Number Ones: Adele’s ‘Hello’ Is A Bit Phoned In, But It Sure Is Nice To Hear Her Voice Again

In his semi-regular column, musicologist Tim Byron takes a deep dive into the new song at the top of the ARIA Singles Chart.

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In the music industry, the last three months of the year are when the big guns come out. It’s when people buy the most music, so its also when the record companies release their surest shots. And right now, at the start of November, they’re firing off their best chances at a number one.

If you want proof, take last week’s number one: Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s ‘Downtown’. This week ol’ Macklemore drops all the way to number five. In the old days of physical singles, a drop from the top that big would usually happen when the record companies stopped supplying the single to record stores, in order to promote the artist’s new single instead. But in the brave new iTunes/Spotify world of 2015, songs don’t drop down the charts that quickly. The iTunes Store doesn’t ‘delete’ singles, so there’s probably around the same amount of people buying ‘Downtown’ this week as last week.

The main difference is that this week, there’s four songs that just have more firepower.

Number four this week is The Weeknd’s ‘The Hills’. If it was most other weeks of 2015, ‘The Hills’ would be at #1 right now. The song just spent six weeks at #1 in the US, so it certainly has chart-topping potential, and Australia seems to be finally coming around to The Weeknd. It was time. But nope: only number four. Number three this week is Drake’s ‘Hotline Bling’, the song that launched a thousand memes. Meme-launchers are usually a shoe-in for #1, as Psy (‘Gangnam Style’) and even Bauuer can tell you (remember the faintly embarrassing spectacle of brands trying to get in on the Harlem Shake?). But even Drake has been outclassed commercially by two bigger guns.

Number two this week is Justin Bieber’s ‘Sorry’, the third in his triptych of immaculately crafted dance-pop singles about confusion and contrition. According to Spotify, ‘Sorry’ is currently being played in Australia twice as much as ‘Downtown’. Justin Bieber, in 2015, is the kind of unstoppable commercial force that can only be stopped by an immovable chart object.

And that immovable chart object? Adele, of course.

Her last album, 21, is the only record released since the digital download era to sell a million copies in Australia. Put it this way: Taylor Swift’s 1989 — that record you kept hearing about this year — has only sold about a third of the copies that 21 sold here. Adele is that far in front. In fact, the only other album to comfortably sell more than about half a million copies in Australia in the 2010s is Michael Buble’s Christmas record (which has gone to #1 at Christmas every year since 2011). Suffice to say that any half-decent first single from the new Adele album was inevitably going to hit #1.

And ‘Hello’ is at least half-decent. Sure, there’s a distinct lack of reinventing the wheel here. Adele has noticed that the world likes to hear her sing angsty ballads about her ex, and she knows the world likes it when she belts out the chorus. ‘Hello’ delivers on both fronts. Four years since her last release — after a new relationship, enormous fame, and a child – Adele is ringing up an old flame to say hello.

There’s something of the quiet-desperation-and-piano of ‘Someone Like You’ (Adele’s other Australian #1 single, from 2011) in the verses; and there’s something of the power of ‘Rolling In The Deep’, when she reaches up to the big notes in the chorus. In that sense, it does feel a little like a phone call from an old friend.

Which is to say that the lyrics — which begin with, “hello, it’s me/ I was wondering if after all these years you wanted to meet“ — aren’t really about her old flame. Instead, the song’s real topic is Adele’s doubts that 25-year-old Adele — presumably a happier, wiser person; definitely a much richer one — will be as popular as 21-year-old Adele. ‘Hello’ is like a flashback to something she used to feel, perhaps because it’s the feeling that caused her to become very, very successful. She wants to recapture the magic, but she knows that she isn’t 21 anymore.

In truth, ‘Hello’ feels a little phoned in. It rarely rises above our baseline expectations for Adele; instead, it coasts along on her voice, her juggernaut of a fan base, and a good hook in the chorus. The verses and the parts of the chorus that she doesn’t belt out feel a little underdone; the song, as a whole, doesn’t quite have the ruthless pop mathematics of ‘Rolling In The Deep’.

But following the biggest album of the decade is no easy task, and it’s rare that the singer comes close to matching that kind of success. Delta Goodrem’s follow-up to Innocent Eyes sold about a third of the copies. Norah Jones’ follow-up to Come Away With Me sold about a quarter. Alanis Morrisette’s follow-up to Jagged Little Pill sold a seventh in Australia. Let’s face it: 25 will be doing well if it sells a third of the copies of 21.

Time will tell whether the rest of the album follows a similar formula, or whether ‘Hello’ is meant to ease you into the album before she ventures into uncharted territory. Track two on the album is a track called ‘Send My Love (To Your New Lover)’, co-written with Max Martin and Shellback, Taylor Swift’s production team on 1989. ‘Send My Love (To Your New Lover)’ could go two ways: at worst it’ll be a blander, more pop version of her schtick; at best it’ll be a Taylor Swift-style self-conscious post-modernist Adele making fun of her own persona, with something that reinvents her sound the way that ‘Shake It Off’ reinvented Swift’s. Whichever way it goes, Max Martin’s track record guarantees it to be infuriatingly catchy.

Bringing Back The ’70s

‘Hello’ harks back to 1970s singer-songwriter folky pop. The lyrical conceit — that you’re hearing one side of a phone conversation with a loved one — was common in the ’70s; you hear it in ‘Hello It’s Me’ by Todd Rundgren, ‘Hello’ by Lionel Richie, and ‘Telephone Line’ by Electric Light Orchestra. ‘I’d Really Love To See You Tonight’ by England Dan and John Ford Coley — another 1970s phone lyric, this time concerning a booty call — starts with the immortal lines, “hello, yeah, it’s been a while — not much, how ’bout you? I’m not sure why I called…” This might have influenced Adele’s very conversational line “it’s so typical of me to talk about myself, I’m sorry, I hope that you’re well“.

But of course, the 1970s singer-songwriters usually opted for softer vocals than Adele; her powerful voice combined with the singer-songwriter vibe reminds me a little of the Barbra Streisand albums from the early 1970s (e.g., 1972’s Stoney End), where Mecha-Streisand covered singer-songwriters like Laura Nyro and Gordon Lightfoot (e.g., ‘If You Could Read My Mind’).

‘Hello’ was co-written and produced by Greg Kurstin, who 1990s alt-rock fans will be surprised to find out was in Geggy Tah (‘Wherever You Are’), and who 2000s indie fans might remember as the boy in the boy-girl indie pop duo The Bird And The Bee (‘Again And Again’). Over the last five years or so, Kurstin has become the most successful pop producer in the world who isn’t named Max Martin. His productions include ‘Not Fair’ by Lily Allen, ‘Chandelier’ by Sia, ‘Blow Me (One Last Kiss)’ by P!nk, and ‘Boy Problems’ by Carly Rae Jepsen (perhaps this year’s best pop song). But for Adele, Kurstin dials down the modern pop thing, giving ‘Hello’ a more retro feel to go along with that very ’70s lyric.

The Power Of The Vocal

Of Kurstin’s previous productions, ‘Hello’ most resembles ‘Power Money Glory’ by Lana Del Rey, from her 2013 album Ultraviolence. Like ‘Power Money Glory’, ‘Hello’ is cloaked in enough reverb that it becomes difficult to distinguish individual instruments from the echoes of others. The end effect — once the build-up in ‘Hello’ has peaked — is something of a Spectorean wall of sound: all the instruments, at once, are playing the same simple notes and chords. The drum beat in ‘Hello’, too, has a similar muffled, reverberant sound to the one in ‘Power Money Glory’. In the quieter moments, when it’s just Adele and a piano, there are echoes of Lana Del Rey’s ‘Video Games’, too.

But the differences between Adele’s voice and Lana Del Rey’s mean the two songs give off very different feelings. Del Rey’s voice has always been wispy and full of ennui; she sings with a studied sense of distance meant to remind you it’s all an act. Adele’s singing, on the other hand, is immediate and full-bodied. Critics have often said of Aretha Franklin that she could probably sound good singing the telephone book; well, Adele could probably sound wracked with emotion singing ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’. And so the end effect of ‘Hello’ is very different to ‘Power Money Glory’.

Of course, the one thing that Adele absolutely nails here is those big notes in the chorus. Specifically, the vocal trill she performs throughout the song, but which happens for the first time when she sings the word “times” in the first chorus: “tiiiiiiiiii-e-iiiiiimes”. Here, she briefly pushes the note to a flat fifth, before falling back to the fourth, inserting a brief whooping sort of sound midway through the note. During that moment, Adele gives you just the briefest horrifying glimpse into the confusing emotional mess dwelling inside her; it’s the only time in the song you hear anything as dissonant as a flat fifth.

The flat fifth was famously ‘the devil’s note’ in medieval times, which is why Satan-obsessed metal dudes like Black Sabbath or Marilyn Manson more or less use it in every song. In modern times, that flat fifth note is also commonly heard as a passing note in the blues. And Adele being an avowed fan of blues singer Etta James, this was the point of that passing whoop.

She woke up this morning, in other words, with the old flame blues.

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Tim Byron completed a PhD in music psychology, plays in too many bands, and chronically overanalyses everything musical. He has written for Max TV, Mess+Noise, The Guardian, The Big Issue, and The Vine.