Adele Hopes That ’30’ Will Explain Her Divorce To Her Son
Adele’s newly released single “Easy On Me” is every bit as brutally honest as fans have come to expect, but what was unexpected was the song’s subject.
As the song starts, Adele appears to explore the moment she found the courage to leave her marriage, leaving her home. Adele, 33, sings of how she tried to make the marriage to Simon Konecki work, but realized it couldn’t be saved.
In April 2019, it was confirmed that the couple had separated, with a rep for the singer revealing in a statement: “Adele and her partner have separated. They are committed to raising their son together lovingly. As always they ask for privacy.”
Adele dedicated 30 to her 9-year-old son Angelo, in a bid to explain the divorce. “I just felt like I wanted to explain to him, through this record, when he’s in his twenties or thirties, who I am and why I voluntarily chose to dismantle his entire life in the pursuit of my own happiness,” she told British Vogue in a recent interview. “It made him really unhappy sometimes. And that’s a real wound for me that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to heal.”
Adele was 24 when she gave birth to Angelo, going “through the motions” and in turn wasn’t happy.” She told Vogue about her relationship. “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.”
In “Easy On Me,” Adele says: “There ain’t no room for things to change / When we are both so deeply stuck in our ways / You can’t deny how hard I have tried / I changed who I was to put you both first / But now I give up.”
Seemingly addressing her son directly in the bridge, she sings: “I had good intentions / And the highest hopes / But I know right now / It probably doesn’t even show.”
She told Vogue, “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.”
“It just wasn’t right for me any more,” she said. “I didn’t want to end up like a lot of other people I knew. I wasn’t miserable miserable, but I would have been miserable had I not put myself first.”
Adele and Simon married when she was 30, with the relationship ending soon after she started working on the album. “We kept [the divorce] to ourselves for a very long time,” she revealed. “We had to take our time because there was a child involved. It would always be like, ‘Where’s Adele? Oh, she’s working’, or, ‘Where’s Simon? He’s in England.'”
Of her forthcoming album, Adele said, “I feel like this album is self-destruction, then self-reflection and then sort of self-redemption. But I feel ready. I really want people to hear my side of the story this time.”
Watch the music video for “Easy On Me” below:
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