Adele’s <em>30</em> and the Year of the Breakup Album
For most everyone, 2021 has been a long and lonely year. Pop stars, it seems, are no exception. Although music about heartbreak has been around for as long as there’s been music, this past year’s charts have looked particularly lovelorn.
Pop music has been a months-long opera of celebrity splits. We went from Olivia Rodrigo’s world-conquering “Drivers License” in January to Adele’s new album, 30, which she’s said is about “divorce, babe, divorce.” In between, Kacey Musgraves also dropped a divorce album and Taylor Swift rerecorded 2012’s Red, including a 10-minute version of the breakup anthem “All Too Well.”
On the podcast The Review, Shirley Li, Spencer Kornhaber, and Sophie Gilbert discuss how these albums approach loss and why 2021 was the year of the breakup album. Listen to their conversation here:
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers.
Shirley Li: Today we're talking about Adele’s new album, 30. But since it continues the theme of breakup records this year, we thought we’d go into that trend a little bit as well. There’s Kacey Musgraves’s divorce album, Star-Crossed; Taylor Swift’s rerecorded breakup album, Red (Taylor's version); and of course, Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour, which kicked off this big year of big emotions. But before we get into all that, let’s talk about Adele. You know, Adele is, in her own words, talking about “divorce, babe, divorce,” on the album 30. Spencer, a while back you wrote about how it’s a good idea to think of Adele as akin to a blockbuster-film franchise. What makes Adele such a powerhouse?
We live in this era where we don’t have that many huge stars that everyone can agree on. But there’s nobody who unites grocery stores across the country quite
