Did you know that all of the tracks on Adele’s new album are the names of tracks we’ve heard before? Things like Hello, When We Were Young, Remedy, I Miss You etc.
That could be out of sheer laziness – after all, this is a woman whose creativity seems to stop short of naming her album anything other than the age she is at the time of writing it (this one’s called 25!). Or, more likely, it could be because she wants to redefine our memory of the titles. At the moment, you might read ‘When We Were Young’ and immediately hear, in your mind’s ear, Brandon Flowers’ strangulated voice wailing out The Killers’ rendition of the song. But once you hear the Adele version, full of soaring outro and lovely yelps of ‘cause I been by myself all along’ well, maybe you might forget that other song a bit easier.
So just like Hello not-quite-but-sort-of replacing Lionel Ritchie’s song of the same name in our memory banks, here’s When We Were Young:
This live version perhaps isn’t as brimming full of catchy emotion as Hello, but it’s still got Adele singing things like ‘it was just like a movie/ You sound like a song/ and god this reminds me / of when we were young’.
She also nods to the passing of time, wailing ‘let me photograph you in this light’ when, well, if it was about something going on right now, it’d be about taking a selfie with her beau. Right?
Like this? You might also be interested in:
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.