Adele - 'Hometown Glory'
You've got to love a song which correctly uses a word like "opaque", haven't you? It's a great word, and you just don't hear it often enough in modern popular song, even though it's clearly a very easy word to sing and does capture a mood rather well.
In fact, if you'll forgive a little meander away from the point for a second (and if you won't, you clearly haven't been here before), budding songwriters should realise that there are a few words like this which could do with being used in songs more often. A word like elegant, melancholy, fractious, thrown in at just the right moment and sung well, can be the making of a song. Remember when Lauren Hill used "reciprocity" in her song 'Ex-Factor', and sent literally several R&B fans scurrying to the nearest dictionary? Well, I do.
Of course, there are other words on offer here too. Put together, they add up to a meaning, and really, you can't ask for more of a song than that.
In this case, Adele is singing an honest love song to London, particularly in the summertime. A love song which shows as much affection for the flaws in our capital city as Lily Allen's 'LDN' did, but which seems to be leading away from simply loving the breadth of human experience on offer, and towards a kind of communal push against being overlooked.
It works best when, without ever being really explicit about it, Adele just hints at the Herculean struggles going on within all the people she's watching. People who work for the government, people who don't. Just people, trying to get by under extreme circumstances, and occasionally coming together, flexing their collective muscles and staring down some un-defined trouble on the horizon.
It's the vaguery, the opaque-ness, which gives the song its power. There's no rabble-rousing, no explicit call to arms against THEM from US, just an honest recognition that times are hard and that people need each other.
Now, it would be tempting at this point to wonder whether Adele tends to get her best ideas for songs when she's out for a stroll - perhaps on the way back from the shops with some milk and a paper - seeing as this is the second single she's had out which uses walking the streets in an aimless fashion as a lyrical hook. But seeing as this is a better song than 'Chasing Pavenments', and isn't drenched in as much production gloss, that would be nit-picky.
So, just ignore that last paragraph, OK? Read , it's much better...
Download: Out now
CD Released: July 14th
(Fraser McAlpine)
Comment number 1.
At 31st Jul 2008, beaumont118 wrote:Love this song, but I do think the piano riff sounds a little like Breathe me by Sia, but I like that song too so it doesn't matter!
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Comment number 2.
At 31st Jul 2008, Psychology101 wrote:I'm a big Adele fan. This song has a beautiful simplicity about it and she makes it sound so easy to sing. Unfortunetly I don't think it will do too well in the charts.
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Comment number 3.
At 3rd Aug 2008, Rosie-3110 wrote:I really dont like adele; i dont like the sound of her voice. =/
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