 with Kevin Fallon Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture.
This Week:
Adele Has Returned to Completely Ravage Us Emotionally We handed Adele the anvil and our consent, even our eagerness: Do your best with it. Wallop us. Pummel our hearts until they shatter. Absolutely ruin us with your music.
With 30, she obliges.
The new album, released Friday, finds the singer processing the pain of her divorce from her ex-husband. For someone with a reputation for articulating complex and unspeakable emotions through soaring ballads, she's operating at a new level here. Her voice is both richer and more dexterous than it's ever been, alternately contorting itself around and booming mightily over lyrics so deep and observant, it's as if they've been exorcised from the depths of her being.  There is going to be a lot of talk about how impressively open she is about feelings and actions that are not always flattering, but indisputably real. We will be histrionic about how much it makes us all cry. There will be reports of keyboards short-circuiting across the globe after so many tears fall onto them this Friday. Wine shortages will wreak havoc as heartbroken fans frantically seek some sort of emotional balm. Investigations will be launched into whether Adele is in cahoots with Big Tissue. Kleenex executives, what hold do you have on this woman?
But that shouldn't overshadow the monumental accomplishment here. A singer of unprecedented popularity is taking major risks on a collection of new music, a refusal to take the easy route of replicating her past successes. She's instead produced a collection of songs that challenge herself musically, challenge her voice, and challenge, in lyrical content, just how much vulnerability and openness people are willing to accept or can even process.
The emotional acuity here is astounding. Things that the heartbroken, the betrayed, the guilty—all of us—have experienced or felt but never could name, let alone understand, are put to song. Making you feel seen, it turns out, is not Adele's talent. It is her calling. After listening to 30, I fired my therapist. We all should. Who needs therapy anymore when we have Adele? (I am kidding. Please don't fire your therapist.)
The crowning achievement of 30 is "I Drink Wine." Contrary to the title, it is not a playful, winking exploration of the instinct to drown sorrows with a bottle. It's an act of confession—a person revealing their darkest secrets and preoccupations when it comes to love and relationships. She then confronts how that has hurt both her partner and herself. "How can one become so bounded by choices that somebody else makes?" she sings. "How come we've both become a version of a person we don't even like?"
In 30, Adele works through how she got here—how and why she ended a relationship, and what does she do now? It's a scary place to be, by yourself. Can she weather that, let alone thrive, in the aftermath of such sorrow? What do you sacrifice for love, and can you ever grow it back on your own? And if you can't, whose fault is that?
These questions swirl throughout the album, and the beauty lies in how Adele offers up no easy answers. There's no conclusion about what she wants from love, what she wanted from herself, or even what she wanted from the marriage that didn't work. That ambiguity is so frustrating when you're going through it, something that is reflected in Adele's voice, like surviving a breakup means solving a riddle that can't be solved. If someone else isn't responsible for your happiness, then who is to blame for your heartbreak?
There's a narcissism to loneliness. Is it a choice? Do you have control over it? So much of 30 centers around what a person can or should do to make themselves feel better, yet never dismisses the idea that there is necessity and even power in feeling the pain. To really feel the hurt and understand what is behind it—even if that, at times, can seem impossible—so that you can change from it. In songs like "Cry Your Heart Out," "Woman Like Me," and especially "Easy on Me," it's almost as if she's coaching herself through that process.
I think so many people were shocked when "Easy on Me" came out, the long-teased first single from the rumored "divorce album." Fans seemed to expect one of two things: a massive-scale event of emotional devastation, or scorched-earth rage at an ex that has seemed to define most female stars' post-breakup music. "Easy on Me" was instead a tender plea for empathy rooted in shared love and shared past. That surprised and wrecked a lot of people. (Read: me.)
In "Hold On," she's acknowledging the emptiness she feels because of her actions, validating her extreme loneliness—"Everyday feels like the road I'm on might just open up and swallow me whole"—but also delivering herself a pep talk that, despite these feelings, she's still strong and will feel better again. The ballad begins with the soft twinkle of piano keys and Adele's voice at a quiet lilt—a spare arrangement that, over the course of six minutes, crescendos to a chills-inducing, booming triumph, emblematic of the transformation she makes herself.
"To Be Loved" has her confronting the ways she wasn't true to herself out of a desperation to make things work. It's another one that builds as an emotional mirror. Her voice is so raw, nearly hung out to dry by such a stripped-down arrangement. The build here is in volume.
 Things start to feel a tad voyeuristic—that there is so much honesty and self-exploration happening here that you might be intruding or shouldn't be witnessing it. But that also seems to be the gambit Adele is making, and she does it from the beginning.
The third track on 30, "My Little Love," finds Adele addressing her child, singing through her guilt and regret for what his life will be like now that his parents are no longer together. Just when the mere concept of such a song is enough to shred your heart into bits of confetti, she plays voice recordings of herself actually speaking with him: "Mommy's been having a lot of big feelings recently… I'm feeling a little trapped. I feel a bit confused… I feel like I don't really know what I'm doing."
Adele's albums have never been all doom and gloom, though from the way people talk about her music you'd think she was a sentient storm cloud. That buoyant, infectious personality that people connect to so deeply is on display in tracks like "Can I Get It," a welcome upbeat, sassy reprieve. "Oh My God" is as close to a pop banger as 30 has. Then there's "Cry Your Heart Out," an Amy Winehouse-invoking retro ballad in the grand Motown tradition: lyrics that are absolutely ruinous but crooned over a bouncy, soulful beat.
Tick, Tick...Boom! Goes My Heart Every once in a while, something happens in life that makes you wonder who you are and if you possibly ever even knew yourself at all. For example, this week I realized I had never seen nor heard a single thing from the musical Tick, Tick...Boom!.  I am exaggerating of course. But still, liking musicals is my thing, in so much as millennials enjoy making "liking things" their entire personalities. Like any gay thirtysomething who did musical theater at his suburban high shool, I had a big Rent phase. Yet somehow that never really sent me to research more about the works of its creator, Jonathan Larson, and the project he had produced before Rent would posthumously make him a legend. (Larson died the morning of Rent's first off-Broadway preview of an aortic dissection.)
Since it is almost never the case, it was an invigorating experience to go into Netflix's new film adaptation of Tick, Tick...Boom!, which is now available to stream, with no preconceived opinions of the source material, who should be cast, or even what the songs sounded like. I absolutely loved it.
In the best way possible—in that it will likely telegraph whether this is definitely not a movie for you—Tick, Tick...Boom! plays like a film made with love by musical theater geeks for musical theater geeks.
That has to do as much with what this project is as who made it. Lin-Manuel Miranda, a vocal evangelist of Larson's work and the effect it had on him as a creator, makes his directorial debut with this. He takes Larson's original project, what the Los Angeles Times describes as "a semi autobiographical rock monologue" about a composer-lyricist who "aims to take the industry by storm with what he believes to be a musical masterpiece," and opens it up, transforming it from what Larson performed as a barebones one-man show into a vibrant, full-scale cinematic musical set throughout New York City, with all the grandeur and energy that entails.
Everything that was small about the production and unknown about Larson explodes. Hope, idealism, emotion, and heartbreak radiate off the screen in near-incessant songs and musical numbers.
Andrew Garfield plays Larson with an indefatigable gregariousness, capturing everything determined, deluded, destructive, and genius about Larson and committing to it with a surprisingly lovely singing voice. Who ever understands how these things shake out, but Garfield deserves his second career Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance. It's one of the most impressive leading male turns I've seen in a movie-musical.
Thankfully, it turns out I have not lost who I am completely. To spoil too much would be to ruin it, but let's just say there is a sequence that is filled with so many cameos of esteemed Broadway legends and I 100 percent burst into tears during it. So you have that to look forward to, too.
I Am Inordinately Excited for These Things I Have Not Seen It's been a big week for trailers of upcoming things that appear to have been generated in a Hollywood lab with the express purpose of appealing to me.
 Then Julian Fellowes swooped in and said, "Hi, gays!" as the Downton Abbey creator's next period piece also unveiled its first trailer. The Gilded Age is set, well, in the Gilded Age, and stars Christine Baranski as a snobby rich lady. Joining her in the cast are Carrie Coon, Cynthia Nixon, and a roster of Broadway stars so stacked we as a community have decided we are just going to turn its premiere red carpet into the Pride Parade. (Watch the trailer here.)
Madonna, the Mansion, and the Very Rich Dog On Thursday, I saw a headline that read, "Madonna's Former Miami Mansion For Sale By German Shepherd Named Gunther."
Surely, I thought, I must be misreading this. So I clicked on the article to learn more. It turns out that, well, Madonna's former Miami mansion has been put up for sale by a German Shepherd who is named Gunther. Gunther VI, to be exact.  It turns out that Gunther VI is the inheritor of the property, as well as a fortune worth about $500 million. He enjoys, I kid you not, flying by private jet to the Bahamas and having his personal chef prepare him meals with caviar. I recently had to charge a carton of milk to a credit card, but congrats to this dog.
Dionne Warwick Still Winning Twitter (Taylor's Version) I was certain that I could not be convinced to care about Taylor Swift, Jake Gyllenhaal, and the scarf. Once again, I am humbled. 
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Adele’s New Album Is a Masterpiece of Heartbreak and Honesty
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