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On my way to Heart & Hustle, a private gym in West Hollywood, where I will be joining Adele for her Monday morning workout, I get the distinct feeling that the Queen of Hearts is about to put me through my paces.
It’s inevitable to some degree. Adele has been doing rigorous weight-lifting and circuit-training sessions every day—twice a day if her anxiety is running high—for three years and counting. It is also true that if, say, the whole world went nuts at the first sight of your significant weight loss, and aired a lot of uninformed theories and loud opinions about your significant weight loss, one way to set the record straight and reclaim the narrative would be to put a journalist to absolute shame at your gym.
When she arrives, breezing through the back door in head-to-toe spandex, my fate is clear. Adele is not merely fit. She’s a brick house, with the kind of muscle definition that’s visible through leggings. Heart & Hustle is a no-frills establishment, owned by two guys from New York and Philly—the back entrance was designed to resemble something from Goodfellas—and one of them, Gregg Miele, is here to lead our workout. Within minutes, Adele is going to town on an elliptical, and I’m just a few feet away, swishing around on another machine, already short of breath.
She starts peppering me with questions, cutting to the quick in that uniquely disarming way that compels you to do the same. When this is sustained for any period of time, it results in a turbo-speed confessional that can only be conveyed with a timeline.
Two minutes and 50 seconds in: Adele mentions that she has a bad back. I tell her that I have two slipped discs. We establish that she has the same slipped discs (L5 and L6).
Three and a half minutes in: While going hard on the elliptical, Adele remarks, “I’m always a bit hungover on Monday morning.” Lockdown turned me into a seven-nights-a-week wine drinker, I tell her. She nods and says: “It got earlier and earlier, the drinking.”
Six minutes in: Adele says that she has probably spent more time with Miele in the last three years than anyone else. “All these other people have come out saying that they trained me,” she says. “Fuckin’ weirdos. I’ve never met them in my life!”
Nine and a half minutes in: I ask if COVID took an emotional toll. Adele responds that much of the emotional stuff her friends went through, she’d gone through the year before, in the middle of her divorce. (Adele was married to the charity executive Simon Konecki for two years. They have a nine-year-old son, Angelo.) “Everyone had to face a lot of their demons, because they had so much time on their hands with nothing to distract them,” she says. “They had to face themselves in isolation. Whereas I did that the year before.”
Eleven minutes in: Back on the subject of alcohol and lockdown. “My first emergency run at the grocery store was for Whispering Angel and ketchup,” Adele says, referring to her favorite rosé. “Whispering Angel turned me into a barking dog. It did not make me whisper.”
Twelve minutes in: I tell her that when lockdown lifted, I felt like an Edie emerging from Grey Gardens. “I got some of the worst ingrown hairs I’ve ever had in my life,” she replies.
It goes on like this for an hour, as Adele proceeds through every weight machine and I wilt in the manner of someone who hasn’t seen the inside of a gym since 2016. She spent many pandemic days and nights here, working out while a movie played on the TV. The Rocky series was a favorite, which may partially account for the boxing gloves she’s hung on a wall nearby. (One says FUCK, the other ORF.)
Adele will break into song a few times over the course of the day I spend with her. It’s fitting that the first time she does, it’s to sing a song from the Rocky soundtrack—a song that, if you’ve seen any of the movies, will probably conjure slo-mo footage of an oiled-up Sylvester Stallone sprinting on the beach in dolphin shorts and tube socks.
Instead, imagine an Adele, who is now as athletic as that voice of hers, doing deep squats with God knows how many pounds of weight on her shoulders, belting it out with her singular, husky vibrato: “Getting strong nooowww!”
Adele’s home in Beverly Hills looks a lot like an English cottage, except that it’s somewhere on the order of 6,500 square feet. I meet her there after our workout and we settle into sofa chairs in her very English garden. She is wearing what look to be cashmere pants and an elegant white button-up, only one of whose buttons is buttoned, revealing a slim hourglass figure and braless décolletage.
Adele takes pains to protect her voice, particularly since she underwent surgery in 2011 to stop a vocal-cord hemorrhage. So it seems significant that when I ask what events led up to her Year of Anxiety, she begins with two shows she had to cancel in the summer of 2017. “I think once my voice rests it doesn’t want to come back for a while,” she says. “I think that’s what happened. The momentum went.” The shows were at Wembley Stadium, and canceling them meant canceling on 200,000 people. “I’m not allowed to perform if I’m not well anymore, because obviously I had surgery years ago. So there was no even pushing through it. I was devastated.”
“Then I hit my Saturn return,” Adele says, flipping up her left wrist to show me a tattoo. It’s Saturn, the planet, with a drawing of L.A. in the middle. “It’s where I lost the plot.” It takes 27 to 32 years for Saturn to fully orbit around the sun and return to the position it was in when you were born, Adele explains. “When that comes, it can rock your life,” she says. “It shakes you up a bit: Who am I? What do I want to do? What makes me truly happy? All those things.”
She does not blame her divorce on her Saturn return, but that was one result of it. “I was just going through the motions and I wasn’t happy,” she says. “Neither of us did anything wrong. Neither of us hurt each other or anything like that. It was just: I want my son to see me really love, and be loved. It’s really important to me.” She says she and Konecki were broken up for some time before they told people. (Adele filed for divorce in 2019.) “I’ve been on my journey to find my true happiness ever since.”
What has the process entailed? “Well, my therapist told me that I had to sit with my little seven-year-old self. Because she was left on her own. And I needed to go sit with her and really address how I felt when I was growing up. And issues with my dad. Which I’d been avoiding.” And what were those issues? “Not being sure if someone who is supposed to love you loves you, and doesn’t prioritize you in any capacity when you’re little. You assume it and get used to it. So my relationship with men in general, my entire life, has always been: You’re going to hurt me, so I’ll hurt you first. It’s just toxic and prevents me from actually finding any happiness.”
Adele elaborates: “Sometimes, with my own son, he could talk to me in a certain way, and I shut down. With my own fucking child. I’ll take it so to heart, what he’s saying, when actually what he’s saying is, No, I don’t want to go to bed.” In relationships with men, she would assume a defensive stance, expecting things not to work out. “And being okay with it, because you had to be okay with it when you were younger.”
Adele’s father, Mark Evans, a Welsh plumber, died from cancer in May of this year. Their relationship had long been strained. Evans and Adele’s mother, Penny Adkins, split up shortly after Adele was born, leaving Adkins to raise their daughter alone—first in Tottenham, then in Brixton, and later in West Norwood. After Adele got famous, Evans sold a story about her to the Sun newspaper. (Adele did go to see Evans before he died. “I know he loved me, and we actually got our peace before he died,” she tells me. “When he passed, I had this sort of physical reaction. That fear left my body.” She adds: “My mom was incredible when my dad was at the final stages. She was there and helping.”)
What helped Adele get her through her Year of Anxiety? “It was a lot of sound baths. It was a lot of meditation. It was a lot of therapy. And a lot of time spent on my own.” The gym was key: “It became my time. I realized that when I was working out, I didn’t have any anxiety. It was never about losing weight. I thought, If I can make my body physically strong, and I can feel that and see that, then maybe one day I can make my emotions and my mind physically strong.” She started with her lower back and stomach: “I have a bad back and I had a C-section. So I had just nothing going on down there.” (When I call Miele, her trainer, later, he confirms that the goal wasn’t weight loss. “It was getting stronger, physically and mentally. She got really turned on to movement, and especially strength training. So turned on that she started doing double sessions.”)
Progress was slow and far from linear. “I’d have a lovely night with my friends,” she says, “and then I’d wake up like a tsunami was coming for me.” As a Taurus, she likes to schedule things, so she found the unpredictability of her anxiety excruciating. “I remember sitting out there with two of my friends”—she points to a table farther out in the yard—“and I was like, When will I stop feeling like this? And they were like, In time. And I was like, Yeah, but how much time? And one of them cried and was just like, I don’t know. It’s gonna be a ride. And it was.”
Her ride-or-dies from childhood are all in England, and since this was before the pandemic, she was able to visit them. But often she was leaning on friends in L.A., including a friend in her late 40s who happens to live in her neighborhood. “She would be like, Mmm hmm. She’d be like, Yeah, that happened to me once. I felt like that once. I’d be there having these meltdowns. Like, sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. And she’d be so calm.”
One particular exchange stands out. “I told my friend, I feel like I’m on a steep mountain, trying to get up to the top. And she was like, You will get there. And you’ll have a nice leisurely stroll down. And then there’ll be another fucking mountain. And I’m like, I’m not even over this one yet. And she was like, That’s just life.” Adele flips up her right wrist to show me a tattoo of a mountain, which she got at the end of 2019.
Some of the most difficult moments involved Angelo. On the whole, Adele says, the divorce has gone as smoothly as a divorce can. Konecki lives across the street, in a house Adele bought for him, and they share custody (and do regular family movie nights). Even during the turbulent moments, Adele had faith that she was doing the right thing: “If I can reach the reason why I left, which was the pursuit of my own happiness, even though it made Angelo really unhappy—if I can find that happiness and he sees me in that happiness, then maybe I’ll be able to forgive myself for it.” But she couldn’t prevent the pain she was causing him in the meantime. One day, when he was only six and a half: “He said to my face, Can you see me? And I was like, Uh, yeah. And he was like, Cause I can’t see you. Well, my whole life fell apart in that moment. He knew I wasn’t there.” She decided to have regular conversations with Angelo about what was happening. “That’s when I started sharing with him.”
She also started going to the studio. She wrote a song for Angelo the day after he told her he couldn’t see her. Over time, the album became a way of explaining things to him—something for him to listen to when he’s older. “He has so many simple questions for me that I can’t answer, because I don’t know the answer. Like, Why can’t we still live together? That’s just not what people do when they get divorced. But why not? I’m like, I don’t fucking know. That’s not what society does. And: Why don’t you love my dad anymore? And I’d be like, I do love your dad. I’m just not in love. I can’t make that make sense to a nine-year-old.”
For this and other reasons, the new album is different from her previous albums. “I realized that I was the problem,” Adele says. “Cause all the other albums are like, You did this! You did that! Fuck you! Why can’t you arrive for me? Then I was like: Oh, shit, I’m the running theme, actually. Maybe it’s me!”
I ask if she revisited any iconic divorce albums in the process of writing hers—I am thinking of Sinéad O’Connor’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got—and Adele responds that she didn’t know she was making a divorce album. She’s not sure it is one, in fact. “He’s not one of my exes. He’s the dad of my child.” If the new album is a divorce album, it’s a different kind of divorce album. “It was more me divorcing myself,” she says, exploding into a laugh that sounds like a balloon buzzing around a room as it deflates. “Just being like, Bitch, fuckin’ hot mess, get your fuckin’ shit together!”
“It’s sensitive for me, this record, just in how much I love it,” Adele adds. “I always say that 21 doesn’t belong to me anymore. Everyone else took it into their hearts so much. I’m not letting go of this one. This is my album. I want to share myself with everyone, but I don’t think I’ll ever let this one go.”
To be around civilian Adele is to forget that she is also that other Adele, the singer of soul-baring torch songs. Civilian Adele is a cutup, relentlessly self-effacing, and always taking the piss out of herself. We know from her music that the other Adele swims below the photic zone.
I catch a glimpse of the other one when her new songs are playing aloud in her sea-green kitchen. Seated on a stool, she leans back, her chest retreats inward, her head hangs down, and her whole torso rocks while her eyelids flutter, as though she is in a trance. It is difficult to describe the emotional intensity of this body language, but the words rolling in the deep come to mind.
The first song she plays is the first song on the album, a gut-wrenching plea of a piano ballad, the chorus of which goes: “Go easy on me baby / I was still a child / Didn’t get the chance to / Feel the world around me.” Her voice does different impossible Adele-ish things with the refrain “go easy,” and although it starts to take on a euphoric tone, by the end, I feel pummeled. “So that’s that one,” she says quietly. “Do you like it?” (Perhaps the only thing more surreal than having Adele play you her new music in her kitchen is the revelation that she feels nervous and vulnerable doing so.)
She queues up another one. “The next song is the one I wrote when I went to the studio the day after Angelo said I can’t see you.” A certain combination of elements—sexy ’70s groove, heavy strings, heavier lyrics—immediately calls to mind Marvin Gaye. (What’s Going On was a “very big reference” on the album, turns out.) “My little love,” Adele sings in a low, smoky register. “I see your eyes / Widen like an ocean / When you look at me / So full of my emotions.” Between verses are snippets of conversations she had with Angelo during the Year of Anxiety, recorded at her therapist’s suggestion. The song ends with bits of a raw, teary voicemail she left for a friend. She was inspired to incorporate voice notes by Tyler, the Creator and the British rapper Skepta, she explains. “I thought it might be a nice touch, seeing as everyone’s been at my door for the last 10 years, as a fan, to be like, Would you like to come in?”
I’m not sure I will survive another of Adele’s new songs, but as she plays four more, it becomes clear that they are mapping a progression. The next one is cathartic, a soulful promise of new love that has her repeating variations of: “I just want to love you for free / Everybody wants something from me / You just want me.” The fourth song is downright upbeat, meant to be a laugh-while-you’re-crying respite from the heaviness—“Otherwise we’d all kill ourselves, wouldn’t we?” Then comes a joyous anthem. Over gospelly organ she sings: “Let time be patient / Let pain be gracious.” Toward the end a chorus of her friends chimes in, chant-singing, “Just hold on, just hold on,” over and over. “The thing that they’re all singing is what my friends used to say to me,” Adele explains. “That’s why I wanted them to sing it, rather than an actual choir.”
The last song she plays is the final song on the album. It was written and recorded while a TV in the studio played Breakfast at Tiffany’s on mute, she explains. “As it finished, we were trying to work out how to end the song, and I said, We should write it as if we were writing the soundtrack—you know, at the end of the movie, where it pans out.” The arrangement is whimsical and wall-of-sound retro, full of strings and vibrato and midcentury romance, but the lyrics deliver a subversive twist. The first line: “All your expectations of my love are impossible.”
We are late for a lunch reservation at the Hotel Bel-Air. Adele runs upstairs to change clothes, then reappears in a gray sweatshirt and matching sweatpants. (“You can take the girl out of Brixton but you can’t take Brixton out of the girl.”) Fifteen minutes later, over a round of Aperol spritzes in a private dining room at the Bel-Air, we talk more about the album as a whole. “I was so fragile when I was writing it that I wanted to work only with a few people,” Adele says.
She wrote both the piano ballad and the song about Angelo with Greg Kurstin, with whom she wrote “Hello.” Later, I ask Kurstin by phone about writing songs with Adele. “She has this way of tackling very complex emotional subject matter that I’ve never seen,” he says. “Also there’s this commitment to a song idea, where if the opening line of a song resonates with her, we could be working on it over the course of years, just perfecting it.” Kurstin adds, “She pushes me to places that are very unexpected on the piano. Sometimes I’ll be looping a progression for hours while she’s figuring out the lyrics. It’s almost like a meditation.”
The friend-chorus song and the Breakfast at Tiffany’s song were written with Inflo, the producer from North London who works a lot with Danger Mouse. “He’s brutally honest with me, like no one else would dare,” Adele says of Inflo. “He’s sort of got this constant resting bitch face, really.” A handful of others worked on songs I didn’t hear: the Swedish pop wizards Max Martin and Shellback; the Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson; and the Canadian singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr., on a “very powerful song” she describes as “an Édith Piaf-y moment.” As with her previous albums, the vocal tracks are original demos because, she explains, demos have a charisma and an urgency that get lost if you rerecord them. “I never redo my vocals. Never. Never ever.”
After hearing Adele describe her two years of turmoil, and then hearing some of the songs that resulted from it, I find myself wondering about seven-year-old Adele. What role did music play in that Adele’s life? “It was my friend,” she says. “Music was literally my friend. I was an only child. Music was my sibling I never had. That’s why I love Beyoncé so much. She would put out music so regularly, it would be like seeing her. It really felt like that for me. It made me feel a lot of things.”
The week before our interview, Adele went out in public for the first time with her new boyfriend, the sports agent Richard Paul. They attended Game 5 of the NBA Finals—Phoenix Suns versus Milwaukee Bucks—and sat in the stands with one of Paul’s clients, LeBron James.
Earlier in our day, Adele had mentioned that she and Paul were friends for a while but didn’t start a relationship until the beginning of this year. “He was always there, I just didn’t see him,” she’d said. Over another round of Aperol spritzes, she tells me they met at a party a couple years ago. “I was a bit drunk. I said: Do you want to sign me? I’m an athlete now.” She adds, “He’s just so fucking funny.” And also: “He was dancing. All the other guys were just sitting around. He was just dancing away.”
Adele did not enjoy the dating process. “It’s been shit. And 99.9 percent of the stories that have been written about me are absolutely made up.” Then, just before her dad died, “Rich just incredibly arrived.” She feels safe with Paul—“I don’t feel anxious or nervous or frazzled. It’s quite the opposite. It’s wild”—and there is no second-guessing. “I’m a 33-year-old divorced mother of a son, who’s actually in charge. The last thing I need is someone who doesn’t know where they’re at, or what they want. I know what I want. And I really know what I don’t want.”
Was the decision to go public a deliberate one? Adele: “I didn’t mean to go public with it. I just wanted to go to the game. I just love being around him. I just love it.” The topic did come up on the way to the game, though. “He was like, What are people going to say? And I was like, That you signed me. As an athlete. You’re my agent. And he was like, Okay, cool.”
This is something of a new approach for Adele, who has generally solved the problems of fame by withdrawing from it completely. At one point she even considered pulling out of music altogether. She wrote to her manager: “This isn’t really for me. It’s not why I love music.”
“I got really famous right as Amy Winehouse died,” she says. “And we watched her die right in front of our eyes.” Adele was worried that she too could spiral out of control. “I’ve always had a very close relationship with alcohol. I was always very fascinated by alcohol. It’s what kept my dad from me. So I always wanted to know what was so great about it.” But different characters come out when you’re drunk, she says, and once you look a little reckless, the press really wants to make a story out of you. “They descend, and descend, and descend on you, which drives you fucking mad.”
Winehouse’s death was a defining moment. “It really offended me. I picked up the guitar because of Amy’s first album. She means the most to me out of all artists. Because she was British. Because she was amazing. Because she was tortured. Because she was so funny. I’m not having these people I don’t know take my legacy, my story away from me, and decide what I can leave behind or what I can take with me.”
She decided to disappear for long stretches of time. “I thought, I’m just going to lock myself in a house. That’s what I did. I was very reclusive. It paid off, I think. People are used to me being a recluse.” Becoming a mom helped too. “Sometimes I get frightened by the idea of where my life would have gone had I not gotten pregnant with Angelo,” she says. It anchored you? I ask. “Beyond,” she says. “They both saved me. There was a real reason why Simon came into my life.”
Anything Adele does still makes news, as demonstrated by the uproar over her weight loss. About that: “My body’s been objectified my entire career. It’s not just now. I understand why it’s a shock. I understand why some women especially were hurt. Visually I represented a lot of women. But I’m still the same person.” The worst part of the whole thing: “The most brutal conversations were being had by other women about my body. I was very fucking disappointed with that. That hurt my feelings.”
And she still takes measures to avoid ramping up her fame. She avoided writing a certain kind of song for the next album, for instance. “There isn’t a bombastic ‘Hello,’ ” she tells me at one point. “But I don’t want another song like that. That song catapulted me in fame to another level that I don’t want to happen again. I’m not saying I’ve got ‘Hello’s in my pocket. I was just conscious that I didn’t want my story on this album to sound like that.”
But she is trying in small ways to integrate her famous and private selves. For example, she used to avoid going out to dinner or turning up at a friend’s birthday party because she didn’t want people taking pictures of her. These days, more and more, she asks herself: What’s the worst that could happen? With the new album on its way (Adele is adamant that it come out in tangible form—on CDs and vinyl—as well as on streaming services), she has taken to warning her friends in L.A., “I’m getting ready to be famous again.”
One thing that will surely be different this time is Angelo. He doesn’t yet understand that his mom is famous. They live a low-key life when Adele isn’t touring, and the last time she went on tour, Angelo was only four. He watched his mom warm up in stadiums, but he would leave with Konecki or a nanny before the stadiums filled up with fans. This became extra-clear to Adele when she took Angelo to see his favorite artist, Taylor Swift, in 2018. It was the first time he saw a stadium full of people. “His jaw dropped,” she says. “I got really annoyed! I was like, Excuse me! This is what I do, you know. He said, When we go on tour, should I have a seat next to me with Taylor Swift’s name on it for Taylor to come?”
So far there has been only one incident at Angelo’s school. “There were a few older girls who chased him around, asking if I was his mom,” Adele recalls. “He was just like: I think her name’s Adele, yeah. My mom. My mom. I’m not Adele to him. He felt like he was being bullied, because they were annoying him. I said: That’s not bullying. Just say, Yeah, she’s my mom. She wiped my ass,” she jokes.
Perhaps more than the fame thing, Adele wants to make sure Angelo understands his privilege. That when he achieves certain things: “It’s not only going to be because he’s a white man. It’s also going to be because I’m his mom. And I want him to notice that. He needs to earn his way through life.” Sometimes Angelo tries to correct his mom’s accent, and she won’t have it. “It’s not free, it’s three,” he’ll say. “And I’ll be like, No, it’s free.”
When she brings up Beyoncé, I ask about her 2017 Grammys acceptance speech, the one in which she tearfully paid tribute to Lemonade. It is a measure of how seriously Adele takes music, and women, and music made by women, that after hours of recounting the most painful events of her life, Beyoncé is the only topic of conversation that brings her to tears.
“My personal opinion is that Beyoncé definitely should have won,” Adele says. She assumed Beyoncé would win, up until the awards show started. And then: “I just got this feeling: I fucking won it. I got overwhelmed, with, like, I will have to go and tell her how much her record means to me.” Adele’s voice starts to crack. “I’m getting a bit emotional.”
Adele went to Beyoncé’s dressing room. On a first visit, she didn’t get it off her chest, and after she left, she burst into tears. Konecki dragged her back, and Beyoncé’s publicist cleared out the room. “I just said to her, like, the way that the Grammys works, and the people who control it at the very, very top—they don’t know what a visual album is. They don’t want to support the way that she’s moving things forward with her releases and the things that she’s talking about.”
Asked why Lemonade deserved to win, Adele says: “For my friends who are women of color, it was such a huge acknowledgment for them, of the sort of undermined grief that they go through. For her to nail that on the head, and also bring in the entire globe? I was like, This album is my album, she just knows what I’m going through. That album was not written for me. But yet I could still feel like, This is the biggest gift.”
She did not mean to break the Grammy onstage, by the way. “I was wringing my hands and the gramophone bit came off.” But a funny thing happened later. The award they give you onstage is a mock one, and when the real one arrived by mail, it was broken. “It got broken when it was getting sent to me.” Adele did not have it fixed. She put it on a shelf, and wedged a piece of fruit into the broken part: “There’s a lemon in it.”
If Adele isn’t quite sure when precisely she came out of the fog, her friends remember. One friend in London, Laura Dockrill, who has known Adele for almost 20 years—long enough to remember both her witchy fashion stage and her “Johnny Cash funeral director” stage—tells me by email that she noticed a change when Adele attended her wedding in February 2020, right before lockdown. “She basically booted everybody off the stage and invited herself to sing ‘Young Hearts Run Free’ to a packed pub. She was wearing a giant triangle skirt covered in white flowers. I watched with a massive grin and thought, Okay, she’s back.”
April McDaniel, who met Adele at Heart & Hustle three years ago, noticed the difference at the gym. “The minute I saw her I could tell that her whole aura changed,” McDaniel says. The writer Jedidiah Jenkins also met Adele three years ago, at a mutual friend’s house in L.A. “She sauntered over during brunch with half a bottle of Whispering Angel,” he writes. When they first met, Adele kept talking about things she’d never done before: “Jed, I haven’t hung out with a group of strangers in 11 years. Will you take me to a party where I don’t know anyone?” Or: “I haven’t been in the ocean since I was 10. I’ve never been in a lake. I want to swim in natural water.” Eventually, they started ticking some of those boxes. They went to Santa Barbara for the weekend, and they went to Idaho, where Adele jumped off a boat into a lake, fully clothed.
Both McDaniel and Jenkins were in the chorus of friends who sang on the record. “It was an out-of-body experience,” McDaniel says. Jenkins recalls: “When we all arrived at the studio, she roasted us: It’s impossible to get any of you together for a dinner, but I say come sing on my album, and here the fuck you are!” In the studio, she was “like an Olympic swimmer in the pool,” he says. “She quickly became a choir director, waving her hands and giving us the motivation of our words. And of course, calling me out: Jed, it’s not your album. Blend in more.”
A couple weeks after our interview, I see Adele one last time, at LACMA’s new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, for Vogue’s photo shoot. She is holding court one minute with a story about taking a CBD pen to England in her luggage, not knowing it was illegal: “I felt like Marianne Faithfull with a Mars bar! I would never do such a thing. I had no idea.” And then, the next, fielding a phone call from Angelo, who has just lost a tooth: “Oh, it fell out! Well, the fairy’s coming tonight!” She will wear three beautiful dresses—pink, blue, green—one of them while elevated in a cherry picker.
During the most golden moment of the golden hour, Adele is perched somewhat precariously on a ledge, all of Hollywood aglow behind her, when a large bird of prey lands on the opposite ledge. Although she doesn’t mention it to the crew, this has been a running theme. Hummingbirds had been fluttering around her head for much of the time we sat in the backyard, and at one point, an enormous, several-inches-long dragonfly flew between us, causing us to duck and weave and dart inside. Adele explained that this had been happening a lot, ever since her dad died. “One time it tried to pet my ponytail!” she said of a hummingbird. The bird of prey is employed by the museum, it turns out, for pest control, but none of us knows this yet. “Come on me hand!” Adele exclaims. The bird sits on the ledge for a while, then flies away.
In this story: Hair, Akki Shirakawa; makeup, Frankie Boyd.
Read British Vogue's November 2021 profile on the inimitable Adele, here.