Adele reveals the moment she first admitted she was ending her marriage

Adele spoke about her marriage breakdown and the events that inspired her new album in an interview with Oprah Winfrey that aired Sunday night on CBS.

“I remember one of my friends, we were answering these questions in this same bougie magazine, and it was like, ‘What is something that no one would know about you?’” Adele recalled. And I just said it in front of three of my friends. I was like, ‘I’m really not happy. I am not living. I’m just lumbering along. And I remember there was a lyric that I wrote that I put in a song in ’25 ‘, that said’ I want to live and not just survive ‘. And I definitely felt that way.”

In Winfrey’s extensive rose garden interview, the two discussed the tumultuous half-decade since her last album which included her marriage and divorce to Simon Konecki; raising their 9-year-old son, Angelo; move to Los Angeles; and the death of his estranged father in April.

Her album, largely inspired by her divorce, is about herself but dedicated to her son, whom she hopes will understand the reasons behind the separation when he listens to music as an adult.

She said the reason her divorce felt so overwhelming had its roots in her own childhood:

“I’ve been obsessed with a nuclear family all my life because I never came from one, you know, like in all these movies and all these books. When you grow up reading them, that’s what it should be, right? And from a very young age I promised myself that when I had children and that we would stay together, we would be that united family and I tried for a long time.

And then I was very disappointed in my son. I was so disappointed in myself. And I thought I’d be the one to stop making those damn patterns all the time. “

The interview was interspersed with clips from his surprise concert last month at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles before a famous audience.