What makes adele so good

More Entertainment. Top Stories. About Contact Us Feedback. Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. Yesterday, 3. That's an insane number of albums. If you had any questions about whether or not Adele was a massive star who could keep her fans through another album, this should squash those. Adele has the kind of stardom that sells albums in physical copies—that can withhold her album from streaming services for at least a few weeks.

But why? What makes Adele so special? Why does everyone love her so goddamn much? There's a precious balance for female stars between being talked about, and being talked about.

Just like Taylor Swift, Adele can rise to massive levels of popularity because she doesn't do anything to alienate conservative fans. She doesn't dress provocatively, or make any kind of social proclamations with her music. It's kind of funny to call a woman who curses up a storm in every interview inoffensive, but Adele gets away with a lot of things because she's not American. That swearing can be written off as a Brit thing. But it's also not in her music.

Anything offensive and edgy about Adele completely evaporates into her songs about feelings. There is nothing about 25 that could possibly keep you from playing it in the car with your 5-year-old or in the living room with your grandmother.

See more Latest quizzes. See more Latest features. Picture: Alamy. More From ClassicFM. It's a cycle of anticipation and satisfaction that nonetheless brings anguish in the fallow periods — the droughts while waiting for something new. Something to make us cry.

Something to make us feel. That is the power of Adele. You could say a lot of artists leave fans hanging in this way. Taylor Swift has delighted fans every two year or three years like clockwork.

Rihanna continues to tease fans with new Fenty projects and products instead of music. But there's something about Adele that's special.

She makes us feel like we're all waiting for an inevitable yet nevertheless delightful emotional pummeling at the hands of her new albums. At the time, the charts were overwhelmed with party-pop songs: Far East Movement's "Like a G6," a ridiculously fun and spiky ode to champagne guzzling, and Rihanna's "Only Girl In the World ," in which Robyn Fenty tells a man to love her as if she were a nice car.

There were a few hints that mid-tempo pop might make a comeback — Bruno Mars ' "Just the Way You Are" was October's hit track — but for the most part, Adele's first single off her second studio album, "21," was an outlier.

It arrived amid an era of major girl pop — this was the age of Katy Perry 's "Teenage Dream," after all — but it couldn't have been more different. Something similarly significant happened on the Billboard album charts: "21" was finally hitting number one, nearly two months after its January release.

And then it hit number one again.