The Adele Experience

About 2 1/2 years ago, Adele came by work..
Work was VEVO and she sat down to play through her new album.

My first impressions of the girl was that she was stout with an extreme cockney accent.
She sat down to play some tracks of her new unreleased album. This was ’21’, which became no.1 in all major record markets..

 

Some first impressions about unmastered albums:
-Unmastered tracks often sound like hell. The vocals are dry, the volumes are all wrong, it sounded like a the way a bad photoshop composition looks, with people’s heads cropped onto presidents, belly dancers, astronauts and rodeo bulls etc…
-The tunes sounded derivative of 70’s soul…
-Adele had a great voice, but that seemed like it on a list of many elements. (Andy Grammer and Jessie J – both visitors to VEVO, scored on all boxes,  with the ‘IT’ factor when they came).

 

So my first first impression, was, that this album was wrong.. more than wrong… i personally thought it would not make a blimp on the chart.

What transpired of course, was that it hit #1 in all markets.

She had a lot of help from the industry marketing machine (ie. constant play), but clearly something that is poor does not go in this direction… Among other things, the tracks were mastered beautifully (eventually). She has an 99% percentile voice… i try to replay this event to see if i would of made a different call, and the truth was what what I heard that day wasn’t good. I love being wrong and it is hard to imagine being anymore wrong than this.

It was a good lesson and experience to have checked something out like this, before it swept the world.

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