The Number Ones: Adele’s “Easy On Me”

In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

Up until a few years ago, you could've made a perfectly strong case for Adele as the biggest pop star in the world. This was interesting because Adele didn't do the things that pop stars are supposed to do. She didn't tour. She didn't dance. She didn't reinvent herself every time she made a new album. She didn't significantly change her look, her persona, or her general presentation. She didn't make songs with other pop stars. She didn't make music that engaged with the zeitgeist at all. She just popped up at infrequent occasions to drop a new album that sold in impossible, world-obliterating numbers, and then she disappeared again.

The sheer overwhelming nature of Adele's commercial success made the "biggest pop star in the world" conversation difficult. It was clear that Adele was playing a different game than any of her peers, if she even had peers. In that time, Adele's closest competition was Taylor Swift, someone who is clearly driven by a Machiavellian urge to always be the biggest pop star in the world and who has pretty clearly had that title on lock for at least the past few years. If you went to the Eras Tour, you know that Swift works inhumanly hard at every single aspect of pop stardom, even the stuff that she didn't have to do. Swift was never exactly a natural dancer, for instance, and nobody would've been mad if she never tried to dance. Instead, she made sure that her live show would be a heavily choreographed epic-length extravaganza. She threw herself into it. It's impossible to imagine Adele even considering doing anything like that.

I could never be a pop star — not just because I have absolutely none of the talent or charisma that the profession requires but also because the entire idea of it exhausts me. It seems like too much damn work! It also seems vaguely embarrassing! You have to be out there constantly, presenting yourself to the general public and asking them for attention and validation. When you don't get that attention or validation, you have to figure out whether it's garden-variety backlash or genuine floppage, and you have to adjust your path accordingly. Also, you have no privacy, and you really only get to hang out with other famous people because you know that everyone else is only around because you're famous or because they already work for you. At least to me, this does not seem like a fulfilling life.

If I had to be a pop star, though, I'd want to be the Adele type of pop star. Adele doesn't really do the work. At any given moment, she gives zero indication that she has any idea what's going on on the overall pop landscape, and she damn sure doesn't adjust her approach to speak to the times. If she's hungry for attention, she does an amazing impression of someone who doesn't give even the tiniest of fucks. Whenever she's not working, which is most of the time, she seems entirely happy living her rich-lady life, hanging out with family and only popping up in the public eye when she's sitting courtside at an NBA game or some such thing. And whenever she returns with new music, people go crazy for it, and the rest of the pop world generally steps aside and lets her cook.

This seems like a nice way to live, but I'm not sure it makes for compelling pop music, at least in part because it doesn't have to make for compelling pop music. Adele knows that she isn't required to run the race. She can vanish for years and then return with a soft, sensitive piano ballad, and that song can monopolize the Hot 100, as well as tons of other charts around the world, for months at a time. That's what happened with "Easy On Me."

In the six years after 25, the kajillion-selling 2015 album that had "Hello" on it, Adele didn't release any music. But that doesn't mean that Adele wasn't busy. She had a lot going on. In 2019, for instance, Adele finally married the random rich British guy Simon Konecki. They'd already been together for years and had a son, and she was already publicly referring to him as her "husband," but they finally made it official. A year later, they broke up. By the time that she released "Easy On Me," her fifth Hot 100 chart-topper, Adele was living in Los Angeles and dating Rich Paul, LeBron James' business partner. (That's why she's courtside at so many NBA games.)

Adele's 21 and 25 were two of the biggest albums of this century, so word of a new Adele record was always going to be a huge deal. Adele was actually 33 when she released 30; she named the album after the age that she was when she got divorced and started writing it, not when she released it. That means she spent a while working on the record. She tried bringing in a few new collaborators like Ludwig Göransson, the Swedish composer who produced Childish Gambino's "This Is America" and who seems likely to win his fourth Best Original Score Oscar for The Odyssey, and Inflo, the London musician behind the arty and self-consciously mysterious R&B collective Sault. But once again, her main collaborator was Greg Kurstin, the dependable pop professional who has been in this column a few times and who worked on her two previous albums.

In an Instagram live session before 30 came out, Adele described the album's subject matter like this: "Divorce, babe. Divorce." Obviously. Duh. Adele ascended to galactic levels by making gut-ripping breakup ballads, so she obviously wasn't going to stop doing that after getting divorced. But "Easy On Me," the lead single from 30, isn't a hard-belting emotional apocalypse like some of her past bangers. It's a lot more tender than that. On the song, she asks a few different people — her ex, her son, possibly herself — to take it easy on her, babe. (She uses the word "babe" really well. That's hard to do.)

Adele doesn't do a lot of interviews, but before she released 30, she told Vogue that she wrote the songs on the album in part so that her nine-year-old son could listen to them years later and maybe come to understand "who I am and why I voluntarily chose to dismantle his entire life in the pursuit of my own happiness." That's a really tough and unflinching way to describe her situation, and it's a lot more stark than anything that she actually sings on "Easy On Me." Instead, her "Easy On Me" lyrics are misty to the point of abstraction.

Adele starts off "Easy On Me" intoning gently but powerfully over a tinkling piano and nothing else: "There ain't no gold in this river that I've been washin' my hands in forever" — exactly the kind of poetic allegory that turns me into a sputtering pedant. It's like: Is she panning for gold in the river, or is she washing her hands in it? Those are two different things! She continues: "I know there is hope in this water, but I can't bring myself to swim when I am drowning in this silence." So wait: Now she's drowning in the water? And choosing not to swim? After washing her hands in it and not finding gold? I'm sorry! I can't help it! Adele should be able to write about the difficulty of divorce however she wants without me hanging over her shoulder like, "So wait, what's the metaphor again?" It's just who I am. You get it. She's not happy. There's water.

Adele sings that she was "still a child" when she got married; she "didn't get a chance to feel the world" around her. She has tried to make her marriage work, but it didn't work: "I changed who I was to put you both first/ But now I give up." She hits the word "up" hard, her voice flying skyward the way it does. And that's the thing about "Easy On Me": It's an Adele song. The lyrics can be clumsy, and the music can be drab, but she is feeling things, and she is going to make sure you feel them, too.

"Easy On Me" is about being at the end, realizing that you have failed in fixing things. Adele feels terrible about it, and the song is a real expression of guilt, an emotion that popular music could probably stand to explore a little more often. The best part of the song is the chorus, where Adele stretches out the words "easy" and "feel," turning them into keening pleas. She wants the people who love her to go easy on her, and she wants to be easy on herself, but she isn't sure she deserves that kind of mercy. Adele's words don't make much of a sympathetic argument, but her voice does. She's just a spectacular singer, someone who can find absolute depth in words and melodies that would otherwise be pretty inert.

Adele's best songs have dizzy, explosive choruses. When she hits the big notes, you expect to see fighter jets flying in formation overhead. "Easy On Me" is too restrained to work like that, and maybe the subject matter is too remote. "Someone Like You" hits hard at least in part because most people have been through debilitating breakups. But I've never been through divorce or experienced the associated guilt, so maybe "Easy On Me" just necessarily can't click with me in the same way. Or maybe Adele had just hit those same emotional buttons enough times, and it didn't have the same effect anymore. I honestly don't know. I just know that "Easy On Me" never clobbers me the same way that "Someone Like You" or "Hello" does.

That might've been an artistic decision. It might've even been a practical decision. In the aforementioned Vogue interview, Adele mentioned that 30 didn't have any songs as "bombastic" as "Hello." She explained, "I don’t want another song like that. That song catapulted me in fame to another level that I don’t want to happen again." But if "Easy On Me" is Adele holding back, consciously deciding not to make another megahit, it's pretty striking that "Easy On Me" still managed to find its way to megahit status. I'd argue that it's a sign of how much goodwill Adele earned with her past heartbreak anthems. Radio started eating up "Easy On Me" right away, just as you'd expect.

"Easy On Me" is an Adele song in the good ways and the bad ways. As with a lot of Adele songs, Greg Kurstin played all the song's instruments. There aren't many of them. Mostly, the backing track is his florid piano, with a few drum kicks and bass notes coming in as the song builds. The film-score orchestral guy David Campbell, Beck's father, did string arrangements for different 30 songs, but the strings never come in on "Easy On Me." Adele's voice has to do all the crescendo work itself, and she can really do that. Musically, "Easy On Me" feels like Adele on autopilot, doing the same things that she has always done. It's not a long song, but it feels long, and not unpleasantly so. It's kind of turgidly pretty. It does the job, but there's nothing exciting about it.

Can Adele make exciting music? I think she could, at least theoretically. Long before its release, Adele teased her fans on Instagram, joking, "30 will be a drum n bass record to spite you." But that wouldn't spite me at all! I think that would be cool as hell! Adele's voice has all this raw expressive power, and she could push it to some really cool and interesting places, but she never does. The Jamie xx remix of "Rolling In The Deep" is a total banger, and I would love to hear Adele try something as weird and energized as that on her own. Instead, she always makes the small-c conservative choice.

But right now, I'm writing fan fiction about an Adele record that does not exist. This isn't what a critic should do. You review the song that you got, not the one that you wish you had. As it is, "Easy On Me" is a perfectly effective Adele song. When I hear it in the right moment, I can close my eyes and drift away to it. It just doesn't sweep me away like her best songs. It's another Adele song. After so many long breaks between albums, the whole idea of "another Adele song" doesn't hit quite as hard.

Still, Adele's return was obviously a huge deal. She unveiled "Easy On Me" as a piece of the canon that she'd slowly been building. She shot the song's video with Xavier Dolan, the same Canadian filmmaker who directed her "Hello" clip, and it's all about her moving out of the house from that video. The "Easy On Me" video starts out in black-and-white before cutting to color, and it's full of visual references to past Adele videos — the same cutesy self-referential Easter-egg business that Taylor Swift indulges so often.

Adele performed "Easy On Me" on a few different TV specials that she shot for different countries' audiences. After covering the country star Chris Stapleton's song "If It Hadn't Been For Love" as a 2010 B-side, Adele invited Stapleton to record a duet version of "Easy On Me" with her, and it became a minor country-radio hit even though it didn't have any country flourishes other than Stapleton's voice. (Stapleton's highest-charting Hot 100 hit as lead artist, his 2015 version of "Tennessee Whiskey," peaked at #20. He also guested on Justin Timberlake's 2018 song "Say Something," which peaked at #9. That's a 5.)

The "Easy On Me" single came out at midnight in the UK, which was 7 p.m. on the East Coast. Based on five hours of streaming and sales, the song debuted at #68 on the Hot 100. A week later, it jumped up to #1. It then stayed at #1 well into 2022, with brief interruptions for a couple of songs, including the now-traditional holiday run for Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You."

Other than the annual Christmas invasion, the upper reaches of the Hot 100 were pretty static for most of the time that "Easy On Me" sat at #1, which tells me that the song mostly got that long run on top by default. It never felt as culturally dominant as Adele's past hits, even though it technically stayed at #1 for longer than any of her previous chart-toppers. Still, 30 came out one month after "Easy On Me" and became the biggest-selling album of 2021 in just one week. I remember indie labels having to delay record releases because Adele was keeping all the vinyl pressing plants too busy to take on other jobs.

At this point, "Easy On Me" is quadruple platinum. The 30 album doesn't have any certifications, presumably because Columbia just hasn't paid the RIAA to get one. Maybe they don't actually want to know. Adele's 21 and 25 are both far past diamond, and that's a hard act to follow. At any rate, Adele wasn't going to work too hard to sell 30. She released a couple more songs from the album as singles, but neither of them were huge.

At this point, Adele's most recent top-10 hit is "Oh My God, " a relatively uptempo Greg Kurstin production about dating after divorce. It's a little more playful than all her big ballads, but that doesn't make it good. I think it's honestly pretty leaden. ("Oh My God" peaked at #5. It's a 4.) She was back in more familiar territory in "I Drink Wine," which has a great title and which peaked at #18. Every song from 30 made the Hot 100, but it wasn't one of those album-bomb situations where one artist colonizes that chart.

There was no 30 tour. Adele played a couple of big shows at London's Hyde Park, and then she settled in for a two-year residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The opening was delayed for nearly a year because of COVID and production issues, but it seems like it was phenomenally successful while it was happening. Then Adele played a run of shows at a Munich outdoor stadium that was constructed entirely for her. At one of those shows, she announced that she was engaged to Rich Paul, which is nice. When she played the last one in August 2024, Adele said that she was about to go away for a while. It was true. She hasn't been back in the public eye since.

Every once in a while, I see vague reports that Adele is working on new music. I'm sure she is, but I'm just as sure that she's not in any hurry to finish it up. Adele never played the ultra-pop game. Her stardom is its own thing. Whenever Adele comes back, if she comes back, I don't think she'll hit with the same world-historic impact that she once had. She'll probably still be back in this column, though.

GRADE: 6/10

BONUS BEATS: Kanye West, someone who has been in this column a bunch of times and who will be back, was on a big gospel kick around the time that 30 came out. He put together a group called the Sunday Service Choir, and they did these church performances where they'd sometimes sing gospel versions of popular songs. Here's the "Easy On Me" cover that they did in 2021, flipping the lyrics just enough to turn it into a song about God:

BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here's the young R&B singer Chlöe Bailey singing a short "Easy On Me" cover on YouTube in 2021, mostly using it as a melisma showcase:

(Chlöe's highest-charting single, 2021's "Have Mercy," peaked at #28. I like that song.)

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. I had good intentions and the highest hopes, but I know right now you can buy the book here.