Skyfall

Eon invited Adele in early 2011, on the suggestion of Sony Pictures music president Lia Vollack. She was a little hesitant, and director Sam Mendes told her to just write a personal song and to take inspiration from Carly Simon's Nobody Does It Better. After reading the script she decided it was a no-brainer, and she wrote the song with Paul Epworth, who produced it. She said the first draft took ten minutes. After vocal surgery she recorded a demo and sent it to Mendes, who played it for producer Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig, and both of them shed a tear. The whole process took 18 months.

Epworth said the producers wanted a dramatic ballad and that he and Adele wanted a sense of death and rebirth. He watched the first thirteen Bond films looking for the musical code that joins the songs, and identified a minor ninth chord. The song quotes Monty Norman's James Bond Theme after the first chorus. It was recorded in two sessions at Abbey Road Studios in London with a 77-piece orchestra conducted by J. A. C. Redford. Adele was heavily pregnant at the time and has said that is why the vocal range is low.

It was released on 5 October 2012, Global James Bond Day, the 50th anniversary of Dr. No. It reached number two in the UK, tying the highest-charting Bond theme at that time, and entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number eight. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, the first Bond theme to do so, along with the Golden Globe, a Brit Award and the Grammy for Best Song Written for Visual Media. She performed it live for the first time at the 85th Academy Awards on 24 February 2013. It appears in 237 of the 435 logged setlists that list songs.