Adele tearfully shared how she leaned on James Corden for support amid her divorce from Simon Konecki during the TV host’s final Carpool Karaoke episode.
On Monday (24 April), the British comedian shared his final episode of the sing-along segment, which featured Adele driving him around as they sang to various songs. The Carpool Karaoke episode, released days before the final episode of The Late Late Show, began with Adele surprising Corden at his home and telling him that she’d be driving him to work.
During the car ride, she recalled what inspired her song “I Drink Wine.” Adele said it was driven by a conversation she had with Corden in January 2020 while they were on vacation with their families. The trip included her now-10-year-old son, whom she shares with Konecki, Corden’s wife, Julia Carey, and Corden’s three children: Max, 12, Carey, eight, and Charlotte, five.
“We were on our way home and my mood had changed,” Adele explained. “It was the first year that I felt like I had to hold myself accountable for just being an adult. When the year before that, I had left Simon and stuff like that.”
The “Easy On Me” singer tearfully praised Corden and his family for their support of her in the wake of 2019 split from Konecki.
“You and Jules and the kids were so integral in looking after me,” she said, as her voice started breaking. “You used to do it with humour as well, you used to be like: ‘Good luck with that one!’ in any sort of thing I was pursuing and stuff like that.”
As for how “I Drink Wine” was born, Adele said: “I remember I said to you on the way home, ‘What’s wrong? You just seem down.’ And you just let it all out to me. And we were having, what, a six-hour conversation about it? The whole way home.”
The actor chimed in that “it was work stuff, and the internet, and all those things.”
Adele added how much he wanted to look after Corden at the time.
“I felt so unsafe with you feeling unsafe,” she said. “I went to the studio a couple weeks later, and I wrote this, and I remember I sang it into my phone and I sent it to you. And I remember you saying: ‘That’s exactly how I was feeling.’”
Corden agreed and said that Adele’s song was “everything” that he’d been feeling during their six-hour conversation.
“I was floored by how you managed to take everything that I was feeling about myself, and life, and just put it in a verse,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “It’s the greatest privilege that… from a conversation between two friends, that you would create such a thing that blows my mind.”
Corden has been involved in a number of controversies over the years, including 2022’s Balthazar restaurant scandal, and allegations of joke-stealing.
You can find a full timeline of the controversies here.
The pair went on to sing the first verse of “I Drink Wine”, which appears to be about Adele’s divorce from Konecki. The verse began with the lyrics: “How can one become so bounded / By choices that somebody else makes? / How come we’ve both become a version / Of a person we don’t even like?”
Since announcing her divorce in 2019, Adele has been very open about the breakup. During one of her concerts in her Las Vegas residency, she revealed that she had multiple therapy sessions a day during her split.
The singer is now in a new relationship and has been dating sports agent Rich Paul since 2021. In February, the pair were rumoured to be engaged, with reports claiming that they’re getting married in the summer. However, when these rumours first speculated in 2022, Adele refused to confirm nor deny the speculation around her relationship status.
