Adele - Rare Songs and Cover Versions, Volume 1 (2008)

I have mixed feelings about Adele. I think she has an incredible voice. She's a talented songwriter, and sometimes she hits it out of the park. "Rolling in the Deep" and "Someone like You" (both of which she co-wrote) are fantastic songs. But I feel she often squanders her talent with too many mid-tempo heartbreak ballads. If only she did more uptempo songs like "Rolling in the Deep!"

Adele put out her first album in 2008, but she's only had three studio albums in total so far, and one live album that pretty much repeats the songs from her studio albums. She's sold an ungodly number of albums, at least 120 million! But I feel all three of her albums are hit and miss.

So I've attempted to make a couple more albums for her. I found enough non-album material for two albums. Frankly, I like these albums better than her studio albums because while she has written or co-written some great songs, those albums have too many of those samey heartbreak ballads. By contrast, these albums mostly consist of covers of classic songs. So the songwriting is solid. It's great to hear Adele apply her remarkable voice to these songs. At times, she's like the second coming of Aretha Franklin or Etta James.

All but five of the songs here are officially unreleased. The sound quality on the unreleased ones are very good to excellent. Generally speaking, most of these come from BBC TV or radio shows, or other radio shows, which means excellent sound quality. Probably the roughest is a version of "Steady, as She Goes," which she apparently did off the cuff while backstage at one of those BBC performances. It's a remarkable performance considering you can see from video footage of it that she's reading the lyrics to the song off her cell phone as she sings!

At first, I was only going to make this a collection of her cover songs. But between this and the next album, I discovered that she has some rare original songs that are pretty good, often as good or better than some of the songs on her studio albums. There are two such songs here, and more on the other album in this series. Both the originals here were released as B-sides.

Adele has almost never included cover songs on her studio albums. One rare exception is "Make You Feel My Love" by Bob Dylan. I've included that here, but I was careful to use a different version than the well-known studio album one.

The song "God Put a Smile upon Your Face" has been edited. That's because the performance she did of it was very short, only a minute and a half long. (It was the first part of a medley, with the other parts of different songs sung by different singers.) It's just one verse and one chorus. I ended it a little bit by repeating the chorus. Even so, that only extended it by another half a minute.

The last two songs, "You Do Something to Me" and "Need Your Love So Bad" were already included on a Paul Weller stray tracks album I made. But since they're duets between Adele and Weller, they fit just as much here, so I put them on this album too.

One thing I like about this album is that it has much greater variety than Adele's studio albums. She does more upbeat material, including versions of some modern rock songs. If you enjoy her voice but aren't so keen on her usual style, you might want to give this a try.

Unfortunately, one of those versions of modern rock songs could only be included as a bonus track. That's "Dreaming of You" by the Coral. It's a great song, and she does a very nice version. But the recording is from an audience bootleg, with some audience noise throughout, so it didn't meet the standard as the other songs here.

This album is 44 minutes long.

Here are the original artists that made the songs famous:

01 That's It, I Quit, I'm Moving On - Sam Cooke
02 Last Nite - Strokes
03 God Put a Smile upon Your Face [Edit] - Coldplay
04 Many Shades of Black - Raconteurs
05 Now and Then - Adele
06 Steady, as She Goes - Raconteurs
07 Black and Gold - Sam Sparro
08 Baby, It's You - Burt Bacharach / Shirelles
09 Painting Pictures - Adele
10 I Just Want to Make Love to You - Willie Dixon / Muddy Waters
11 Make You Feel My Love - Bob Dylan
12 Fool that I Am - Etta James
13 You Do Something to Me - Paul Weller
14 Need Your Love So Bad - Little Willie John

Dreaming of You - Coral

Here's the usual song list:

01 That's It, I Quit, I'm Moving On (Adele)
02 Last Nite (Adele)
03 God Put a Smile upon Your Face [Edit] (Adele)
04 Many Shades of Black (Adele)
05 Now and Then (Adele)
06 Steady, as She Goes (Adele)
07 Black and Gold (Adele)
08 Baby, It's You (Adele with Burt Bacharach)
09 Painting Pictures (Adele)
10 I Just Want to Make Love to You (Adele)
11 Make You Feel My Love (Adele)
12 Fool that I Am (Adele)
13 You Do Something to Me (Paul Weller & Adele)
14 Need Your Love So Bad (Paul Weller & Adele)

Dreaming of You (Adele)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15123356/Adel_2008_RareSongsandCoverVersionsVolume_1_atse.zip.html

The cover art uses a promotional photo of Adele from 2008.