In December 2011, I sat in a parked car at the grocery store to hear Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” on then Triple-A WNWV (The Wave) Cleveland. Early in 2012, when it was a fast-breaking UK hit, I got in a Twitter contretemps with a radio programmer when I asked why U.S. radio hadn’t noticed yet. “Because it’s not a hit?” he asked. “Record of the year? Really?” asked another.
Six weeks ago, there were a surprising number of articles about how “Easy on Me” wasn’t a hit, most notably The Lefsetz Letter’s declaration that it was “an album track. Expect very short legs. There must be a hit single on 30, but this isn’t it. This is . . .Adele coming out with her viewpoint, prefacing the tone of the album.”
I read three or four similar articles on the willfulness of the “Easy on Me” choice. A few were propelled by Internet misinformation on the day after its release which claimed erroneously that WHTZ (Z100) New York and KIIS Los Angeles hadn’t played it right away (because the song wasn’t captured immediately by the stations’ “now playing” widget). In reality, iHeart stations did give Adele the hourly premiere treatment from the moment of its release, and I heard the first Z100 spin.
“Easy on Me” wasn’t just a willful singles choice. It was on top of the willful choice of “Hello” as the first single from 25. In the radio misery of 2015, “Hello” was undeniably a hit, but solved nothing for radio. “When You Were Young,” the equally solemn follow-up, wasn’t even a hit. There was no pulsating “Rolling in the Deep” or “Set Fire to the Rain” or “Rumour Has It” on 25 at a time when radio needed the energy. And five years later, only “Hello” can truly be considered an enduring single from that album.
There is a lot of discussion of what constitutes a hit these days. But one might have to allow that “Easy on Me” is now a hit. At this writing, “Easy on Me” has returned to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for its fifth week out of seven charted. That seventh week was based on only five hours in release.
It is possible these days for a song to top the Hot 100 without ever becoming a true airplay hit. At this writing, “Easy on Me” is the No. 2 song at CHR. It reached No. 1 at Adult Contemporary, just ahead of the format’s switch to holiday music. It is currently No. 1 at Adult Top 40 and No. 9 at Adult R&B. It has also already been to No. 1 at Triple-A. The only rapid drop-off was after the first week play of the Country remix, typical of event songs in that format where it could still climb the charts again.
Because it was an event record, “Easy on Me” was a rare case of a song that got significant radio airplay before the research came back. (Same goes for “Peaches” and “Bad Habits” this year.) By now, the research is back and “Easy on Me” is in power at CHR radio in nine out of the top 10 markets.
Some people wonder whether it’s radio or streaming that makes real hits. At this moment, “Easy” has returned to No. 1 on Spotify’s Today’s Top Hits, after briefly being overtaken by “Oh My God.” I’ve heard it in the “Trending Ten Countdown” on SiriusXM’s TikTok Radio.
I suppose it’s possible that second single “Oh My God” will quickly draw radio’s attention away, especially after “Easy on Me” reaches No. 1 CHR. The current callout would suggest otherwise. As likely, we will see something like the relationship between “Déjà Vu” and “Good 4 U.” The combination of album excitement and a perfect radio song brought Rodrigo enough attention to make both songs hits.
Even if “Easy on Me” were to fade quickly, it will now be remembered as a hit and a cultural moment in a way that few hit records are now. “Levitating,” for me the perfect example of a song that instantly sounded like a hit, still needed six months to prove it. “Levitating” was, according to some programmers, still unfamiliar after four months. The power of cultural event, plus radio, made “Easy on Me” familiar almost instantly.
Like Lefsetz, several of the articles I read in the first 10 days focused on how “Easy on Me” didn’t sound like a hit single. In fact, it sounded like a couple of hit singles—“Hello” and “Someone Like You.” In fact, a lot of surprisingly solemn and/or ethereal songs have become hits in the last five years, thanks to those damn kids and their TikTok music. When reviews of 30 came out a few days ahead of the album release, it was hard for me to tell whether the album would have any hits that weren’t mid-to-dirge tempo.
If there were no “Oh My God” or “Can I Get It” on 30, Adele’s long-term status as a mainstay of contemporary radio might be in question. In 1990, George Michael gave radio not an uptempo crowd-pleaser but a statement song in “Praying for Time.” Top 40 played along for a while but rescinded his automatic hitmaker status. If Adele releases four straight ballads, it could perhaps catch up with her around the time that 33-1/3 (and she has to call it that, right?) comes out. Then again, she’s already outlasted Michael (or Alanis Morissette) as an automatic radio artist despite the languid 25.
And now, after a thousand words of spirited Adele defense, a confession.
I wanted another “Rolling in the Deep” too. There is nothing more gratifying than the Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” or INXS’s “Need You Tonight”-style moment, in which acts make the hit single you didn’t expect from them. Almost no artist pulls that off twice. Many artists have kicked off follow-up projects with a textbook uptempo guaranteed smash that wasn’t, and I still have “In My Room” by the Bangles in my phone to prove it.
Six weeks later, it’s easier to sort out “not a hit” from “not the song I would have personally hoped for.” It’s hard not to want a “Bad Habits” or “Don’t Start Now” from every returning artist. Uptempo hits were the original supply-chain issue, and after a brief respite this summer, we seem to be running dry again. If we had 35 songs in play at Top 40 and not 18, there would be no pressure for every artist to deliver the uptempo crowd-pleaser that acts from Michael to Morissette have bristled at. But there now seems to be a pleased crowd anyway.