Adele – Someone Like You

Two Days in a Small Hollywood Studio, Just a Piano and a Voice. The First Piano-and-Vocal Ballad to Top the Billboard Hot 100 Since Elton John’s Candle in the Wind in 1997, and One of the Most-Watched Performances in YouTube’s History.

Rick Rubin had recommended them to each other. The American songwriter and producer Dan Wilson — formerly the frontman of Semisonic, more recently a Grammy-winning Nashville co-writer with the Dixie Chicks — was working out of a small studio called Harmony on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, a high-ceilinged room with a Yamaha grand piano he had grown attached to. Adele Adkins was twenty-two years old, working in Los Angeles for the first time, building toward what would become her second album. Rubin had told both of them they should work together. The session was set for two days. Adele arrived with the first half of a verse worked out on acoustic guitar, the kernel of a melody, and a clear sense of what the song needed to say. She had been writing about the man she had been with for eighteen months — the man she had assumed she would marry — and who, a few months after he had ended the relationship, had become engaged to someone else. “I thought we would get married,” she would say later. “But that was something he never wanted. So when I found out he does want that with someone else, it was just the horrible-est feeling ever.” She had begun the song sitting on the edge of her bed.

“Adele came to the session with lyrics and melody for the first half of the verse at least,” Wilson recalled in an interview with American Songwriter. “There was a real vibe and idea already.” They listened to Wanda Jackson records on YouTube for a while. Then they moved into the studio’s main room. Adele showed Wilson the verse on guitar; he learned the chord shapes, then moved to the piano. “She lit up,” Wilson said. “‘That’s way more inspiring!’ she said. So I played piano for the rest of the session.” There were no arguments. Wilson described the writing as “old school, Carole King and Gerry Goffin in a small studio in Hollywood.” On the second day, Adele’s voice had what Wilson called “a rougher, more ragged edge than the day before.” He suggested they re-record the last chorus to take advantage of the extra rasp in her voice. “It was heartbreaking,” he said. The recording on the finished album is that demo — recorded in real time as the song was being completed, never replaced with a more produced version. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, they’re going to make a big version of this, strings and angelic choirs, like a big Chrissie Hynde power-ballad,'” Wilson said. “But by the end of the first day, the demo was sounding lovely, and very affecting.” Adele tried recording it later with a full orchestra. She kept the original instead.

The Album Closer Nobody Was Quite Sure About

The album 21 was released in the United Kingdom on January 24, 2011, with Someone Like You sequenced as its closing track. The first single, Rolling in the Deep, had been released the previous November and had peaked at number two in the UK by the end of January. The album debuted at number one. Someone Like You was released as the album’s second single on the same day as the album itself in the UK, but it did not enter the chart with much momentum — a respectable showing on the lower half of the Top 40. The song had been intended originally as the third track on the album. It had been moved to the final position late in the sequencing process, partly because everyone involved recognised that it was different in temperature from everything else on the record, partly because Adele wanted the album to end where she had left her own emotional process at the time of writing — at the moment of letting go.

What changed everything was the performance at the 31st BRIT Awards on February 15, 2011, at the O2 Arena in London. James Corden — pre-Carpool Karaoke, hosting his first major awards ceremony — introduced Adele. She walked onstage alone with a pianist. She sang Someone Like You straight, without staging, at a slightly slower tempo than the recording. The audience stood. Adele was visibly emotional by the closing chorus — she later told ITV2 she had been picturing her ex-boyfriend watching the performance from home, and it had broken her concentration. The performance went viral on YouTube within hours, and the next chart week, Someone Like You jumped from number forty-seven to number one. It stayed at number one for five weeks. By that same week, Rolling in the Deep was at number four; 21 was at number one for the fourth straight week; and her debut album 19 had climbed to number four. Adele became the first living act since The Beatles in January 1964 to have two simultaneous top-five singles and two top-five albums in the United Kingdom.

The American Climb and the Music Video

The American release was held back until August 9, 2011. The pattern repeated. Adele performed Someone Like You at the MTV Video Music Awards on August 28 on a darkened stage with only a piano — a deliberately spare performance pitched against the more theatrical productions surrounding it that night — and the song jumped from number nineteen to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the largest leap to number one in the chart’s history that was not driven by a brand-new single release. It stayed at number one for five weeks. It was the first piano-and-vocal-only ballad to top the Billboard Hot 100 since Elton John’s Candle in the Wind 1997. The music video, directed by Jake Nava — the British director who had previously made Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love and Single Ladies videos — premiered on Adele’s VEVO channel on September 29, 2011. Shot in black and white over two days in Paris, it shows Adele walking the empty streets of the city at dawn, delivering the lyric directly to camera in close-ups that mirror the recording’s intimacy. There is no narrative, no theatrics, no second character. It runs four minutes and forty-five seconds. As of 2026, the video has accumulated over 2.4 billion views on YouTube, placing it among the most-watched performance videos in the platform’s history.

Someone Like You won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Solo Performance in 2012. The album 21 won Album of the Year at the same ceremony — Wilson, as one of the album’s producers, took home a Grammy for the win — and 21 went on to top the Billboard 200 for twenty-four weeks, a record for the modern chart era, and to become the best-selling album of the twenty-first century. The 2011 BRIT performance has been covered, parodied, taught, and analysed in academic music journals; a Wall Street Journal piece in 2012 used the song as a case study in how “ornamental notes” — small unexpected melodic deviations — can produce involuntary tears in listeners. It became, in 2013, the most-downloaded digital single in UK history. The song that Adele wrote sitting on the edge of her bed about a man who had married someone else became, in fourteen months, the song most associated with her, and one of the songs most associated with the entire decade in popular music. “I’m never gonna write a song like that again,” she said in 2011. “I think that’s the song I’ll be known for.” The math, fifteen years later, has confirmed her.

Adele – Someone Like You (2011) | Two Days, One Piano, Five Weeks at #1