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Happy Birthday, Adele!

Adele is the British singer whose 2008 debut album won two Grammy Awards and made her a leading pop singer in the U.K and around the world.

Adele is one of the most popular British singer and songwriter nowadays. She has broken through the music industry at a relatively young age, particularly owing it to her distinctive voice. She was born Adele Laurie Blue Adkins on May 5, 1988 in Enfield, North London. She came from a non-musical family but a very supportive one. Adele said that her mother used to set up a stage show for her in their own home with Adele being the performer and her mother's friends being the audience.
Like many teenagers swept with the Spice Girls fever in the '90s, Adele too liked to impersonate the all-girls band. She was also a fan of British singer Gabrielle whose songs she liked to cover. One day, her father's friend who happened to be a dance producer praised the color of her voice and thus Adele's spirit was lifted.
She tried to cover Blondie's "Heart of Glass" and once she got a hold of a real mic, she knew it was her destiny to be a singer. "As soon as I got a microphone in my hand, when I was about 14, I realized I wanted to do this," she later on recalled. "Most people don't like the way their voice sounds when it's recorded. I was just so excited by the whole thing that I wasn't bothered what it sounded like."
Her secondary school life was not particularly cultivating for her singing career, only when she entered The BRIT School did she gain much more. Enrolling at the school that had graduated famous names like Amy Winehouse, Kate Nash and Leona Lewis, the young singer was lucky to meet an inspirational singer named Shingai Shoniwa which later on joined the band The Noisettes as the vocalist. Living next door to Shoniwa, Adele often made use of the opportunity to jam around with her and she confessed later on that Shoniwa made her "want to be a writer and not just sing Destiny's Child songs."
To boost her singing career, like many other hopeful musicians, Adele opened a MySpace account where she can display her songs and demos and ask for feedbacks. By 2004, she was already a popular singer on-line but only two years after that did she gain wider opportunity to showcase her talent. After graduating from BRIT school in May 2006, she toured around with affiliates Jamie T, Jack Penate, and Davendra Banhart.

Her 2008 debut album, 19, included the singles "Hometown Glory" and "Chasing Pavements" and won her Grammy Awards as best new artist and (for "Chasing Pavements") best female pop vocal performance.

Her follow-up album, 21, was released in 2011, debuted at #1 on the U.K. music charts, and stayed there for 10 straight weeks, selling over 4.5 million copies in the U.K. alone. It was helped along by the acclaimed heartbreak-of-romance single "Someone Like You," which became a big hit after Adele performed it at the BRIT Awards in February of 2011.

She also sang the theme song to the 2012 James Bond movie Sky fall and earned an Oscar nomination for best original song. Her third album, 25, featuring the hit single "Hello," was released in 2015 to stellar sales. The album "shot to No 1 in the iTunes chart in 106 out of 119 countries," according to The Guardian, and The New York Times reported that it sold "a record-shattering 3.38 million copies in the United States through its first week... nearly a million more than the previous high mark for first-week sales." The song has so far spent 2 weeks at No. 1 on Hot 100.