He went off to put on his bathing suit. By the time he left, things had eased up. She hugged him goodbye, looking tiny. The next day, she sent me a video. Then she glanced at the camera slyly, the corner of her mouth pulled up. I just rested my knees for a while. The record dives into such conflicting impulses: she empathizes with other women, rages at them, grows infatuated with them, and mourns their rejection, sometimes all at once. But as an adult she has hung out mainly with men.
The twenty-one-year-old singer Mikaela Straus, a. But Apple has more complicated dynamics with a wider circle of friends, exes, and collaborators. Starting with her first heartbreak, at sixteen, she has repeatedly found herself in love triangles, sometimes as the secret partner, sometimes as the deceived one. Her fascination with women seemed tied, too, to the female bonding of the MeToo era—to the desire to compare old stories, through new eyes. In July, she sent me a video clip of Jimi Hendrix that reminded her of a surreal aspect of the day she was raped: for a moment, when the stranger approached her, she mistook him for Hendrix.
During the assault, she willed herself to think that the man was Hendrix. Years later, however, she found herself hanging out with a man who was a Hendrix fan. Sometimes it recurs through painful flashbacks, sometimes as echoes to be turned into art.
But I think that, at that time, I was struggling with my sexuality, and trying to force it into what I thought it should be, and everything felt dirty. Going out with boys, getting high, getting scared, and going home feeling like a dirty wimp was my thing.
Apple came of age in a culture that viewed young men as potential auteurs and young women as commodities to be used, then discarded. She was twenty; he was twenty-seven. The singer and the director became an It Couple, their work rippling with mutual influences.
But, as Apple remembers it, the romance was painful and chaotic. They snorted cocaine and gobbled Ecstasy. Apple drank, heavily. Mostly, she told me, he was coldly critical, contemptuous in a way that left her fearful and numb. Anderson had a temper.
After attending the Academy Awards, he threw a chair across a room. In , when she was getting treatment for O.
Apple was buoyant as Anderson drove her to an orientation at U. He screeched up to the sidewalk, undid her seat belt, and shoved her out of his car; she fell to the ground, spilling her purse in front of some nurses she was going to be working with. Anderson, through his agent, declined to comment.
He praised her as an artist. Yet the relationship had warped her early years, she said, in ways she still reckoned with. Apple was also briefly involved with the comedian Louis C. When a hacky standup set of his was leaked online, she sent him a warm note, urging him to dig deeper.
One of the women C. Apple began working with the group, and, once she got to know Corry, she started to see C. In a text, she told me that, if C. He is so WEAK. At times, Apple questioned her ability to be in any romantic relationship. Last fall, she went through another breakup, with a man she had dated for about a year. I was feeling safer with her here. Hallman, an affable, silver-haired lesbian, grew up poor in Appalachia; after studying engineering at Stanford, she worked in the California energy industry.
In the mid-aughts, she moved to L. In addition, Hallman sat in on our interviews and at recording sessions; she often took videos, posting them online. They slept on the daybeds in the living room. After my July visit, Apple began to text me. Occasionally, she sent a screenshot of a text from someone else, seeking my interpretation a tendency that convinced me she likely did the same with my texts.
In another video—broken into three parts—she appeared in closeup, in a white tank top, free-associating. I forgot about that. She chalked this up to a fear of outside influences, but she had a tetchiness about younger songwriters, too.
But she also had something that resembled a repetition compulsion—she wanted to take all the risks of her early years, but this time have them work out right. When I returned to Venice Beach, in September, the mood was different. Anxiety suffused the house. In July, Apple had been worried about returning to public view, but she was also often playful and energized, tweaking mixes. You can talk to me. That episode was about the death of Alison, one of the main characters.
Played by Ruth Wilson, Alison is a waitress living in Montauk, an intense beauty who is grieving the drowning death of her son and suffers from depression and P. She falls into an affair with a novelist, and both of their marriages dissolve. As we watched, Apple took notes, sitting cross-legged on the daybed.
In one sequence, Alison, devastated after a breakup, gets drunk on a flight to California, as her seat partner flirts aggressively, feeding her cocktails. He assaults Alison as she drifts in and out of consciousness. She fights back, complaining to the flight attendant, but the man turns it all around, making her seem like the crazy one; she winds up handcuffed, as other passengers stare at her. Apple found the sequence horrifying—it reminded her of how she came across in her worst press.
Her head lowered and her arms crossed, she began to perseverate on her fears of touring. I have lots of rage inside. I have lots of sadness inside of me. Later, we tried to listen to the album. Apple has tried all kinds of cures. She was sent to a family therapist at the age of eleven, when, mad at her sister, she glibly remarked, on a school trip, that she planned to kill herself and take Amber with her.
After she was raped, she spent hours at a Model Mugging class, practicing self-defense by punching a man in a padded suit. In , she attended eight weeks of silent Buddhist retreats, meditating from 5 a. She had a wild breakthrough one day, in which the world lit up, showing her a pulsing space between the people at the retreat—a suggestion of something larger.
She tried a method for treating P. The first day we met, Apple spread printouts of brain scans on the floor of her studio, pointing to blue and pink shapes. She was seeking patterns, just as she often did on Tumblr, reposting images, doing rabbit-hole searches that she knew were a form of magical thinking. She loved getting loose on wine, but not the regret that followed. Her father has been sober for decades, but when Apple was a little kid he was a turbulent alcoholic.
He hit bottom when he had a violent confrontation with a Manhattan cabdriver; Apple was only four, but she remembers his bloody face, the nurse at the hospital. Apple, at two, had wandered around an adult party, drinking the dregs. For decades, Apple has taken prescription psychopharmaceuticals. In December, she began having mood swings, with symptoms bad enough that she was told to get an MRI, to rule out a pituitary tumor.
In the end, Apple said, she had to wean herself off an antipsychotic that she had been prescribed for her night terrors; the dosage, she said, had been way too high.
Earlier that fall, she had given an interview to the Web site Vulture, in which she was brassy and perceptive. But the positive response also threw her, she realized.
By January, the situation was better. Apple was no longer having nightmares, although she was still worried, at times, by her moods. One layer of self-protection had been removed when she stopped using alcohol, she said; another was lost with the reduction in medication. And, although she was enthusiastic about some new mixes, she felt apprehensive. She could listen to the tracks, but only through headphones. So we talked about the subject that made her feel best: the dog rescues she was funding.
She paid her brother Bran to pick up the dogs across the country, then drive them to L. She and Hallman followed along through videos that Bran sent them. The dogs had been through terrible experiences: one was raped by humans; another was beaten with a shovel. Apple felt that she should not flinch from these details. The next afternoon, her face was glowing again.
Civilian Adele is a cutup, relentlessly self-effacing, and always taking the piss out of herself. We know from her music that the other Adele swims below the photic zone. I catch a glimpse of the other one when her new songs are playing aloud in her sea-green kitchen. Seated on a stool, she leans back, her chest retreats inward, her head hangs down, and her whole torso rocks while her eyelids flutter, as though she is in a trance.
It is difficult to describe the emotional intensity of this body language, but the words rolling in the deep come to mind. She queues up another one. The song ends with bits of a raw, teary voicemail she left for a friend.
She was inspired to incorporate voice notes by Tyler, the Creator and the British rapper Skepta, she explains. The last song she plays is the final song on the album. We are late for a lunch reservation at the Hotel Bel-Air. Adele runs upstairs to change clothes, then reappears in a gray sweatshirt and matching sweatpants. I know what I want. Cartier earrings. Never ever. After hearing Adele describe her two years of turmoil, and then hearing some of the songs that resulted from it, I find myself wondering about seven-year-old Adele.
I was an only child. Music was my sibling I never had. She would put out music so regularly, it would be like seeing her. It really felt like that for me. It made me feel a lot of things. The week before our interview, Adele went out in public for the first time with her new boyfriend, the sports agent Richard Paul.
Over another round of Aperol spritzes, she tells me they met at a party a couple years ago. I said: Do you want to sign me? All the other guys were just sitting around. He was just dancing away. Adele did not enjoy the dating process. And Was the decision to go public a deliberate one? I just wanted to go to the game. I just love being around him. I just love it. And I was like, That you signed me. As an athlete.
And he was like, Okay, cool. This is something of a new approach for Adele, who has generally solved the problems of fame by withdrawing from it completely. At one point she even considered pulling out of music altogether. I was always very fascinated by alcohol. So I always wanted to know what was so great about it.
She means the most to me out of all artists. Because she was British. Because she was amazing. Because she was tortured. Because she was so funny. She decided to disappear for long stretches of time.
I was very reclusive. It paid off, I think. People are used to me being a recluse. It anchored you? I ask. There was a real reason why Simon came into my life. Anything Adele does still makes news, as demonstrated by the uproar over her weight loss. I understand why some women especially were hurt. Visually I represented a lot of women. I was very fucking disappointed with that. That hurt my feelings.
And she still takes measures to avoid ramping up her fame. She avoided writing a certain kind of song for the next album, for instance. But she is trying in small ways to integrate her famous and private selves. With the new album on its way Adele is adamant that it come out in tangible form—on CDs and vinyl—as well as on streaming services , she has taken to warning her friends in L.
One thing that will surely be different this time is Angelo. He watched his mom warm up in stadiums, but he would leave with Konecki or a nanny before the stadiums filled up with fans. This became extra-clear to Adele when she took Angelo to see his favorite artist, Taylor Swift, in It was the first time he saw a stadium full of people. I was like, Excuse me! This is what I do, you know. My mom. He felt like he was being bullied, because they were annoying him. Recently she has been seeing friends and stepping out in public in L.
Dior pants. Perhaps more than the fame thing, Adele wants to make sure Angelo understands his privilege. And I want him to notice that. He needs to earn his way through life. I got overwhelmed, with, like, I will have to go and tell her how much her record means to me. For her to nail that on the head, and also bring in the entire globe?
That album was not written for me. But yet I could still feel like, This is the biggest gift. She did not mean to break the Grammy onstage, by the way. The award they give you onstage is a mock one, and when the real one arrived by mail, it was broken. She was wearing a giant triangle skirt covered in white flowers.
I want to swim in natural water. They went to Santa Barbara for the weekend, and they went to Idaho, where Adele jumped off a boat into a lake, fully clothed. Both McDaniel and Jenkins were in the chorus of friends who sang on the record.
Blend in more. I would never do such a thing. I had no idea. During the most golden moment of the golden hour, Adele is perched somewhat precariously on a ledge, all of Hollywood aglow behind her, when a large bird of prey lands on the opposite ledge.
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