Your Favorite Band: Adele

Do you know what's fun? Reading fan fiction about bands and singers written by other bands and singers! Do you see what we did there?

In this first installment of Your Favorite Band, Brigette Adair Herron from Tunabunny takes us on an emotional journey of her fictitious love for Adele. 

You could have had it all. Both of you.

It’s been almost five years since you and your husband had to give up your poultry farming business. Well, it was never really your business to begin with-you raised chickens for one of the largest poultry producers in the southeastern United States. They provided the baby chicks and the feed and then all you had to do was make sure that they grew up. After a few weeks the company would come back to pick up the chickens and write you a check. You would receive a certain amount per pound of chicken. It seemed so easy, especially since you didn’t have to be involved in the slaughter. At least, this was how the company pitched it to you.

“Well, we raised a sixteen-year-old boy. I’m sure we could manage a few little chickens,” your husband joked the day you signed the contracts with Cedar Valley Farms. The company name sounded so innocuous. Now every time you pass one of the dozens of street signs in this town that begin with the word Cedar (Cedar Bluff, Cedar Rock, Cedar Falls…) your stomach turns. You relive the kind of hell that only the most efficient corporate bullies can hand out. They were bureaucratic hit men like the faceless killers that occupy the tops of buildings. They took you and your husband for everything you had, and then convinced you that you only had yourself to blame. Only now, years later, are you beginning to surface from the debt you ended up owing to the company. Now there is a fire starting in your heart.

“Go ahead and sell me out, and I’ll lay your shit there.” A daydream. A lyric. You’re not even sure if that’s what Adele is singing, but it doesn’t matter. It suits your purposes just fine. When Adele says “my heart” you begin to sing along. Only now this is your song and it’s your heart and Adele has become your backup singer. You put the car in park and turn the key. Blue lights flash off the face of your car stereo and cascade across the dashboard. The CD player goes black. There are no more voices. You open the door and step out of the car.

When you get inside the coffee shop you begin to chat for a while with the nice girl working behind the counter. You’ve talked before. She starts making your usual drink before you have a chance to order. It’s a sugar free caramel latte with skim milk, extra hot. Not long into the conversation you confide a little bit about your past. You are not sure how you arrive at the subject, but you tell her about the time that you almost died when the metal track lighting crashed to the ground in the chicken house.  Your husband was at the other end of the corridor repairing machinery when it happened. He had always warned you about walking under the track lighting. Being already in over your head with hidden costs from Cedar Valley Farms there wasn’t any money left to reinforce the lights. They were rickety. They creaked as often as the chickens clucked. It was only a matter of time before they fell, crushing whatever and whoever was beneath. After the crash your husband screamed your name across the narrow pitch-black rectangle.

“Kathryn?”

“I’m OK!” you screamed back. You took one step forward and tripped over the twisted metal that only seconds before had been attached to the ceiling. It knocked the wind out of you and sent a tornado of red dust from the dirt floor into the nostrils of a hundred squeaking and flapping baby chicks. Somehow the story doesn’t fully match your memory of the experience as you retell it now. Still, the girl working behind the counter nods her head sympathetically. Her eyes widen and mouth gasps at all the appropriate times during your story. “That sounds really scary,” she says.

You instantly feel guilty for burdening her so you change the subject. ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” is playing over the coffee shop speakers. “Oh I just LOVE ABBA,” you tell her, “You know, I don’t listen to too much modern music but there is one singer that I heard on the radio and I just had to buy her CD. It’s that Adele. Man alive, can she sing!”

“Really? That’s cool,” the girl says. She breaks eye contact and begins to wipe the fingerprints from a glass. You wish you could say more. You wish you could really explain what it is about her voice that brings you right back to the day you realized everything you had worked for was over. Jobless with crippling debt. The hole that is left when you take a risk and you fail.

“I bought the CD and I liked about three of the songs immediately, but then, the rest of the songs really grew on me. I am just so impressed by her. She is such an amazing artist, she really is,” you continue saying. It sounds too mundane, too trivial.

How can you describe what it means to you? You would like to tell her that Adele has helped you stare down your deepest insecurities, that her voice helps you go on when it seems impossible. You would like to tell her that the whispers of “Rolling in the deep,” perfectly mimic the fluttering of wings and that your heart always jumps when the drums come in for the chorus. It makes the same sound as the crash of the metal track lighting, the sound of you visualizing your own death.

You would like to tell her these things, but you can’t because none of this exists in Adele’s music. It only exists within you.