Adele

1988-present

Adele Now: Singer Postpones Concert Dates Because of Illness

Doctors have told “Easy on Me” singer Adele to take it easy on her voice. The singer announced February 27 she had postponed all scheduled shows of her Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace through March. The 35-year-old says she is continuing to recover from an unspecified illness that has lingered since her last leg of performances.

“I hadn’t quite gotten the chance to get back to full health before the shows resumed and now I’m sick again, and unfortunately it’s all taken a toll on my voice,” she wrote on Instagram. “I love you. I’ll miss you like mad and I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

Dates for residency shows in May and June are still listed on ticketing platforms like Ticketmaster. Adele is also scheduled to play in Europe for the first time in eight years this summer, with 10 shows booked in Germany in August.

British singer-songwriter Adele has sold millions of albums worldwide and is known for the songs “Rolling in the Deep,” “Someone Like You,” and “Hello.” Months after graduating a performing arts school near London, the young talent signed a record deal at age 18. On the heels of her 2008 debut album, 19, Adele picked up the 2009 Grammy for Best New Artist. Her subsequent albums have been massive commercial hits, including the most recent release 30 from November 2021. To date, the musical powerhouse has 16 Grammys and one Oscar and is the first artist in Grammy history to sweep the top three categories—Album, Song, and Record of the Year—twice. Currently, Adele is performing a Las Vegas residency that began in November 2022.

FULL NAME: Adele Laurie Blue Adkins
BORN: May 5, 1988
BIRTHPLACE: London, England
SPOUSE: Simon Konecki (2018-2021)
CHILDREN: Angelo
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born on May 5, 1988, in north London, England. She is the only child of Penny Adkins, an “arty mom” who was just 18 at the time of her birth, and a Welsh father, Mark Evans, who left the family when Adele was 4 years old.

Evans remained in contact with his daughter up until her teen years, when his problems with alcohol and increasing estrangement from his daughter caused their relationship to deteriorate. By contrast, Adele grew close to her mom, who encouraged her young daughter “to explore, and not to stick with one thing.”

Early on, Adele developed a passion for music. She gravitated toward the songs of Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, and Destiny’s Child. But her true, eye-opening moment came when she was 15, and she happened upon a collection of Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald records at a local shop.

“There was no musical heritage in our family,” Adele told The Telegraph in a 2008 interview. “Chart music was all I ever knew. So when I listened to the Ettas and the Ellas, it sounds so cheesy, but it was like an awakening. I was like, oh, right, some people have proper longevity and are legends. I was so inspired that as a 15-year-old I was listening to music that had been made in the ’40s.”

While clearly bright, Adele wasn’t oriented towards traditional classroom settings. Instead, her mother enrolled her in the Brit School for Creative & Performing Arts, which counts actor Tom Holland and late singer Amy Winehouse as alumni. While at school, Adele cut a three-track demo for a class project that was eventually posted on her MySpace page. When executives at XL Recordings heard the tracks, they contacted the singer and in November 2006, just four months after Adele had graduated school, signed the 18-year-old to a record deal.

Years into her career, the singer reconciled with her father in early 2021 as he battled a recurrence of cancer. She told Rolling Stone the two had an honest conversation about their relationship, and Adele even played songs off her upcoming album for him. Evans died that May. “I don’t think I understood the true deepness of how I felt about my dad until we spoke,” she said. “It was like I let out one wail and something left [at his death]. I’ve felt so calm ever since then. It really did set little me free.”

Adele performs during the 2012 BRIT Awards.

Adele has released four albums to date, starting with 2008’s 19. Her albums are named for the ages when she began each recording project. Both 21 and 25 were awarded Album of the Year at the Grammys.

Adele’s albums, in order, are:

The first of Adele’s songs to chart in the United Kingdom and the United States was “Chasing Pavements,” the lead single from her debut album. The singer says she wrote the song after an argument with her then-boyfriend in a London club. “It was six in the morning. There was no one chasing me, I wasn’t chasing anyone. I was just running away. I remember saying to myself, ‘What you’re chasing is you’re chasing an empty pavement,’” she said. In the United Kingdom, it first appeared on the Official Singles Chart in January 2008 and peaked at No. 2. It rose as high as No. 21 on America’s Billboard Hot 100 in February 2009.

Since then, Adele has captured three No. 1 U.K. hits—“Someone Like You,” “Hello,” and “Easy On Me”— and five U.S. chart-toppers. Her No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 are:

• “Rolling in the Deep”
• “Someone Like You”
• “Set Fire to the Rain”
• “Hello”
• “Easy On Me”

Adele drew inspiration for many of these ballads from her love life. She wrote “Rolling in the Deep,” her first No. 1 Billboard single from May 2011, the day after breaking up with her “first real relationship” that she later said “made me an adult.” Similarly, “Someone Like You” was crafted to help her get over a breakup—reportedly with Alex Sturrock, a 31-year-old photographer. However, not all these songs follow that mold. The British singer explained during a live show she got inspiration for “Set Fire to the Rain” when her lighter stopped working in the rain.

“Hello” stands out for its accompanying visual clip and historic popularity. Directed by up-and-coming filmmaker Xavier Dolan, it reportedly became the first music video to be shot with IMAX cameras. The song was also the first single to received more than 1 million downloads in a week’s time.

In total, Adele has had 19 songs in the U.K. Top 75 and 25 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, including eight Top 10 hits.

In 2017, Adele holds her five Grammy trophies resulting from her album 25 and song “Hello.”

Adele has won 16 Grammys out of 25 total nominations. Her most recent win was her fourth Best Solo Pop Performance trophy for “Easy on Me” in 2023.

She collected her first two Grammys at the 2009 ceremony when she took home Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for “Chasing Pavements.” In 2012, Adele swept the Grammy Awards; three of her six wins that night were for the top honors of Song of the Year and Record of the Year for “Rolling in the Deep,” as well as Album of the Year for 21. “This record is inspired by something that is really normal and everyone’s been through it—just a rubbish relationship,” she said at the ceremony.

In 2017, Adele became the first artist in Grammy history to sweep the top three categories twice. “Hello” won Song and Record of the Year as 25 nabbed Album of the Year. Adele additionally earned Best Pop Solo Performance and Best Pop Vocal Album, bringing her total for the year to five Grammys. However, she was effusive in her praise to fellow Album of the Year nominee Beyoncé and her groundbreaking album Lemonade. “But my artist of my life is Beyoncé, and this album for me, the Lemonade album, was just so monumental,” Adele said in her acceptance speech.

Her song “Skyfall,” the theme song for the 2012 James Bond movie of the same name, collected the 2014 Grammy for Best Song Written for Visual Media after winning an Academy Award and Golden Globe the year prior.

Beyond the Grammys, Adele has a host of other accolades. Her first album 19 earned the singer the distinction of being named the “Sound of 2008” by the BBC. That same year, she earned the Critics’ Choice prize at the BRIT Awards. In 2022, the singer took a step closer to EGOT status. Adele: One Night Only, a two-hour televised concert at Los Angeles’ Griffiths Observatory and an interview with Oprah Winfrey, earned the musical powerhouse the Emmy for Outstanding Prerecorded Variety Special. During the concert, Adele helped orchestrate a successful surprise marriage proposal between two fans.

Rich Paul and Adele attend the Grammy Awards in February 2023. They have been in a relationship since 2021.

Adele has dated singer and sports agent Rich Paul since 2021. Paul is the founder of Klutch Sports Group, the agency that represents basketball superstar LeBron James and a number of other high-profile NBA players. The couple made their first public appearance together at an NBA Finals game in July 2021, before sources revealed they had in fact been together for months.

In September 2023, speculation began that Adele and Paul had married after the singer referred to him as “my husband” amid an interaction with fans at one of her concerts. The following month, Paul gave an interview to CBS Mornings in which he said of their relationship: “She’s superb. We’ve been great for each other.” However, he didn’t confirm or deny the marriage rumors.

Adele shares a son with her ex-husband Simon Konecki. The couple were in a years-long relationship starting in late 2011. Konecki is the founder of Life water and the charity Drop4Drop.

On June 29, 2012, Adele announced on her website that she was pregnant with the couple’s first child. She spoke to People magazine about being a mother: “I really want to be a mum. I better start getting on with it!” she said. She gave birth to their son, Angelo, on October 19, 2012.

In early 2017, Adele was spotted wearing a wedding band, sparking marriage rumors. At her Grammy acceptance speech that same year, Adele appeared to confirm the rumors by calling Konecki her husband, though in interviews backstage she referred to him as her “partner.” Divorce proceedings between the pair eventually cited May 2018 as their marriage date. In April 2019, the singer’s representatives revealed that Adele and Konecki had split. Their divorce was finalized two years later.

Adele and Konecki continue to coparent Angelo, who is now a preteen.

Adele made significant changes to her diet and exercise routines, including lifting weights and doing circuit training, and made headlines in 2019 and 2020 with photos showing off her new physique. The singer lost around 100 pounds and even joked about her transformation during an October 2020 appearance as host of Saturday Night Live. “But actually, because of all the COVID restrictions… I had to travel light and I could only bring half of me, and this is the half I chose,” she said.

According to the singer, the workouts also eased the anxiety she had experienced amid her divorce. “Working out, I would just feel better... it was never about losing weight, it was always about becoming strong and giving myself as much time every day without my phone. I got quite addicted to it,” she told British Vogue.

According to Celebrity Net Worth, Adele’s total fortune is estimated around $220 million as of January 2024.

• I’ve seen people where it rules their lives, you know, who want to be thinner or have bigger boobs, and how it wears them down, and I just don’t want that in my life.
• I don’t write songs about a specific, elusive thing. I write about love, and everyone knows what it is like to have your heart broken.
• I doubt I’ll be singing forever, because at some point people aren’t going to want to hear my music, and I hope that I’ll still get the opportunity to write songs.
• I’m a big personality. I walk into a room, big and tall and loud.
• I have never been insecure, ever, about how I look, about what I want to do with myself. My mum told me to only ever do things for myself, not for others.
• I have sympathy for myself, I have sympathy for [my audience], they have sympathy for me, and I know that we are all there knowing exactly how each other feels.
• I want to go and see things as a fan again. I am a fan, but I can’t remember what it feels like to be a fan anymore. Because I’ve become an artist. I’ve become the artist.
• [Etta James] was the first time a voice made me stop what I was doing and sit down and listen. It took over my mind and body.
• I don’t make music for eyes. I make music for ears.
• I’ve never been more normal than I am now.
• If something is only all right, I make it into a bad thing. I won’t if it’s really good.
• I like having my hair and face done, but I’m not going to lose weight because someone tells me to. I make music to be a musician, not to be on the cover of Playboy.

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