When it comes to her music, Adele can always expect an honest review from her nearest and dearest.
The 33-year-old singer revealed what her pals really thought of her new track "Easy on Me" during an Oct. 15 interview on BBC Radio 1 Breakfast With Greg James.
"Well, they loved it," she said. "I was saying the other day that I sent a snippet of me singing it as I was writing it to three of my closest friends here and one didn't like it, the other one was like, 'Well yeah maybe, keep trying though,' and the other one was, 'I'm busy working.' So that was the perfect response for me."
Describing herself as a "knee-jerk person," Adele also noted her friends appreciated her patience with the recently released single. "I think it was clear to them, you know, in the lyrics of 'Easy on Me' that I bided my time, and I wasn't reacting, you know, to a reaction or anything like that," she continued. "It was just a feeling that I sort of stirred on for a while."
The 15-time Grammy winner isn't the only one who's been patient. It's been almost six years since Adele released new music, with her last album 25 dropping in 2015.
"I don't do any music in my time off," she explained. "It's not a muscle I exercise, you know, writing or singing. So most of the time, you know, even like my best friends and even my manager, their first reaction, no matter what a song is, is 'It's just nice to hear you sing again.'"
Luckily, fans won't have to wait much longer. Adele is releasing her new album, 30, on Nov. 19. During the interview, the "Someone Like You" star revealed "Easy on Me" was the first song she wrote for the album back in early 2019. That year, Adele announced her split from Simon Konecki, with whom she shares 8-year-old son Angelo, and the two filed for divorce, reaching a settlement in 2021.
"I was making decisions in my life, which have been well-documented over the last, you know, few years but also obviously some interviews I had and stuff like that," she said. "But it was just sort of that thing of, like, initiating a discussion or you know whatever, not in the case of, you know, my son's dad and stuff like that, or a massive bloody fight, which I definitely started some fights post our relationship with my son's dad, with other people. Normally, I'm very not confrontational and stuff like that. But you could initiate something and be like, 'Well hang on a minute. No, go easy on me.' It was like, 'Bear with me while I try to find my feet in a situation.'"
Adele said there was something both hopeful and sad about the song. "I mean, I obviously bawled my eyes out when I was writing it and when I was singing it for the recording and stuff like that," she noted. "But there's an element of hope in it, which in turn, gave me hope, you know, because I was at my wit's end in the beginning of 2019….It felt like that was what people were missing from me, you know the people that like my music."
All in all, she hopes it will encourage "people to acknowledge how they're feeling, which I feel like we're all encouraged not to do." And she can't wait for fans to hear the rest of the album.
"I was hoping to release this album last year but obviously 2020 happened for all of us," she shared at one point during the interview. "So I've been living with it for a lot longer than I feel like I would have liked to. I'm just so eager for 'Easy' to come out, and then for the album to come out and stuff like that and just for my truth to exist in the world."