Someone Like You

Adele wrote Someone Like You with Dan Wilson, weeks after the Rubin sessions, after she learned that her ex-partner was engaged. She has said she wrote it at the end of her bed with a cold while waiting for a bath to run. She has said it set her free. Wilson told Billboard they wanted it to be as personal as possible and did not try to make it open-ended so it could apply to anybody. It was recorded at Harmony Studios in West Hollywood with Wilson on piano and Philip Allen engineering.

Her label disliked the bare arrangement and asked for a re-record with Rubin's band, but she kept it. Tom Elmhirst described it to Sound On Sound as a single stereo piano and one lead vocal, with a brief vocal double in the middle eight. It was released as the second single on 24 January 2011 in the UK and in August 2011 in the United States.

She first performed it in October 2010 at The Current in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and her performance on Later... with Jools Holland in November 2010 produced a stunned silence from the audience. On 15 February 2011 she sang it at the Brit Awards at The O2 Arena, with only a pianist, and almost broke down. UK sales then took it to number one, and it held the top spot for five weeks in total. After the MTV Video Music Awards on 28 August 2011 it rose from 19 to number one on the Hot 100, the first strictly voice-and-piano ballad to get there. It won the first Grammy for Best Pop Solo Performance at the 54th ceremony. The video was shot in black and white in Paris by Jake Nava. It appears in 305 of the 435 logged setlists that list songs.