I wasn’t expecting this to be the Back to School week cover of the new issue of PEOPLE, were you? And it’s not an exclusive. Any time anyone has an Adele exclusive, of course it’s making the cover. But Adele was not interviewed by PEOPLE. I’m not sure that Adele’s people are talking to PEOPLE either, like to build advance publicity. Adele doesn’t need to be on the front page of PEOPLE to market her music. This, evidently, was built around a tip the magazine got from a source about how happy Adele is right now, after a rough year and the end of her marriage, and they turned it into a cover story because Adele is the torch singer of our time. And a headline about her being “happy after heartbreak” is irresistible to everyone.
That’s what I’m curious about – will Adele ever get tired of being associated with heartbreak? She’s joked about it before, about how everyone cries to her music, but at the same time, no artist has ever wanted to be artistically boxed. When she and Simon Konecki announced that they’d split, the general reaction was OMG I can’t wait for all the sad songs! ... but what if she delivers the opposite? What if her new album, which PEOPLE says will be released before the end of the year (everyone’s been saying that), isn’t at all what you’re expecting and is instead a collection of songs that make you want to dance in the kitchen, dance everywhere, dance, dance, dance. After all, since her breakup, that’s what we’ve seen her doing. She’s gone dancing. She shows up at the club or somewhere and people capture it on social media – ADELE IS DANCING! What’s the likelihood of that? PEOPLE’s headline is about how, right now, she’s “perky as hell”. “Perky” is not a word usually associated with her music. I’m in for perky Adele jams though. I wouldn’t complain.
