Saturday, October 30, 2021

Adele “Easy on Me” hit #1 for first of 10 weeks

Easy on Me

Adele

Writer(s): Adele Adkins, Greg Kurstin (see lyrics here)

Released: October 15, 2021

First Charted: October 23, 2021

Peak: 1¹⁰ US, 1¹⁵ BA, 1² DG, 1⁵ ST, 1² AC, 1¹⁰ A40, 2 AA, 32a RB, 1⁸ UK, 1⁸ CN, 1⁴ AU, 12 DF (Click for codes to charts.)

Sales (in millions): 4.0 US, 1.8 UK, 8.88 world (includes US + UK)

Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, 975.3 video, 1884.59 streaming

Awards:

Click on award for more details.

About the Song:

After Adele’s debut album, 19, in 2008, she won the Grammy for Best New Artist. Her sophomore effort, 2011’s 21, became the best-selling album of the 21st century with sales over 31 million. That album and its follow-up, 2015’s 25, both won Album of the Year Grammys. Between them, the two albums gave Adele four #1 songs. Her biggest was “Hello” from 25, which spent ten weeks on top.

While that set the bar impossibly high for Adele’s 2021 release, 30, she still pulled off another multi-platinum, #1 album which spawned yet another huge hit, “Easy on Me,” another ten-week chart topper. The song broke streaming records for a song in both a day and a week for Spotify and Amazon Music. ^WK The song was also nominated for Grammys for Record and Song of the Year. Adele won both awards with “Rolling in the Deep” and repeated the feat with “Hello.” Could she pull it off a third time?

The “minimally produced pop ballad [is] set to a prominent sobre piano and propelled by sparse beats. Expressing themes of nostalgia, regret, and forgiveness, the lyrics represent Adele’s plea to her son, [Angelo], in which she details her struggles with her dissolved marriage and requests him to be kind to her.” ^WK Adele and her ex-husband, Simon Konecki, separated in 2019 after eleven years together and finalized their divorce in March 2021.

“Easy on Me” was the first song she wrote for 30. Then she wrote nothing else for six months because she though the song said it all. ^SF Adele said, “I just felt like I wanted to explain to [Angelo], 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. It made him really unhappy sometimes. And that’s a real wound for me that I don’t know I’ll ever be able to heal.” ^WK

Nick Levine of New Musical Express said “Adele has never sounded better.” ^WK The Independent’s Alexandra Pollard praised the raspy vocals, sentimental lyrics, polished sound, and piano composition. ^WK Cat Zhang said in Pitchfork that the song “isn’t really trending new ground,” instead sticking to Adele’s classic formula. ^WK