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Adele seemed a natural when it came to the expected run of music videos that would accompany her songs. She was herself, quietly animated and at ease in front of the camera. Equally important was that the songs projected a nuanced, almost noir tone about them that would result in quite inventive storytelling.

In keeping with the tone of the projected videos, Adele and her management cast a fairly wide and hip net, and the result would be a highly imaginative group of filmmakers.

CHASING PAVEMENTS

Adele said the storyline for her “Chasing Pavements” video was pretty literal. “I had a shit boyfriend who I knew would be shit,” she explained to Spyder’s Random Things. “I knew when I got with him that it would be a car-crash relationship.”

Hence the car-crash story line in which Adele is pictured from two different perspectives in a car crash: one in which she lays inside the wreckage before climbing out to observe the other accident victims being taken away by ambulance. The second element of the video shows Adele and her ex recovering from a breakup and rekindling their passion in the moments leading up to the crash. As this element plays out, we see Adele and her lover motionless on the ground as they are taken away. It is all very dark, effectively theatrical and, by visual turns, very surreal.

Director Mathew Cullen had already made quite a name for himself in the music video world on the strength of videos for the groups Weezer, R.E.M., Beck, and Modest Mouse.

Cullen had been trying forever to get a job with XL. “Finally we got the track from Adele,” he said in an interview with Anatomy of a Music Video. “She knew our work and she was a fan so it was a natural collaboration.”

Set in London but filmed in Los Angeles, Cullen recalled that his marching orders were to be “creatively ambitious.” But the fact that “Chasing Pavements” would be Adele’s first video also weighed heavily on his approach.

“When I listened to the song, I was inspired by the idea of following after someone you love even though it will never work out,” he explained to AOAMV. “The unconscious couple coming to life to retell the story of their relationship was a perfect storytelling device for the themes.”

Adele acquitted herself quite well in front of the camera, fully natural in the dramatic and romantic sequences and more than capable of conveying the eerie and surreal nature of the piece.

COLD SHOULDER

Easily the most bizarre Adele video to date, “Cold Shoulder” had the odd distinction of being directed by Phil Griffin who, in his day job, is the president of the cable news channel MSNBC.

Filmed in London, the atmospheric, stark video opens with Adele sitting in a darkened room surrounded by the faces of melting ice statues whose expressions are of extreme despair. At the conclusion of the video, Adele’s face melds into the faces of the melting ice sculptures. Creepy stuff by anybody’s standards, “Cold Shoulder” received massive exposure upon its release and many favorable reviews that said the video captured the essence of the song.

From an acting point of view, Adele was challenged in the solitude and underlying hopelessness of it all but managed the introspective nature of the video quite well, proving that, despite her early movie and television bits, she could be a believable actress in certain contexts.

HOMETOWN GLORY

There was no official video the first time “Hometown Glory” made its recorded debut as a limited-edition single in 2007, although several YouTube performance videos would quickly hit the Internet. It would remain for the song’s official release a year later to finally generate a proper, polished video. XL chose veteran director Paul Dugdale to fashion the “Hometown Glory” piece. Dugdale was a seasoned director of films, television, awards shows and, of late, videos by the likes of The Prodigy and Cajun Dance Party. He knew his way around elements of starkness and fantasy, both of which would come into play in the “Hometown Glory” video.

A London parking structure served as the backdrop for the desolate and quite haunting visage of Adele, alone with her thoughts and a contemplative piano backup, singing as a series of posters depicting cities revolves around her with dramatic regularity: a simple yet quite effective visual treatment that nailed the intent of the song.

MAKE YOU FEEL MY LOVE

By the time Adele had decided to do her first cover, the Bob Dylan–penned “Make You Feel My Love,” the song had already gone through the hands of Billy Joel, Garth Brooks, Joan Osborne, and countless others. When it came to Adele’s video, the consensus was that a mixture of then and now would be appropriate.

Enter director Matt Kirkby, a veteran of the Ridley Scott school of filmmaking who had cut his teeth on numerous commercials and music videos for Basement Jaxx, Muse, and Jamiroquai. The director came up with a story line that examined the dichotomy of longing and modern technology.

The premise was fairly straightforward: Adele is sitting alone in a darkened room at four in the morning. She is missing a relationship she feels is over and, as she sings, she is texting the mystery man in hopes of salvaging the relationship. In a perfectly ironic moment, Adele finishes the song just as a light goes on indicating her message is being returned.

At this point, Adele had settled rather easily into the video personification of her songs. She maintained a subtle mixture of vulnerability and hope that, in this video, never strayed from the believable.

ROLLING IN THE DEEP

In a video sense, this would be an important step. The song was already being talked about as a major player come awards season that would truly put Adele on the map. Director Sam Brown, whose list of video credits include efforts for Jay-Z, James Blunt, and Foo Fighters, knew that he would have to pick Adele’s brain to come up with a vision that worked.

“The idea was really about finding different ways of expressing the anger in the words,” Brown told MTV, “and then housing them in this one giant building. I was thinking about the house as her mind and the rooms as everything that was happening inside it.”

The video has Adele seated in a room in a house and uses the house as a metaphor for a life in stages of renovation. Broken glass sets the tableau in motion, and then the video moves to a mysterious dancer stirring up dust and, by association, the memories that bubble up inside Adele’s stoic face. The video’s flaming conclusion brings full circle the concept of emotions unchained and highlights a video that is definitely more art than commerce.

SOMEONE LIKE YOU

The song was an exposed raw nerve. There was no reason to believe that the video would not be any different. But what emerged in the “Someone Like You” clip was not only a spot-on distillation of the song’s somber intent but a truly classic bit of video that, in a shade under five minutes, summed up what this phase of Adele’s music had been all about.

Director Jake Nava, whose long list of music video credits includes Beyoncé, Shakira, Leona Lewis, and Britney Spears, was a quick read when it came to translating the song to a video counterpart, and he looked no further than the streets of Paris for inspiration. “The location evokes romance,” he told MTV. “Shooting in the early morning allows you to focus on Adele and this lonely and emotional space.”

Nava knew it would be an artsy concept. He also saw it in black-and-white and with an off-kilter haze that, doubtless, brought back memories of classic Italian cinema of the ’60s and ’70s. Shot in Paris in the early morning hours, we see a defeated Adele walking the streets of the city as she sings her song amid a series of rotating shots of the City of Lights. Tension builds at the second chorus as she stops along the Seine River and stares out, contemplating love lost. Finally she goes to the apartment building where she sees the mystery lover who has moved on to another life with another woman. There is the heartrending moment of recollection, and maybe just a hint of longing, before the man turns and walks away, leaving Adele to have some final longing looks after him at the fade.

“Someone Like You” was something very personal and old school. And there has not been a viewer who did not have a lump in their throat … or a tear in their eye.