Review: Adele offers heartbreak, wisdom and salty banter at long-delayed Las Vegas residency
“No place is sacred,” she sings at the start of “Someone Like You,” one of the most poignant songs of the new album set to be released on Sept. 27.
It’s a line that has been repeated many times for Adele. The British singer who released “25” in late 2014 — two years into her first world tour by the time its release — has a way of making life seem like an extended flashback. And one that she’s been having since she was 22, when she moved to New York at the recommendation of her dad, who was working at the time for a record label.
By the time she came out of rehab in 2009, to put her 18-month stint in the National Institutes of Health’s National Drug Hospital at the top of her resume, the singer had already established herself as one of the leading pop stars of her generation, with three albums to her name. She’d had the most prolific career of any female artist in decades: three albums and a number of guest spots on other acts’ albums after releasing her first album in 2008.
But at that point, she hadn’t established herself as an in-demand recording artist, and she wasn’t an active pop star. What’s more, when she exited rehab in January 2009, she didn’t have any of the tools to promote herself or her music.
By the time she finally decided to release a record, she was more than two years sober. “When you’re coming off something like that, you’re coming off the stuff that creates in you,” she says of her years in addiction. “You’ve just got to heal. And I think you do that through art and through love.”
It wasn’t the only thing she would need to heal. In early 2010, she left England to live in New York, her first major move away from her family and friends and the comforts of a comfortable life in rural Derbyshire, England.
What started as a temporary move to a more urban environment was soon to become permanent, as she moved back to London from New York and took an apartment in central London she bought with her own money.
In that time between her arrival back home and the release of her third album, she and her record label, Syco Music, made a conscious decision to not sell one another. “This is what happens,