Adele: Inside Her Private Life and Triumphant Return

On some level, Adele refuses to allow her success to make it too deeply past her skin. She still sees herself as “some random girl from London,” albeit one whose little car needs to be trailed by a bodyguard in a Range Rover. With the throwback classicism of its songwriting and its almost militantly organic arrangements, 21 stood to the side of the pop mainstream, even as it somehow outsold everything. Adele is trying to pull off a similar trick with her career itself. “My career’s not my life,” she says. “It’s my hobby.” She wants to be able to release her albums, live in public for a while, and then return to her private existence — for years at a time, maybe, so she can live enough to write the next set of songs. “I think she’ll make 20 records,” says her manager, Jonathan Dickins. “We’re playing for the long game.”

“People think I hate being famous,” Adele says. “And I don’t. I’m really frightened of it. I think it’s really toxic, and I think it’s really easy to be dragged into it.” Early in her career, she faced frequent musical comparisons to Amy Winehouse, whom she met only a few times: “Watching Amy deteriorate is one of the reasons I’m a bit frightened. We were all very entertained by her being a mess. I was fucking sad about it, but if someone showed me a picture of her looking bad, I’d look at it. If we hadn’t looked, then they’d have stopped taking her picture. That level of attention is really frightening, especially if you don’t live around all that showbiz stuff.”

Adele still feels out of place among celebrities. Earlier this year, when she went backstage to meet one of her idols, Stevie Nicks, Adele found herself uncontrollably sobbing (“like, snot, everything”). “I’m not sure if I’ll ever not feel a bit overwhelmed when I go to places where there are loads of stars,” says Adele, who spent the first decade of her life in the poor, crime-plagued district of Tottenham. “I always feel like I’m gonna get thrown out. Or it’s going to turn out to be some, like, hidden-camera show. Like someone’s gonna send me back to Tottenham.” She has recurring dreams of falling from tall buildings.

Since Angelo’s arrival, Adele’s life has been thoroughly domestic — though not, she emphasizes, reclusive: “I’ve been to every fucking park, every shop, every supermarket you could ever imagine.” She’s in a “very serious” relationship with Angelo’s father, Simon Konecki, a bearish 41-year-old investment-banker-turned-philanthropist with a warm smile. She met him just as the 21 phenomenon was peaking. “He’s so supportive,” she says. “And that takes a very big man, because I’m very successful at what I do. My last boyfriend was uncomfortable with how successful I was, and the fact that he had to share me with lots of people.” (She’s referring to the 21 dude, though there was a relationship in between.)