When We Were Young could be the album's Rolling In The Deep. A great big fat love song, it's a 70s styled shimmery disco ballad produced by Ariel Rechtshaid and co-written with Tobias Jesso Jr., an unknown (until Adele tweeted about him to her 23.4m followers) who she discovered after hearing his song Hollywood. She flew to LA and recorded it on Philip Glass's piano, as you do, at Tobias's friend's nan's house in Brentwood. "It used to be this mad party house and for some reason his piano was there so we wrote the song on that."
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WHEN WE WERE YOUNG: (Adele, Tobias Jesso Jr.)
This is the one, then – the Hit Expectant. I can’t help thinking Adele has smashed it, as she’d hoped. The song just has that feel – a standard in the making, only waiting to become a part of the fabric of the coming years, chosen again and again on karaoke machines, picked out for people to get married to and buried to, centrepiece of an album that seems sure (however much she flaps her hand and demurs) to rattle the world the way 21 did.
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"It was based on us being older, and being at a party at this house, and seeing everyone that you've ever fallen out with, everyone that you've ever loved, everyone that you've never loved, and stuff like that, where you can't find the time to be in each other lives," Adele said of the track, which was co-written by Tobias Jesso Jr. "And you're all thrown together at this party when you're like 50, and it doesn't matter and you have so much fun and you feel like you're 15 again. So that's the kind of vibe of it really."
