Adele Laurie Blue Adkins, more commonly known as Adele, is someone who rightly deserves world recognition. This British belle comes from a completely non-musical family and was born to a single teenage mother in London. Her musical talent was discovered when she was four years old and used to impersonate the Spice Girls at parties and family gatherings.
“I did little concerts in my room for my mum and her friends. My mum’s quite arty; she’d get all these lamps and shine them up to make one big spotlight. They’d all sit on the bed,” she says. Her father’s best friend who was a dance producer rightly recognised her voice to be magical and invited her to record a song for him. She was just 14 at that time and she heard her calling in her own recorded voice. She knew then that a singer is what she wanted to become.
Today, Adele is the proud winner of eight Grammy awards and one Brit Award. She is the first artist in history to lead Billboard 200 concurrently with three Billboard Hot 100 number ones. She is the first living artist after the Beatles who achieved two top five hits in both the UK Official Singles Chart and the Official Albums Chart at the same time. With only two albums and eight singles to her name, Adele’s second album, 21, is the longest running number one album by a female solo artist on the UK Albums Chart.
It can rightly be said that Adele has created musical history. When she was a shy student in BRIT School of Performing Arts and Technology, Adele’s friend set up a MySpace page for her and since her voice was so powerful, she was unsurprisingly ‘discovered’ by XL recordings within two years and it was all uphill from there. In 2008, her first album 19 came out.
At first Adele was dismissed as a singer who sounded like Amy Winehouse and even dressed like her a little. She was not disgruntled by this. Adele believed in her talent for music and songwriting and she proved it to the world when she was was titled ‘Artist of the Year’ by Billboard in 2011.
AllMusic stated, “Adele is simply too magical to compare her to anyone.” Her husky voice, distinct accent and lyrics, which are so realistic that they feel like they are being sung for the listener, are what set her apart from all the other pop/soul singers in the present day and age. Most of her songs are about heartbreak, lost love and misery and yet one cannot stop listening to them. The anger in Set fire to the rain to the heartache in Someone like you can be felt in her vibrating vocals that reach deep in your gut. She has even sung about her love for London in Hometown Glory and about her love for a boy that couldn’t amount to anything in Daydreamer.
Her painful songs have brought her nothing but happiness though, and she has just recently bought a £7 million house in West Sussex with boyfriend Simon Konecki. She is currently nominated for three awards in the Brit Awards, which will take place on February 21, 2012.
Adele got a well-deserved, almost minute-long, standing ovation from the whole of the Hollywood music industry after her live performance at the Grammy Awards ceremony.
This was her comeback performance after a microsurgery to her throat due to hemorrhaging of her vocal chords. She showed the world that she was unstoppable by giving an absolutely flawless performance of her song Rolling in Deep which is the highest selling song in the United States. She stood on stage with grace and humbleness as thousands applauded her voice and courage.
She is an inspiring woman who is the perfect example of a ‘dream come true’. She showed the world that being in the music industry doesn’t have to be about being whimsical and showing skin. Between all the metallic dresses and blue hair, Adele is a classical representation of beauty and talent combined.