Invited by the BBC, Adele has opened up about her mental health and the media’s obsession with her surprise weight loss. In the podcast Desert Island Discs, she had to give the eight works, musical, literary or the objects that she would take with her on a desert island. The opportunity to retrace her life, both private and public, and the moments that marked the singer of Hello.
The author and performer returned to her superstar journey, which has not always been easy. At the microphone of journalist Lauren Laverne, she returned to her first successes, thanks in particular to this video of her singing, posted by a friend on MySpace and which made her take off in the industry. But also losing control: “It was really intense and sometimes it was really difficult to enjoy because I couldn’t keep up with the pace (…) I didn’t even know who I was.”
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Sport, a way to clear your head
Adele, 34, also spoke about the various therapies she has undertaken throughout her life, and her need to end the “drama” today. On this subject, the interpreter of Set Fire To The Rain spoke again in particular of the media frenzy, and on social networks, around her weight loss, revealed on Tuesday May 5, 2020, after having posted a photo of her for her 32 years.
“I understand why the press is fascinated by [ma perte de poids]it’s because I didn’t share my journey like everyone else”, she said. Among the messages congratulating her, other Internet users were annoyed to see their idol return to the standards of beauty imposed on society.
“Some people felt very betrayed by me, saying ‘she gave in to the pressure’,” Adele assumes. Without having to justify herself, the music star adds that she was not “bothered” by these remarks, since these people did not live her daily life and “did not hold her hand when she cried with anxiety” .
More broadly, the singer explains that she found in sport a way to take care of her mental health: “It gave me a way to get rid of all my energy, good or bad, and it gave me the impression of becoming stronger mentally by becoming stronger physically.”
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A sadness anchored for years
From album to album, 19, 21, 25 and lately 30, Adele has shared, at different ages, her disappointments in love, her motherhood, and her pain, with her audience. Now she is learning to live with her demons. “I’m a pretty sad person and I don’t always know why. (…) Maybe it comes from elsewhere,” she says. Her paternal grandfather died when she was 10, recalls Adele, an event that greatly “traumatized” her. She thus wonders about the fact that her sadness stems perhaps from this loss that she would not have digested.
In January 2022, Adele announced that she preferred to cancel her planned show in Las Vegas until April 2022. The artist was not satisfied with the conditions in which she had to perform, preferring to stop everything. A decision that disappointed more than one fan, leaving Adele “devastated” in front of her community, she said to CBS Radio 4.
To Lauren Laverne, Adele recounted the “brutal” backlash from the cancellation: “I just had to wait and cry, I guess, just cry the shows and get over the guilt.” In London on July 1 and 2, 2022, the singer took to the stage for the first time in five years, and was overwhelmed with emotion, promising that she would soon be offering dates in the United States.
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