Anticipation for Adele’s album 30 was palpable across the globe. After all, this project was accompanied by myriad transitions in the singer’s life; following several years out of the spotlight, a marriage and subsequent divorce, major weight loss, and, most importantly, vocal rehabilitation—all eyes and ears were on Adele. The question on everyone’s minds was: could she still sing?
I’ve always loved Adele’s music—especially singing it. 11-year-old Haley’s go-to karaoke song was Adele’s rendition of “Make You Feel My Love;” At age 15, I shakily sang “I Found A Boy” for my audition for The Voice; “Someone Like You” was one of the first full-length songs I learned on the piano, and “When We Were Young” was my final performance at my recital before moving to Boston to attend Berklee College of Music.
I idolized her.
Adele and I had a lot in common, and I’m not just talking about our general paleness or the way we identified with our heartbreaks, though that’s true too. We shared similar vocal habits that could ruin our careers as vocalists.
Let’s rewind a bit.
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Even in my family’s earliest home videos I was constantly singing, but something switched at age six. My mom had been watching American Idol in our living room, and a song came on that I knew, so I started singing along. Suddenly, my mom wasn’t watching the TV: she was looking at me in a way she never had before—lips parted in a soft smile, eyebrows raised ever so slightly, and a sparkle in her eyes. Over the years, I’d see that same expression reworn on different faces. It became something I lived for.
I could sing.
After that day, performing became part of my identity. Whether it was private voice lessons, school musicals, local contests, or just performing for friends and family, singing gave me the confidence that I didn’t have in conversation. I was a shy kid who often said the wrong thing, but the reception I got told me that, when I was singing, I was doing something right. It was the validation that yes, I did have value.
And nothing felt more therapeutic than belting it out. It made me feel so powerful to release all that sound. So impressive. But it would take me years to discover that, in reality, I was doing very little right.
This unfortunate truth was revealed to me during my second semester at Berklee. My ego was still sky high because I’d gotten a partial vocal scholarship to one of the top music schools in the world. I walked into my first lesson with the teacher who changed my life in so many ways, and to start the lesson, she asked me to sing something for her. So naturally, I pulled out an Adele song, and eight bars in, I heard:
“JUST STOP.”
I was a deer in the headlights.
Stop?
“If you keep singing like that, you will not have a voice by the time you’re 25.”
There was a reason that Adele’s songs had fit so well in my voice: We both stretched our chest voice beyond capacity instead of accessing a healthy mixed belt. All singers eventually should switch vocal registers the moment something doesn’t feel good, but many don’t. Imagine going to the gym to work out and feeling something off in your back, but continuously working out in the same way until your muscle tears: that’s what it’s like to sing incorrectly. The improper technique has painful consequences. I thought I’d been belting correctly because I had received so much positive reinforcement throughout my life. This revelation nearly shattered me.
There’s something demoralizing about someone criticizing your vocal technique and even more when you suffer from a vocal injury. While, thankfully, I had an instructor to step in and fix my habits before there was irrecoverable damage, Adele did not. In 2011 during a live radio performance, Adele suffered from a vocal hemorrhage, which is when a blood vessel in the vocal fold ruptures and bleeds. Although she did get surgery to “fix” this issue, she didn’t change anything about her approach and would find herself vocally compromised again, cancelling the end of her tour in 2017.
Meanwhile, I became somewhat of a vocal elitist. After refining my technique, my obsession with vocal health caused me to scour singing blogs, enroll in vocology class, and even start my own private voice studio, teaching students of all ages how to sing. I wasn’t listening to Adele and other singers who used to inspire me, but only those who had been lauded for their healthy practice. On the surface, I was a snob, when in reality, I was deeply insecure that my singing wasn’t getting the big reaction that it used to. I remember eavesdropping upstairs when my dad played two recordings of me singing for his dinner party: one that was recorded this year, and one from high school. And I remember feeling that pit in my stomach when his guests agreed they liked the “old style” better.
At least I knew nothing bad could happen to me. Not like it did to Adele.
Or so I thought.
One day, during the midterms of my graduate program, I was reading some dense assignments aloud to keep my focus when an onset of hoarseness came out of nowhere. I didn’t think anything of it until I went to teach my lessons that afternoon. During a demonstration, there was a sudden stop in my voice. I was mortified and confused. A brief telehealth appointment suggested laryngitis, so I went on vocal rest. I took a few absences from school to rest my voice, but it was getting worse. After a month and a half of battling this (and rating my pain an eight out of 10), I was certain it was a hemorrhage.
This led to a full-fledged identity crisis and a sudden understanding for what Adele must be feeling. If I was doing everything right, and something as simple as reading could lead to a hemorrhage, how could I expect a singer who performs for a living to never injure herself? Vocal folds are just twin pairs of tissue the size of a fingernail, and if she’s singing notes regularly that require her folds to vibrate over 500 times per second, how could she always perform without conflict?
I went to an ENT and found that my issue was not related to my vocal folds, but was in fact unusual inflammation in my pharynx and sinuses. Still, that sentiment never left me. I had been in the mindset of an injured singer for so long that I couldn’t return to blissful ignorance. The stigma surrounding vocal injury so easily damages a singer’s worth, yet when athletes get injured, it’s considered part of the game and understood by the masses. I was frustrated.
So, right when Adele released 30, I decided to listen to her music again, and it felt like an old friend.
It’s her best work to date.
While countless reviews of this album have discussed “vocal restraint,” it’s not that at all—she’s exercising caution. In past works, the singer was pushing registers and testing the limits of her thyroarytenoid muscles, but now she’s achieving way more of a balance, using both a gentle mix and head voice in songs like “Strangers By Nature” and the interlude, “All Night Parking,” flaunting excellent vocal control.
She also uses production as her friend by using several backing vox layers to thicken the arrangement and make the vocals big without having to employ a screaming belt (colloquially referred to as a “screlt”). Adele beautifully plays with octaves of low chest voice paired with head voice on choruses like “Oh My God,” and “Can I Get It.”
Although she does revert to old habits on a few tracks, especially “To Be Loved.” Adele said during a podcast that she refuses to sing this song live because it’s too emotional to revisit, but we screlters know better: If this track is added to her tour setlist, she will find herself back in the same position of 2017, and that’s a theory I certainly wouldn’t want to test, if I were her. After all the progress on all the other tracks, it would be negligent.
“To Be Loved” takes me back to a voice lesson I had one year after that introductory lesson with my teacher. I missed being a belter, so one day, I brought in one of my high school go-to songs: “I Know The Truth” from Aida. This was the song I received several standing ovations for, including one from the judge at a state competition. So, I reverted back for the whole song, and my teacher couldn’t even look at me. At the end of the performance, she took off her glasses and asked me: “Haley, did you forget everything I’ve ever taught you?” Tears immediately welled up in my eyes. I felt ashamed. But I still had this attachment to how I thought I should sing. I imagine this track was a similar experience for Adele. Change is scary.
This album showed me that what’s special about Adele is not the “big notes” at all. In fact, the soft verse at the beginning of “To Be Loved” made me cry during the first listen because of the honest fragility, the raw emotion, and her tone. Her power is the relatability of her heartbreak.
Adele has one of those timbres that is so special in itself that she doesn’t need the acrobatics to prove to anyone she can sing. She just can. It’s her voice and her delivery that makes her one of the most praised singers of our generation, not how loud or high she can belt. I hope she knows that, because thanks to her, I’ve learned to be more compassionate with myself as a singer.