Happy Birthday Adele!
With her timeless sound and heartbreak-focused tunes, it's hard to believe the British songstress (full name: Adele Laurie Blue Adkins) will only be 24 on Saturday.
Raised in the working class London neighborhood of Tottenham by a single mom, the soulful star hit it big with 2008's 19–and even bigger with her second album, 2011's 21, which landed her six Grammys and has kept her atop music charts in the U.S. and the U.K. ever since its release. (On Wednesday, the record outsold Michael Jackson's Thriller by 500 copies, making it the fifth biggest-selling album of all time in the U.K.)
2012's already shaping up to be a pretty good year for the "Someone Like You" chanteuse; one month before sweeping the Grammys, the notoriously unlucky-in-love singer headed on vacation with a new boyfriend, 37-year-old nonprofit director Simon Konecki.
In a March interview with Vogue, Adele opened up about the influence past loves have had on her music–and emphasized that her tunes show off only one aspect of her personality. "People think that I'm f—ing miserable," the "Chasing Pavements" singer shared. "There are really surprised when they meet me that I'm chatty and bubbly and kind of quite carefree really."
Any man "brave" enough to give romance a shot with Adele–including Konecki–shouldn't think twice, she insisted.
"Come on! I'm wifey material! I'm great," she told the mag. "It's not like, 'You f–k me over and I'm going to write a record and make you the most hated man in the world.'"
Joked the Brit, "I am never writing a breakup record again, by the way. I'm done with being a bitter witch."
