“19” at Nineteen

Adele is the only artist I can claim to have listened to all my life. There are still videos of me singing “Someone Like You” into my scratchy toy microphone, the “Rolling in the Deep” music video is one of the first videos I can distinctly remember watching, and I cried to “When We Were Young” long before I had ever fallen in love. With her rich and powerful vocals, Adele has time and time again managed to hit me where it hurts, even when I wasn’t hurting. And yet, due to the often-noted maturity of her voice, particularly when she released her first two albums, I have always felt as though the feelings that Adele sings about are those of “grown-ups,” and that I would only ever truly relate to her music at an abstract someday, when I, too, would be one of these grownups.

As Adele was serenading me through one of many cry sessions, it is just recently that I have come to realize that I have reached that “someday” I used to think of. I turned 20 in early January, the first year of my long-dreamed-about twenties, my first year no longer saddled by the suffix that is -teen, and an age that finds itself smack-dab in between 19 (2008) and 21 (2011), Adele’s freshman and sophomore albums. Just as my nineteenth year, Adele’s 19 is riddled with love, pain, and nostalgia that I finally feel old enough to understand. 

Having moved abroad for college at the age of seventeen, “Hometown Glory” has spoken to me more clearly than any other song on the album. For anyone who has moved away from home, their relationship to their hometown is an emotional one. Whether that be hatred and resentment for whatever you endured during your school years or regret for leaving home in search of a different life, the experience of walking around this town is sure to make you feel something. The line that sticks to me the most strongly is her chorus, where Adele sings “round my hometown, memories are fresh.” Coming from a small town, any time I return home I have no way of avoiding the streets I used to walk down when I was still in high school. Particularly, seeing as my parents’ house is hardly two blocks away from my old school, traveling home means being reminded of every single high school experience I moved hundreds of miles to escape from. And yet, I still have so much love for this town, and it’s this conflict between love and disdain that is encapsulated by Adele’s song.

In addition to the waves of nostalgia that washed over me during my nineteenth year as I moved out of the first town I’d lived in on my own, my year was also notably marked by two separate heartbreaks, the first having to do with a nearly year-long situationship that very few of my friends approved of. I found myself overanalyzing our entire relationship (or lack thereof) to the sound of “Chasing Pavements” time and time again, and as anyone who has found themselves in a slightly-more-than-friends, not-public-about-it situationship can attest, such situations involve a lot of waiting around. I yelled the lyrics “should I just keep chasing pavements even if it leads nowhere” to my reflection in the mirror, both as an outlet for the frustration that I felt towards him, and simultaneously to motivate myself to keep it going, despite it eventually leading nowhere, just as Adele predicted.

My second heartbreak, a lot more fresh and a lot more painful, involved a long-distance relationship and the struggle that is dating someone with very different needs to your own. While recently, thinking of this woman has involved a lot more of Adele’s 21 rather than 19, there was a point when the relationship was going better than I could have ever imagined, and the emotions I felt were perfectly encapsulated by Adele’s “Crazy for You.” In this song, Adele expresses nearly obsessive feelings towards the boy she loves, particularly when he is not there. Though her vocals have a maturity far beyond that of the average nineteen-year-old’s, the lyrics themselves contain an inherent youthfulness, as Adele sings of “pacing floors and opening doors” in hopes of seeing him, and thinking of him to the point that she can no longer function. This level of longing and lovesickness is one that I felt over and over throughout this year, but it is only because of my young age and my still-limited responsibilities that I could even allow someone to turn me “crazy.”

Despite these two heartbreaks, it is “Make You Feel My Love”–a cover of a song originally by Bob Dylan–that resonates the loudest with me, though not because of the people I was in love with. For me, the love that Adele sings about here, when all she can do is offer a “warm embrace,” reminds me of the love that I feel for my friends. College and early adulthood is a hard time for everyone, but no matter what I’m going through, I always want to make sure that my friends are doing better than I am. This song, where Adele sings off all the things she would do to show her love, evokes the many nights my friends and I have spent leaning on each other, while we are all so far away from home. Although one could apply the lyrics to romantic love, the song also embodies a friend letting me sob on their shoulder, going out for drinks as a distraction, and reminding each other of how loved we are when yet another relationship fails.

It feels bittersweet to think that I have already lived through a quarter of Adele’s discography.  While I am finally reaching an age that my younger self considered grown up and mature, I haven’t even experienced my “Someone Like You” yet. And, when I do, and I inevitably find myself singing along to Adele as I cry over my fourth, fifth, or sixth heartbreak, deep down I will still be that kid with a pink plastic microphone.

Written by Micah Petyt