Adele performed a devastatingly gorgeous “To Be Loved” — while casually sitting in a living room — in a video she shared on Instagram. The heartbreaking track appears on 30, her five-star album arriving on Friday.
In the clip, she’s accompanied by live piano that’s played off-camera; her vocal runs escalate as she belts the lyrics, at one point doubling over with emotion. “To be loved and love at the highest count/Means to lose all the things I can’t live without,” she sings on the chorus. “Let it be known that I will choose to lose/It’s a sacrifice, but I can’t live a lie/Let it be known, let it be known that I tried.”
In Rolling Stone‘s cover story with Adele, she said her estranged father was the first person to hear some of the new songs from her fourth studio album (in a recent interview with Oprah, Adele said “To Be Loved” was one of the songs she played). He had split with the family when she was three. She visited him before he died in May after an eight-year battle with cancer.
“I don’t think I understood the true deepness of how I felt about my dad until we spoke,” she told Rolling Stone and addressed how their relationship had a lasting impact. “I always had this fear from a really young age that you’re going to leave me anyway, so I’m going to leave or I’m not going to invest myself in anything.”
After he died, she had a “physical reaction” and ultimately found forgiveness. “It was like I let out one wail and something left,” Adele explains. “I’ve felt so calm ever since then. It really did set little me free.”