Tear Jerker / Adele

• From 19:
  • "Hometown Glory" is an odd one in that is sounds fantatical with how Adele describes the city, but the the overall sound and the situation that caused its writing (Adele not wanting to leave for university) make it rather depressing.
  • "Chasing Pavements" is sad in just how desperate she sounds on the track.
• From 21:
  • "Someone Like You" is so overwhelmingly heartbroken that SNL parodied it in a sketch with Emma Stone.
  • "Don't You Remember" tears at all the right heartstrings too.
  • "Turning Tables" also gets damn close to that, thanks to this beautiful piano accompaniment.
• From 25:
  • "Hello," about an attempt to reconnect a broken relationship, is so damn sad that it practically went memetic over how sad it was.
  • "When We Were Young" is explained by Adele as borne out of an acknowledgment of how her, her age-mates and friends realized how their age is catching up to them—and how, in retrospect, all their loves, hates and quarrels are better left in the past, if only they could be together a bit longer.
  "[It was] based on us being older, and being at a party at this house, and seeing everyone that you've ever fallen out with, everyone that you've ever loved, everyone that you've never loved, and stuff like that, where you can't find the time to be in each other's lives. And you're all thrown together at this party when you're like 50, and it doesn't matter and you have so much fun and you feel like you're 15 again."
  • "All I Ask" is about a relationship the narrator knows can't last, and their struggle to accept its inevitable end while begging their lover to make it tender and meaningful in spite of that, with lines such as "give me a memory I can use."
  It matters how this ends
  'Cause what if I never love again?
  • "Love in the Dark" has incredibly heartbreaking lyrics. Adele feels incredibly devastated about leaving, and her boyfriend clearly doesn't want to, but it's clear that it's taking an emotional toll on both of them, and she feels as if she needs to live in order to be able to start feeling alive again.
  We're not the only ones, I don't regret a thing
  Every word I've said, you know I'll always mean
  It is the world to me that you are in my life
  But I want to live and not just survive
• From 30:
  • "Easy On Me" was written after Adele filed a divorce with her first husband and that she had to live a new post-divorce life. The refrain of the song has the phrase "Go easy on me, baby".
  • In a deeply raw and vulnerable track, "My Little Love" details Adele's relationship with her son, Angelo (arguably a successor to "Sweetest Devotion"). Punctuating various points of the song are voice clips of Adele and her son with the final one being a tearful voicemail from to Adele to a close.
  I'm having a bad day, I'm having a very anxious day
  I feel very paranoid, I feel very stressed
  Um, I have a hangover, which never helps, but
  I feel like today is the first day since I left him that I feel lonely
  And I never feel lonely, I love being on my own
  I always preferred being on my own than being with people
  And I feel like maybe I've been, like, overcompensating
  And being out and stuff like that to keep my mind off of him
  And I feel like today, I'm home and I wanna be at home
  I just wanna watch TV and curl up in a ball and
  Be in my sweats and stuff like that, but I just feel really lonely
  I feel a bit frightened that I might feel like this a lot

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