It all began on a typical Sunday night. As per usual, I was stressing out about all the work I had to do, when I received a notification that my mom had written on my Facebook wall. She doesn’t normally do this, so I knew something was up, and as soon as I read the post, I started freaking out (as evidenced by my multiple, consequetive comments).
You see, my mom had tried getting tickets for Adele back in December, when they first went on sale (and immediately sold out). She’d been sending me texts over the last two months, with the ticket prices some people were offering her for re-sales. These were typically nosebleeds or Section 200s for several hundred dollars. I told her it wasn’t worth it.
That fateful Sunday night, though, my mom had been stalking StubHub and the ticket prices had started to drop by hundreds of dollars. As she bought our tix, she saw the seats around us disappearing off the grid. Three hours before the October 16th show, my mom managed to nab SECOND ROW SEATS TO ADELE. I dropped everything I was doing to begin my transformation into Adele fangirl — watching Pinterest tutorials on how to do Adele’s signature makeup and ravaging my closet for the perfect black dress.
When we finally got to Bridgestone Arena, Nashville’s biggest concert venue, and found our seats, I noticed the girls in my aisle had gift bags. One of them leaned over me to say to the other, “They told me she’s not accepting gifts,” to which the other girl seemed very disappointed. I wondered if someone’s birthday party was seeing Adele live (um, best birthday ever?!), and they were so humble as to not be accepting gifts. Nope, this gift was for the queen herself, Adele, and apparently, the security guards had informed these girls that they couldn’t accept any gifts on behalf of the performer.
This was a new level of fan-girling that I was witnessing, and I liked it.
The girl sitting to my left introduced herself–Vanessa–and told me her plan. Adele usually searches the crowd for the crazy fans during the first few songs and picks a few to talk to and/or invite on stage after “Rumour Has It.” Vanessa planned on dancing like crazy, waving her arms around, and doing whatever she could to grab Adele’s attention, and I decided to join in on the fun.
Since Vanessa had already seen Adele live a few times before this, she was filling me in on some of the behind-the-scenes tidbits. Adele starts her show on the B-stage (the stage that is in a more central location to the audience, instead of at the forefont of the auditorim), and in order to get there, she climbs into a box and gets carted over. When we saw a box rolling (in the deep) towards the stage, we FREAKED out, and within a few minutes of this, the lights dimmed and Adele rose from a platform onto the B-stage, singing “Hello.”
There are no words to describe the perfection of Adele’s voice. It sounds like you’ve died and gone to a heaven where the angels are singing their narration to you, but it’s actually just one angel and it’s ADELE. It’s booming, it’s all-encompassing, and it sounds 100% like the recordings.
The concert felt like all those late nights driving home, having my very own carpool karaoke jam sesh with Adele, but this time, Adele was right there with me, just a few hundred feet away. After “Hello,” she made her way to the main stage, and she admitted she didn’t know why this many people wanted to spend two hours listening to the most depressing music they’d ever heard. Like a true Brit, her humour was entirely self-deprecating, and she warned us that this was not a very happy show. She played her “happiest” songs for us upfront, and by “happy,” she meant that they were sad songs that at least sounded happy.
After “Rumour Has It,” she did indeed take a break to talk to some fans in the pit and invited a woman onstage to take a selfie. Then, she continued on with “Skyfall,” explaining how she had initially declined to record a song for the James Bond movies, in an effort to play hard-to-get, but been absolutely devastated when they accepted her “no.” Eventually, they came back, she was immensely relieved, and this time around, she rushed to say yes. She was actually pregnant when she recorded the song, and her vocal range went much lower, so the song includes some notes so low that she can barely hit them anymore.
And then my moment of glory came.
I SWEAR TO GOD Adele kept looking over at my row and smiling. The three of us were swaying around, hands in the air and singing along dramatically to the song. I kept thinking back to my freshman year in Syracuse, New York, how I would play “Skyfall” on my long walks to campus through the downpour of snow. There were at least three separate times that I felt myself making eye contact with Adele and imagining that she could actually see me too, although I imagined she probably couldn’t.
After the song, though, Adele pointed over to my row and said: “Shoutout to those three girls over there dancing like they’re in the club to ‘Skyfall’!”
I heard nothing after “those three girls” because I was screaming so hard and practically crying. ADELE LITERALLY SPOKE TO MY SOUL, Y’ALL (which you can witness in this Instagram video.
For the rest of the concert, I was essentially floating. Adele asked everyone to please sit for the next set of songs, which included a brief acoustic set. She described her own fangirl experience with Alison Krauss, an American bluegrass-country singer and musician. When Adele heard that Krauss was at the show, she nearly followed her into the bathroom, trying to find her and tell her how much she loved her. As she introduced “Don’t You Remember,” she admitted how nervous she was to perform the song in front of the woman whose musical style inspired it. I realized then that Adele and I were both massive fangirls, and essentially, one and the same (she writes about ex-boyfriends who broke her heart, OMG ME TOO?!)
Other highlights included when Adele gave a shout-out to her boyfriend and the father of her child, saying that she didn’t think any other man could deal with her level of success and fame the way that he does. She also thanked the fans for being so patient and understanding when she took her break from music (I don’t remember being that patient….but as long as you think so, Adele!). She announced that she plans on taking another break, but explained that these pauses from the high-pace, high-intensity lifestyle of touring and promotion allows her to live a normal life back in England. If she wants to continue writing songs about normal experiences, the experiences that her fans connect and relate to so much, then she needs to maintain this normalcy. She has no intentions or desire to write about partying it up in the club, so if the fans want her to keep up the good work, then we’ll let her go back into hiding in peace.
Adele’s show was basically two hours of her standing on a stage singing with a band. No costume changes. No pryotechnics. No surprise celebrity cameos. No crazy visuals, other than black and white projections of her onto the screen behind her (or the screen that came down around her on the B-stage). The fanciest she got was girl literally made it RAIN during “Set Fire to the Rain.” She starts on the the B-stage and returns back to it for a few songs, before closing on the main stage. Compared to other artists of our generation, this was probably the most simplistic show I’d ever seen, next to Ed Sheeran’s tour.
I walked away from the show with two new life mantras: keep up the fangirling and you will be rewarded, AND “you’re gonna wish you never had met me,” the echoing refrain that plays in her finale song, “Rolling in the Deep.” Throughout the show, Adele commented on how awkward it felt to still be singing about the same guy from all those years ago, but that it helped her move on from the experience and she can see how it helps so many others. As a writer, it spoke to me as an encouragement to embrace the feelings of pain that life brings and to write about it. To not be afraid to write about certain people who have hurt or wronged me, to essentially make them wish they had never met me because I have the potential to immortalize their mistakes, a la “21.”
If the best revenge is success, then Adele is certainly winning at life. Let us all hope to aspire to her level one day.