Adele, well-known for her songs about heartbreak, is releasing her next album, 30, on November 19. And while her popular single "Easy on Me" is typically Adele in its subject matter ("divorce, babe"), the rest of the album reflects the trajectory of the personal journey that followed—and in a new interview with Rolling Stone, the singer gets real about it all.
In the newly published interview, Adele opened up about her self-discovery journey prompted by the highly-publicized divorce with Simon Konecki, her husband of two years. Per the singer, the split marked an end to her relationship with not just her ex-husband, but also to an estranged version of who she was. “I didn’t really know myself,” she said. “I thought I did. I don’t know if it was because of my Saturn return or if it was because I was well and truly sort of heading into my thirties, but I just didn’t like who I was.”
A Saturn return, which refers to a cycle in astrology of roughly 30 years, is said to reflect a significant milestone in an adulthood and mark a period of upheaval and struggle. For Adele, these struggles have led to her upcoming album, and she's detailed the experiences in the interview.
Adele shared she was initially caught in the external circumstances of the divorce, feeling she had somehow messed up. "It made me really sad,” she recalled. “Then having so many people that I don’t know know that I didn’t make that work … it fucking devastated me. I was embarrassed. No one made me feel embarrassed, but you feel like you didn’t do a good job.” She also opened up about the emotional rollercoaster that defined her first few transitional months. “I was like, ‘This is going to be really fucking up-and-down,’” she said.
Staying around "brilliant energy" and exercising have been among her several coping antidotes. "If I can transform my strength and my body like this, surely I can do it to my emotions and to my brain and to my inner well-being,” the singer added. “That was what drove me. It just coincided with all of the emotional work that I was doing with myself as a visual for it, basically.”
In May 2019, around her 31st birthday, she also felt a eureka moment, where things began to take a positive turn. “I remember going upstairs, and doing my face, and getting into bed,” she said. “I felt quite hopeful ... It was the first time I felt I’d had a really nice evening and I was OK being in the house and going to bed on my own. I was not excited, but I was looking forward to the next day."
Sabrina Park is a Digital Fellow at HarpersBAZAAR.com where she covers news, fashion, and culture stories. When she’s not writing she loves hanging out with her cat, reading outdoors and scrolling the depths of TikTok.
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