The story behind Adele "chasing the pavement"

There was a not-so-pretty story behind this award-winning single. Adele’s “Chasing Pavement” received three Grammy Award nominations and won one of them, but once you know what inspired this hit single, you may wonder if it was really worth it (at least from Adele’s point of view). Although I don’t have any solid statistics to back this up, I suspect not many hit songs were inspired by getting punched in the face.

You see, Adele was in a six month relationship with a (now ex) boyfriend. One day she found out that he had cheated on her. So she went to the London West End bar where her boyfriend was and she confronted him. The confrontation led our illustrious heroine to throw a punch to her face. Yes, she was later kicked out of the bar. Afterward, she Adele ran down Oxford Street alone, noting: “He didn’t chase me! So he was running, just looking at these big, wide pavements stretching out in front of me.” She then wondered, “What are you chasing? You’re chasing an empty pavement.”

From a musical point of view it is good that we live in the age of mobile phones. Adele used one right then and there to sing and record the words she came up with, arranging the chords only after she got home.

The best part was that the song won the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

And the worst part? After discovering that many of the songs on “19” were inspired by her breakup, Adele’s ex-boyfriend demanded some of the royalties. She told the British newspaper Sun“For about a week he was calling and being very serious about it. Finally, I said, ‘Well, you made my life hell, so I lived through it and now I deserve it.’ the creative process being a *****. I’ll give him this credit: he made me an adult and set me on the path I’m traveling on.”

Also, it appears that the Unintended Consequences Act was also at work. Remember how much flak John Lennon received for composing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” because it supposedly stood for the initials “LSD”? Overlooked was the fact that the title came from a picture Lennon’s son Julian had innocently drawn at school for a friendly classmate…especially since Lennon, of course, really had used LSD before.

Unfortunately, “Chasing Pavement” suffered the same fate. It appears that in America the phrase “chasing the pavement” has been used to describe the persecution of gay men, and that the song was about being gay, a claim strongly argued by Adele.