I feel like if I’m not learning, then I’m not really trying to get better. Hell yeah! Shit, why not? I mean, shit, tell her holler at me! ĭo you feel like you’re kind of in that same space as Adele of still maturing, both as an artist and as a person?
You got to respect it.Ī quote came out recently where Adele was talking about wanting to sing on a rap record. No matter how long a person been doing it, they still have the desire to get better and try new stuff. I mean, I could see that she’s still, at the end of the day, maturing with her songwriting, and the way she go about making her music. I need some advice from her, if anything!
Shout-out to Adele.Īs someone who’s now been through his 30s, do you have any advice for her? She’s 33 now. Her stuff is just straight-to-the-point traditional songwriting. Ain’t about the glamor and the glitz, or the Auto-Tune, or nothing like that. At the end of the day, that’s what you take away from her albums. It feels like this sort of song where she’s recounting all this shit she has been through over the past few years.ĭefinitely could relate to that.
That was like some Motown shit or something. I think if you don’t, you don’t care then, at that point. Especially with putting out music - I think everybody gets this nervous feeling of something when they putting music out. Still, shit! I feel uncertain to this day. Ten years on, listening to XXX, the same could be said about yourself.ĭo you remember feeling uncertain at that moment, or confused? No matter who you are, still a human being. You think, people like Adele, like, What? Ain’t got no problems. The choir is actually a bunch of her friends.Īnd to me, this feels like one of those being-uncertain-about-her-30s type of songs. And it seems so minimal in the beginning, but I bet you that was a lot of work on that song right there. You could just tell it’s probably recorded in many different places, had to do this there and this there. That sounds like a hard song, like it took a long time to do. In the end, it gets big and there’s a choir. I could see her, a nice night, with a bottle of wine. So this next one, I felt like there was also a bit of a thematic similarity to XXX. You were talking about breakups in your 30s, and this song was that moment like, okay, she did the divorce, and now she’s stepping out again. Man, I don’t know if I could sit there and listen to a 15-minute song right now. I don’t know if I can do something - I mean, nowadays, songs are getting shorter and shorter. The one after this, she said in an interview that it was originally 15 minutes and she had to cut it down to six. Well, the other thing too is a lot of these songs are over six minutes long. I never know where it’s going to go next. But the way it is just so, I don’t know, unexpected. Like, verse, hook, verse, hook, maybe have a cool breakdown part. I can’t wrap my head around how you make songs like that. That one’s like, song-sequence-wise - that was just crazy. We can talk about that more in a second, ’cause there’s a few songs she worked with a hip-hop producer on. Was this produced by the same person, or it was a lot of different producers? Between that, Brown took the time to light up a joint, listen to part of Adele’s 30 for the first time, and reflect on its similarities to XXX and his own 30s. He’s also said he’s working on XXXX (pronounced “quaranta,” in Italian), the sequel album to XXX, and even debuted a few new bars at Pitchfork Festival earlier this year. Of course, Vulture had to find out what Danny Brown thought of it.Īlong with celebrating a decade of XXX, Brown has been preparing for his eighth annual Bruiser Thanksgiving concert, a showcase curated by the rapper that takes place in Detroit on November 24 and benefits local children’s-literacy nonprofit InsideOut. As it so happens, Adele’s 30, her best album to date, also covers sex and alcohol, along with the existentialism that so often comes with aging out of young adulthood. The Detroit rapper’s album, which celebrated its tenth anniversary earlier in 2021, chronicled his own anxieties over hitting a new decade of life while still building a rap career, amid songs about drinking, fucking, and partying. When the singer-songwriter announced 30, her first full-length in six years, last month, it recalled a different album to some listeners: Danny Brown’s XXX, also recorded when he was 30. Photo: Xavi Torrent/WireImage Cliff Lipson/CBSĬontrary to popular belief, Adele doesn’t have a monopoly on naming albums after ages.