So powerful. Wikipedia has a thorough page on the song. Here’s Adele speaking about the inspiration of the song:

We were so intense I thought we would get married. But that was something he never wanted …So when I found out he does want that with someone else, it was just the horrible-est feeling ever. But after I wrote it, I felt more at peace. It set me free.

Picturing a man in a 4th-floor walkup apartment deep in downtown New York. An apartment with hardwood floors, not much furniture and a weathered feel. The smell of lost dreams. Arthur Russell was from Iowa, but did ultimately settle down in New York.

Here is some acoustic guitar mastery for you to enjoy before the week starts. Song actually starts at 4:50 (everything before that is Dave telling stories: his friend Jonathan, cave crickets, milk-giving trees, ants, etc). 7:46 is when Tim unleashes a heavenly solo that you wouldn’t think someone could play on an acoustic. And as commenter JamExam says, “At 8:18 is when Tim Reynolds got job security! Cheers!”

I heard this song for the first time last night on WFMU.

This is one of those songs that is so good that, along with all the joy and visualizing it inspires, it’s also discouraging. You realize, if you like to make music yourself, that you might not ever be able to make a song this good.

But also, there is no musician who can pump out songs like this routinely. This is the kind of caliber song that most musicians never even achieve (concise, gemlike, zeitgeist vibe, etc). When it does happen, as it has here, you have to think that luck played a big part. Of being able to have access to your tools right at that moment of fleeting inspiration when you’re unconsciously channeling something. And even so, there is so often so much loss of fidelity in that conversion from what you hear in your head to what you end up being able to record. It might end up being a huge letdown and you lose steam and the song never happens. But then sometimes you get that initial feeling, you’re able to faithfully render it into sound, and then you find yourself further inspired within this new world of sound you’ve started to create. And that’s when it really lifts off.

LOVE this song. I had it on repeat for about two hours earlier today. Love how though it’s mainly electronic with the arranged voice samples, drum machines, and synths, it still sounds human and natural. A little sloppy and loose in all the right ways. It’s also a great music video too. Be fun to be at a club when this song starts playing and go crazy in the middle of the floor: feeling the mass of human rhythm around you, the way everyone seems to move slowly in unison when you’re not focusing on anyone. But focusing on one person you’re reminded of how good music can make dancing people so intriguing.

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

-Albert Einstein