Adele is currently on the last leg of her North American tour in promotion of her newest album, "25." Shortly after announcing her North American tour, tickets went on sale in a somewhat quiet fashion as is often the custom with Adele; yet with over 10 million Adele fans in the Ticketmaster waiting room the Ticketmaster website was extra slow. Out of 10 million fans, only roughly half a million fans would be able to purchase tickets. I initially couldn’t get tickets to her Los Angeles shows and I was devastated, sulking around while jealously looking at the posts from her #Adele2016 hashtags on Instagram.
When Adele announced that she was adding two more last minute dates to her Los Angeles shows, I made sure to babysit my laptop in hopes of getting tickets. After an hour of waiting in the waiting room, the page refreshed, giving me a prompt that the tickets had sold out & I felt my heart sink. Five minutes after getting that prompt I decided to re-click the Ticketmaster link to her tickets. The crazy thing is that I ended up getting taken directly to the page, with a few seats available. And just like that, I had two tickets to her last Los Angeles show of her "25" tour with just a few clicks. I felt the rush of a kid in a candy store, singing all her songs from her "21" album at the top of my lungs for a good hour, and I started thinking about how I even started to like Adele in the first place.
I remember initially disliking Adele’s music at first when "21" had first come out in 2011 because I could not relate to the music yet. My nineteen-year-old self was confused about why everyone liked her so much. Why were her songs on the radio? Sure, she has a beautiful voice but were people listening to the lyrics? After all, her songs were so depressing, right?! Fast-forward a year later to 2012 & I went through my first break up, and I remember feeling like the ground beneath me was caving in, feeling like there was a storm in my chest and in the pit of my stomach. I gave Adele another shot after listening to Drake’s then-new album "Take Care." Andre 3000 had briefly referenced Adele in The Real Her and it re-sparked my curiosity. About two minutes into Adele’s "21," I was already in tears. She sounded so soulful, so sad, & her lyrics were breaking through my heart and making me feel a release of bad energy leaving my body. "Turning Tables" became my favorite song immediately after listening to her album all the way through.
Fast-forward again to the night of her concert, I was smiling from ear to ear with misty eyes while she started singing my favorite songs off of "21." I looked around at the attendees sitting in my area and I saw that most of the guys and girls there also had big smiles while their eyes were glistening with tears. It was a good feeling, being surrounded by people who were feeling the same way. What made the night even better was Adele’s intense crowd interaction. She was not shy about talking to her audience and telling us about her own experiences with relationships, being overweight and even Disneyland. She even talked about how she never dreamed that she would be at the point in her life that she’s at now, getting to meet so many people and performing in an arena housing an audience of over thousands of fans. She too had grown as a person after "21." She too had found happiness and you could hear it in her voice when she started singing songs off of "25."
Although Adele’s songs in "21" are so sad, I look back positively on them because, in many ways, Adele helped me move on from heartbreak. I like to think that I grew as a person with her through my early 20's. My new favorite Adele song is actually “Send My Love to Your New Lover” which is a way of her reaffirming that she has moved on & is looking at her failed relationship positively now that she’s in a better place and a happier situation with a fiancé and toddler. I still get chills down my spine whenever I hear it because I can hear her raw emotion even when she’s not writing sad songs.
Adele taught me to embrace being a drama queen and to bask in the lows in order to be able to move forward completely at peace. She also taught me that my failed relationships and heartbreaks were necessary in order to be able to have a happier life. Being a drama queen and the summer where I listened to Adele while crying my heart out is what has helped me grow up. Attending her show was a celebration of embracing growing pains.
