Adele - An Audience with Adele, The Palladium, London, Britain, 11-6-2021

I think a lot of popular music these days sucks. That's not to say there isn't plenty of good new music being made, but to my ears, the more popular it is, the less I generally like it. However, there are exceptions. Adele is massively popular, selling tens of millions of albums. She clearly has an incredible voice, but she also is a talented songwriter, and she doesn't ruin her music with bad production. 

I'm particularly impressed with her most recent album, "30," which was released earlier this month as I write this (in November 2021). I thought her previous albums were bogged down by too many sad ballads, but she varies the tempo a lot more on this one, and her songwriting has improved even more.

I won't post that album here, because that would be against my policy on posting widely available and unchanged albums. However, she performed a couple of concerts to promote her new album. One of them was filmed in Los Angeles and broadcast on US TV. The other one was filmed in London and broadcast on British TV. I came across an excellent bootleg recording of the London show, so I'm posting it here.

Both TV shows were not just typical concerts. The US show alternated between concert footage and an interview Adele did with Oprah Winfrey filmed at a different time and place. The British show was all from the concert, but at five separate points, there were extensive sections in which Adele took questions from the audience. And instead of fielding questions from ordinary people, all the questions came from stars like Samuel Jackson, Alan Carr, and Emma Thompson.

I want this to be an album with replay value. I think having all those question and answer sessions bogged down listening to it as a musical experience, so I cut them all out. However, I left in whatever talking Adele did between songs when it was just her talking to the audience. 

As a result, this ends up sounding like a typical concert after all. However, it's rather short as concerts go, at only 52 minutes long. But if you're not familiar with her music, this is a great place to start. She played the best songs from her new album, as well as her biggest hits from previous albums.

01 Hometown Glory (Adele)
02 Hello (Adele)
03 talk (Adele)
04 Send My Love [To Your New Lover] (Adele)
05 Easy on Me (Adele)
06 talk (Adele)
07 I Drink Wine (Adele)
08 Rolling in the Deep (Adele)
09 talk (Adele)
10 Hold On (Adele)
11 talk (Adele)
12 Set Fire to the Rain (Adele)
13 talk (Adele)
14 Someone like You (Adele)
15 Love Is a Game (Adele)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15123467/Adel_2021_AnAudiencewithAdelThePalladium__11-6-2021_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I used a photo taken at the concert in question. I also copied her name from some of the show's promotional material. I then wrote the bottom text using a similar font.

Adele - Acoustic - Morning Becomes Eclectic, KCRW, Santa Monica, CA, 11-17-2008

There are a lot of so-called "divas" who can really belt out a song. But, in my opinion, Adele stands heads and shoulders above the typical diva by having lots more talent than just an impressive voice. A real test of musical talent is how you do in a solo acoustic format. Adele's music is more acoustic than most people realize, especially her first album, and she's capable playing the guitar. So she excels playing acoustic.

As far as I know, she's never played a full concert acoustically. The closest she's probably come that is publicly available and has great sound are two performances for the KCRW radio station in 2008. She was promoting the same album and played many of the same songs. So I used all the songs from the second appearance, and just the different ones for the first appearance. The four songs from the first appearance start this album.

The KCRW material is forty minutes long, and makes up the bulk of this album. She also has some entertaining talk between most of those songs, though she's usually brief. There was no crowd noise since it was all recorded live at the radio station studio. Sometimes, a guitar backs her so she can concentrate on singing (though she's fully capable of playing the guitar for all those songs, as you can see in some YouTube videos). Occasionally, the backing instrument is keyboards or piano, though it's usually guitar.

But I wanted to make this into the ultimate Adele acoustic album, as much as possible. So I've added five extra songs at the end. Four of those are from her second album, including the all-time classics "Rolling in the Deep" and "Someone like You." There's also a cover of the Cure hit "Lovesong" to go with the earlier cover of "Make You Feel My Love" by Bob Dylan for the only two cover songs here.

Altogether, the album is an hour and two minutes long.

As you've probably noticed if you follow this blog, I'm not a fan of most of the musical mega-stars from the last couple of decades. But Adele is the real deal. If you're not that familiar with her, this is a good place to start.

01 Crazy for You (Adele)
02 talk (Adele)
03 Melt My Heart to Stone (Adele)
04 talk (Adele)
05 Make You Feel My Love (Adele)
06 talk (Adele)
07 That's It, I Quit, I'm Moving On (Adele)
08 Daydreamer (Adele)
09 talk (Adele)
10 Right as Rain (Adele)
11 talk (Adele)
12 Hometown Glory (Adele)
13 talk (Adele)
14 Fool that I Am (Adele)
15 First Love (Adele)
16 talk (Adele)
17 Cold Shoulder (Adele)
18 talk (Adele)
19 My Shame (Adele)
20 talk (Adele)
21 Chasing Pavements (Adele)
22 Lovesong (Adele)
23 Rolling in the Deep (Adele)
24 Turning Tables (Adele)
25 Don't You Remember (Adele)
26 Someone like You (Adele)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15123390/Adel_2008_AcousticMrningBecomesEclecticKCRW__11-17-2008_atse.zip.html

The cover art is a photo of Adele in concert in 2008. I don't know the exact date or location.

Adele - Rare Songs and Cover Versions, Volume 2 (2011-2017)

I just posted an album of Adele rarities, all from the year 2008. I made that together with this one, so I might as well post this too. If you like that one, you should like this one too.

The main difference between the previous album and this one is that that one was mostly covers (all but two songs), whereas this one is about half covers and half non-album Adele originals. Most of the originals are bonus tracks to her 2011 and 2015 albums. But there's also "Skyfall," her 2012 hit for the James Bond movie of the same name. Plus, there are two songs, "You'll Never See Me Again" and "Never Gonna Leave You" that are still officially unreleased. They were recorded for her 2011 album "21" but weren't included on it, then were somehow leaked onto the Internet in 2014.

Additionally, I stumbled upon a really interesting unreleased mix of "Rolling in the Deep." That's easily my favorite Adele song. I think it's one of the very best songs of the millennium (from 2000 onwards). This version is the same as the studio album version, but with all the instrumentation removed, leaving just Adele's lead vocals plus the backing vocals. It's not as good as the hit version, but I still think it's interesting and worth hearing.

Regarding the cover versions, a few of them are bonus tracks. The rest generally are from live performances. Generally speaking, the sound quality is high, even though three of them are from concert bootlegs.

This album is longer than the previous one. That one is 44 minutes long, and this one is an hour and one minute long. It's kind of an album and a half. The first 40 minutes are all from 2011, and are related to the "21" album released that year. If Adele comes out with a new album and has a bunch of non-album tracks that go with it, I may well move the post-2011 songs to that, if that makes for a sensible album length.

Here is a list of the original artists that made the songs famous:

01 Need You Now - Lady Antebellum
02 I Found a Boy - Adele
03 If It Hadn't Been for Love - Darryl Worley
04 Hiding My Heart - Tim Hanseroth
05 Lovesong - Cure
06 You'll Never See Me Again - Adele
07 Never Gonna Leave You - Adele
08 Promise This - Cheryl Cole
09 [You Make Me Feel like A] Natural Woman - Aretha Franklin
10 I Can't Make You Love Me - Bonnie Raitt
11 Rolling in the Deep [Acappella Version] - Adele
12 Skyfall - Adele
13 Can't Let Go - Adele
14 Lay Me Down - Adele
15 Why Do You Love Me - Adele
16 Fastlove - George Michael
 
Here's the usual song list:

01 Need You Now (Adele with Darius Rucker)
02 I Found a Boy (Adele)
03 If It Hadn't Been for Love (Adele)
04 Hiding My Heart (Adele)
05 Lovesong (Adele)
06 You'll Never See Me Again (Adele)
07 Never Gonna Leave You (Adele)
08 Promise This (Adele)
09 [You Make Me Feel like A] Natural Woman (Adele)
10 I Can't Make You Love Me (Adele)
11 Rolling in the Deep [Acappella Version] (Adele)
12 Skyfall (Adele)
13 Can't Let Go (Adele)
14 Lay Me Down (Adele)
15 Why Do You Love Me (Adele)
16 Fastlove (Adele)

NOTE: The download link has been removed, due to a copyright issue, sorry. But check the comments below.

The photo for the cover comes from Adele's appearance at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards.

Adele - Rare Songs and Cover Versions, Volume 1 (2008)

I have mixed feelings about Adele. I think she has an incredible voice. She's a talented songwriter, and sometimes she hits it out of the park. "Rolling in the Deep" and "Someone like You" (both of which she co-wrote) are fantastic songs. But I feel she often squanders her talent with too many mid-tempo heartbreak ballads. If only she did more uptempo songs like "Rolling in the Deep!"

Adele put out her first album in 2008, but she's only had three studio albums in total so far, and one live album that pretty much repeats the songs from her studio albums. She's sold an ungodly number of albums, at least 120 million! But I feel all three of her albums are hit and miss.

So I've attempted to make a couple more albums for her. I found enough non-album material for two albums. Frankly, I like these albums better than her studio albums because while she has written or co-written some great songs, those albums have too many of those samey heartbreak ballads. By contrast, these albums mostly consist of covers of classic songs. So the songwriting is solid. It's great to hear Adele apply her remarkable voice to these songs. At times, she's like the second coming of Aretha Franklin or Etta James.

All but five of the songs here are officially unreleased. The sound quality on the unreleased ones are very good to excellent. Generally speaking, most of these come from BBC TV or radio shows, or other radio shows, which means excellent sound quality. Probably the roughest is a version of "Steady, as She Goes," which she apparently did off the cuff while backstage at one of those BBC performances. It's a remarkable performance considering you can see from video footage of it that she's reading the lyrics to the song off her cell phone as she sings!

At first, I was only going to make this a collection of her cover songs. But between this and the next album, I discovered that she has some rare original songs that are pretty good, often as good or better than some of the songs on her studio albums. There are two such songs here, and more on the other album in this series. Both the originals here were released as B-sides.

Adele has almost never included cover songs on her studio albums. One rare exception is "Make You Feel My Love" by Bob Dylan. I've included that here, but I was careful to use a different version than the well-known studio album one.

The song "God Put a Smile upon Your Face" has been edited. That's because the performance she did of it was very short, only a minute and a half long. (It was the first part of a medley, with the other parts of different songs sung by different singers.) It's just one verse and one chorus. I ended it a little bit by repeating the chorus. Even so, that only extended it by another half a minute.

The last two songs, "You Do Something to Me" and "Need Your Love So Bad" were already included on a Paul Weller stray tracks album I made. But since they're duets between Adele and Weller, they fit just as much here, so I put them on this album too.

One thing I like about this album is that it has much greater variety than Adele's studio albums. She does more upbeat material, including versions of some modern rock songs. If you enjoy her voice but aren't so keen on her usual style, you might want to give this a try.

Unfortunately, one of those versions of modern rock songs could only be included as a bonus track. That's "Dreaming of You" by the Coral. It's a great song, and she does a very nice version. But the recording is from an audience bootleg, with some audience noise throughout, so it didn't meet the standard as the other songs here.

This album is 44 minutes long.

Here are the original artists that made the songs famous:

01 That's It, I Quit, I'm Moving On - Sam Cooke
02 Last Nite - Strokes
03 God Put a Smile upon Your Face [Edit] - Coldplay
04 Many Shades of Black - Raconteurs
05 Now and Then - Adele
06 Steady, as She Goes - Raconteurs
07 Black and Gold - Sam Sparro
08 Baby, It's You - Burt Bacharach / Shirelles
09 Painting Pictures - Adele
10 I Just Want to Make Love to You - Willie Dixon / Muddy Waters
11 Make You Feel My Love - Bob Dylan
12 Fool that I Am - Etta James
13 You Do Something to Me - Paul Weller
14 Need Your Love So Bad - Little Willie John

Dreaming of You - Coral

Here's the usual song list:

01 That's It, I Quit, I'm Moving On (Adele)
02 Last Nite (Adele)
03 God Put a Smile upon Your Face [Edit] (Adele)
04 Many Shades of Black (Adele)
05 Now and Then (Adele)
06 Steady, as She Goes (Adele)
07 Black and Gold (Adele)
08 Baby, It's You (Adele with Burt Bacharach)
09 Painting Pictures (Adele)
10 I Just Want to Make Love to You (Adele)
11 Make You Feel My Love (Adele)
12 Fool that I Am (Adele)
13 You Do Something to Me (Paul Weller & Adele)
14 Need Your Love So Bad (Paul Weller & Adele)

Dreaming of You (Adele)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15123356/Adel_2008_RareSongsandCoverVersionsVolume_1_atse.zip.html

The cover art uses a promotional photo of Adele from 2008.

Paul Weller - The Start of Forever - Non-Album Acoustic Tracks (2006-2008)

Sometimes, I post Paul Weller full-band stray track albums and sometimes I post his all-acoustic stray track albums. This is the latter kind.

This is the usual sort of mix of songs. He does two Jam songs ("Liza Radley" and "The Butterfly Collector") and one Style Council song ("Down in the Siene"). He also covers a couple of famous songs ("Daydream" and "Pretty Flamingo"). I also included one song from earlier in his solo career ("Shadow of the Sun") because, as far as I know, an acoustic version of it hasn't been officially released. Most of the rest are his own songs, generally from recent solo albums.

However, there is one special section to this album, at the end of it. Weller and superstar diva Adele played three songs together in the studio for the BBC. Both of them sang on all three songs, but Adele sang most of the lead on a Weller hit, Weller sang most of the lead on an Adele hit, and then they tackled an old blues classic together.

01 I Wanna Make It Alright (Paul Weller)
02 Roll Along Summer (Paul Weller)
03 The Start of Forever (Paul Weller)
04 Wild Blue Yonder [Demo] (Paul Weller)
05 Down in the Siene (Paul Weller)
06 Liza Radley (Paul Weller)
07 Shadow of the Sun (Paul Weller)
08 Sweet Pea, My Sweet Pea (Paul Weller)
09 The Butterfly Collector (Paul Weller)
10 Daydream (Paul Weller)
11 Pretty Flamingo (Paul Weller)
12 Light Nights (Paul Weller)
13 You Do Something to Me (Paul Weller & Adele)
14 Chasing Pavements (Paul Weller & Adele)
15 Need Your Love So Bad (Paul Weller & Adele)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15849598/PaulW_2006-2008_TheStrtofForevrAcoustc_atse.zip.html

I made the cover from a concert photo from 2009.