Lyrics on her new album explain the end of her marriage. She wonders how her son will react to hearing them
Divorced parents across the country felt a guilty pang of recognition last week as Adele broke five years of silence to talk to Vogue about her new album, inspired by the end of her marriage. She and her ex-husband, Simon Konecki, have a nine-year-old son, Angelo, and Adele says the lyrics in some of her new songs are really for her boy, because he doesn’t understand why she had to break up with his dad.
“I just felt like I wanted to explain to him, through this record, when he’s in his 20s or 30s, who I am and why I voluntarily chose to dismantle his entire life in the pursuit of my own happiness,” she told the journalist Giles Hattersley, in a burst of brutal honesty. “It made him really unhappy sometimes. And that’s a real wound for me that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to heal,” she added, laying bare the knife in the heart that so many separated parents quietly feel. The knife that we put there ourselves. Ouch.