Rolling in the Deep

Adele wrote Rolling in the Deep with Paul Epworth within a day of her break-up. She has described it as a dark, bluesy, gospel disco tune and said she wrote it after being told that her life would be boring, lonely and rubbish. She came to Epworth with a riff she said would not go away, he picked up an acoustic guitar and found a set of chugged chords underneath, and, as he told Sound On Sound, the whole thing happened in under five minutes. He recorded her singing the riff in one take with a click and low piano chords, and his count-in is still audible at the top of the master. All of her vocals on the released version come from that demo.

She went to Malibu to record it again with Rick Rubin, but Epworth said Rubin's version was awesome and that the rawness of her original vocal could not be replicated. Epworth rebuilt it at Eastcote Studios in London with drummer Leo Taylor, pianist Neil Cowley and engineer Mark Rankin, trying to reproduce the binaural head-microphone sound of Tom Waits records. A lot of the stomp of the kick drum was Adele stamping on a wooden step in his studio. Tom Elmhirst mixed it, adding a sub-bass harmonic to the chorus, and said the chorus had to explode.

It was released on 29 November 2010. It entered the UK chart at number two, behind Bruno Mars's Grenade, and spent seven weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, her first American number one, and ended 2011 as the year's top Hot 100 single. The video, directed by Sam Brown, won three MTV Video Music Awards. At the 54th Grammys on 12 February 2012 it won Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Short Form Music Video, making it only the second song to win all three, after We Are the World in 1986. It appears in 314 of the 435 logged setlists that list songs.