The Earliest Bird: Top New Recorded Release 10-15-21-10-21-22, Adele’s “Easy On Me” Reviewed

It isn’t “Hello”. SNL won’t be doing sketches about it. It doesn’t touch that place where love and sadness and song meet. And though she didn’t call it “Goodbye,” “Easy On Me” is the goodbye side of “Hello” in the same multiverse, not to mention the same house, as “Hello,” and has the same power ballad with enveloping piano we know so well. The song isn’t good enough as a song, as opposed to a series of feints and formulas, a branding exercise.It maintains the product for her upcoming fourth album, but only just. With Greg Kurstin back producing and co-writing, and Xavier Dolan directing the video, everything is in its place except the song.

Six years after Hello, and six years after I saw Adele at Madison Square Garden (here), Adele might find she has a problem. The Spice Girl for adult women and their daughters has spent the time losing weight (both physically, and husbandwise), commuting from L.A. , dating rappers, glamming herself, and enjoying her success. Yet, still, while Adele might be iconic, and heartbreak might be a female province (women cry, men kill themselves without tears), she doesn’t work for me. It’s a sharing thing… that I don’t share. After a while it is like having a friend who calls you late at night to discuss her latest break up, you want to tell her to stop being a moaning minnie and move on, and yet there you sit tutting for hours on end. I tut a lot. And I get irritated, as amusing as Adele could be.

“Easy On Me” is a break-up ballad and Adele can sing the fuck out of it, but it just isn’t the triumph she needed after six years.

Grade: B-