Her voice is full of laughter. And not the nervous kind. The deep belly laughs of a 20-year-old girl who might miss home but is 100 percent—OK, make that 99.2 percent—happy with her sudden rise to fame. Not that Adele Laurie Blue Adkins wants to seem ungrateful; it's just that she is both a mommy's girl and a homebody, so touring so far away from the U.K. can prove tough. So bad that just a few weeks ago in Chicago the young singer swiped her passport from her manager and tried to make a run for it to the airport; lucky for us (and the remaining eight cities on her U.S. tour), the 100-meter dash isn't really her thing.

But when we hop on the phone Adele sounds pretty chipper for someone who's at the tail end of a grueling U.S. tour promoting 19, her stunning debut. She's been keeping busy off stage as well, apartment hunting in Williamsburg (where she plans to pen her sophomore follow-up) and sitting in the rain in Central Park to check out Vampire Weekend's free performance (according to Adele, people in the crowd started stripping). That's a lot of running around for a girl who is quick to admit that she doesn't even like walking all that much. (Admittedly, her single "Chasing Pavement" tells a much different story.)

In the end, that refusal to sprint might serve her well. In an era where talented female singers from the U.K. are about as commonplace as unflattering pictures of Amy Winehouse on benders, for me Adele stands out as the antidote. Childlike, but a bit of an old soul ("I feel like I've accomplished 10 years worth of stuff in the past seven months."), she comes across as unabashedly comfortable in her own skin, which is a refreshing change of pace; let's just hope she doesn't follow through on her giggle-infused threat to make her next album 28!

For more information please visit www.adeleus.com.

- Caroline Stanley

Similar Topics:debut albums, music, U.K.

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