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Adele had already started writing the album everyone was waiting for. She began work on 30 in early 2019 and had it completely written by early 2020, though the pandemic would have something to say about the eventual release date. Sure, it’s an album about “divorce, babe,” as she stated recently in her first-ever Instagram Live. But it’s not the collection of scorched-earth power ballads everyone may have been expecting.

Instead, Adele wrote an open letter to Angelo, in hopes that one day he’ll hear the album and really, truly understand who his mom was and how her life changed during this time. The only song specifically about her marriage is “Easy on Me,” the gorgeous, very typically Adele first single. Across 30, Adele assesses the most important relationship of her life: the one with herself. Saturn returns are periods of major upheaval at the turn of one’s thirties, and Adele just went through hers, coming out on the other side of a turbulent period ready to reckon with who she is and what she wants, even if it meant upending her own life. She got a bit addicted to the gym; it was another place where she didn’t feel anxious. She was learning she was stronger than she thought and healing parts of her body, like the back that had given her trouble for years. She also learned she is surprisingly athletic. “If I can transform my strength and my body like this, surely I can do it to my emotions and to my brain and to my inner well-being,” she surmised. “That was what drove me. It just coincided with all of the emotional work that I was doing with myself as a visual for it, basically.” Adele has started to wonder about society’s expectations for mothers, how they’re always just moms while dads can be many things at once. Much of that is what reinforced her feelings of failing Angelo after leaving Konecki. “I might not have been emotionally there all the time, but I never wasn’t there for him,” she says, defending herself against her own fears. “My Little Love” — and, really, all of 30 — is about showing Angelo who his mother really is: a layered and complicated woman with an identity outside of their relationship, who’s struggled and cried and hurt. “He needs to know everyone goes through it,” she continues. So far, and as heard on the voice memos, he is quite the understanding nine-year-old. “He’s a Libra, so he is, like, ‘Chill. It’s fine, Mama. Just chill out.’ ”

There ain’t no gold in this river That I’ve been washing my hands in forever I know there is hope in these waters But I can’t bring myself to swim When I am drowning in the silence Baby, let me in