Adele: Inside Her Private Life and Triumphant Return

Adele is fresh from a rehearsal with her backing band, where she perched on a chair facing the musicians and sang her first-ever live version of “Hello,” the melancholy, surging first single from her third album, 25, due November 20th. (She turned 27 in May, but named the album after the age when she began work on it: “I’m going to get so much fucking grief: ‘Why is it called 25 when you’re not 25?'”) “Hello, it’s me,” she sings at the beginning of the single, as if there could be any doubt. When she finally puts the song out a couple of weeks later, it will rack up a record-setting 50 million YouTube views in its first 48 hours.

With a young child to raise, Adele took an unhurried approach to making the album. A full six months passed between writing the verses of “Hello” and nailing the chorus. “We had half a song written,” says producer/co-writer Greg Kurstin, who didn’t know if Adele was ever going to come back and finish it. “I just had to be very patient.”

The lyrics sound like she’s addressing some long-lost ex, but she says it isn’t about any one person — and that she’s moved on from the heartbreaker who inspired 21. “If I were still writing about him, that’d be terrible,” she says. “‘Hello’ is as much about regrouping with myself, reconnecting with myself.” As for the line “hello from the other side”: “It sounds a bit morbid, like I’m dead,” she says. “But it’s actually just from the other side of becoming an adult, making it out alive from your late teens, early twenties.”

Adele still hasn’t decided whether she’ll do a full-scale tour behind 25 — right now, the rehearsals are for TV performances. Her band has a few new members, and she’s especially excited to have a percussionist for the first time, an addition inspired by her childhood idols: “The Spice Girls had a mad percussionist,” she says.

In public, at least, Adele has had little to say — and nothing to sing — for the past couple of years, not since she and collaborator Paul Epworth won an Oscar for “Skyfall,” the first decent James Bond theme song in forever. “When I have nothing to say,” she says, “I’d rather just not talk.” But it takes just a few minutes with her to see that silence isn’t exactly her natural state. “I’m just fucking waiting for Frank fucking Ocean to come out with his album,” she says. “It’s taking so fucking long.” She blinks, pauses, laughs again. “That sounds so stupid, coming from me, doesn’t it?”