Adele: the surprising stories behind six of her biggest hits 

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Off the back of one of the most highly viewed Glastonbury slots ever, the Official Charts Company have revealed that Adele now has three (!) records in the top 60 best selling albums OF ALL TIME in the UK.

But what is the secret of her success? Well, obviously her voice is one of a kind, melding soul and vulnerability with pure power. However, it\'s also the stories and the songs themselves that have connected with people around the world on a deep and profound level.

With the singer\'s wildly successful world tour in full swing, we\'ve delved back into her discography to unearth the surprising stories behind the songs that have won over millions of fans…

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On the surface, \'Hometown Glory\' is a wistful ode to urban living. Yet, the story behind the song isn\'t quite as angst-ridden. Instead, it was partly influenced by Adele\'s mother\'s request that she leave South London to attend university out of the capital. "I played it to to her as a protest song," she told

back in 2007, "and said this is why I\'m staying."

that, aged just 16, she was stumbling home after a drunken night out when someone asked her if she was all right. Replying drunkenly, Adele shouted: "Nah, it\'s me hometown, love." This interaction actually made its way into the first verse of the song. Adele wrote the track – her first – in just 10 minutes.

When \'Rolling in the Deep\' was released, no one thought that Adele\'s subsequent album,

, would go on to become the fourth bestselling album ever in the UK, beating out Michael Jackson\'s

The song itself was written as a kiss off to an ex-boyfriend. Speaking to

magazine in 2011, Adele recalled how the song was her saying "[G]et the fuck out of my house instead of begging him to come back."

The defiant nature of the song was drawn out, she told

, by producer Paul Epworth, who co-wrote three songs on

and who also produced the Bond theme \'Skyfall\'. Speaking to the

, Adele said that she approached Epworth after having a blazing row with her ex-boyfriend. "The morning I started my first session with Paul Epworth, the night before I broke up with my boyfriend, who the album\'s about, I was so upset, I was so angry," she said. "I was telling Paul, \'Oh Paul, let\'s write a ballad. That\'s all I ever do!\' And he was like, \'Absolutely not! I want to write a fierce tune.\'"

Continuing, she added: "I kept going, \'Feel my heartbeat Paul!\' And the beat of the song was my heartbeat. I\'m such a fucking drama queen. I was so angry. It just built and built …"

, Paul Epworth said how Adele actually came to him with the song\'s first line. "She had all the verses, that thematic melody that she uses all through the song," he said. "I put all the verses down as one long recording, and then we put spaces in the track to start work on a pre-chorus and a chorus. We wrote the core of the song — her verses and the chords — in under 15 minutes. And the rest of it was structured over two hours."

the initial recording was just meant to be a demo. However, Adele and Epworth soon realised that they couldn\'t quite re-capture the murderous spirit of the song.

Ultimately, the song went on to be the singer\'s first US number one and won her the Grammy Awards for Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Short For Music Video. Sucks to be her ex, we guess…

TV show in November 2010, it would take almost another four months for \'Someone Like You\' to become the instant classic it has now become, with Adele performing an emotional rendition of the song at the 2011 BRIT Awards.

, a devastating breakup with an ex-boyfriend inspired the song. Speaking to MTV, she said: "It broke my heart when I wrote this record, so the fact that people are taking it to their hearts is like the best way to recover. \'Cause I\'m still not fully recovered. It\'s going to take me 10 years to recover, I think, from the way I feel about my last relationship."

She explained how the song was actually about her looking forward in her life. "I can imagine being about 40 and looking for him again, only to turn up and find that he\'s settled with a beautiful wife and beautiful kids and he\'s completely happy," she said, "and I\'m still on my own. The song\'s about that and I\'m scared at the thought of that."

This, she says, was a response to the "bitch" she had been while writing songs like \'Rumour Has It\' and \'Rolling in the Deep\'. "I was really emotionally drained from the way I was portraying him," she told MTV, "because even though I\'m very bitter and regret some parts of it, he\'s still the most important person that\'s ever been in my life, and \'Someone Like You,\' I had to write it to feel OK with myself and OK with the two years I spent with him. And when I did it, I felt so freed."

Apparently, the singer wrote the song at the end of her bed while she was waiting for her bath to run after she\'d just found out her ex had become engaged. She also had a cold at the time, too. No wonder it\'s so fantastically miserable.

Both \'Turning Tables\' and \'Rumour Has It\' were co-penned by OneRepublic\'s Ryan Tedder, and you can certainly hear the prolific songwriter\'s gospel influences throughout both tracks. However, Tedder and Adele actually first met on the night of the Grammys in 2009. "She was standing there by herself in the lobby of the London Hotel in LA holding 50 balloons," Tedder recalled to

"[W]e both got in the elevator at the same time. On the way up we tried to have a conversation through the balloons."

A few years later when the pair first worked together, it was actually Tedder that came up with opening piano sequence and the first line of \'Turning Tables\'. "I had no idea about the break-up with the boyfriend," he said. "But then when she heard the lyric she said it was literally what she was going through and so we made the song autobiographical." Later, over text, the pair realised that they had a hit on their hands.

Meeting in LA later down the recording process, and the duo worked together on \'Rumour Has It\'. "The entire vocal took about ten minutes,\' says Tedder. "She sang it once top to bottom, pitch perfect, she didn\'t miss a note. I looked at the engineer then at her and said, \'Adele I don\'t know what to tell you but I have never had anyone do that in ten years\'. Putting a vocal on typically takes around four or five hours to make perfect; she did it in one take."

in 2015, Adele made the initial steps for her comeback, revealing the opening lines of what would become \'Hello\', the lead single from her record breaking third album

The song, which was co-written and produced with pop maestro Greg Kurstin, is an overblown power ballad of epic proportions, and on the surface appears to track the melancholy of a break up (again). Speaking to Ryan Seacrest, however, Adele revealed that the song isn\'t actually about anyone in particular. "I have a little curiosity about my past now that I\'m a grown up,"she said. "We\'re not kids anymore and stuff like that. It\'s kind of a hello to all my old friends, all the relationships I\'ve had, all my old teachers, my little me when I was 7 or 8, and also a bit of a hello to all my fans because I\'ve been gone for so long."

that while the lyrics "hello from the other side" might sound morbid "it\'s actually just from the other side of becoming an adult, making it out alive from your late teens, early twenties".

the singer said that "[t]he song is about hurting someone\'s feelings but it\'s also about trying to stay in touch with myself, which sometimes can be a little bit hard to do."

Following on she added: "It\'s about a yearning for the other side of me. When I\'m away, I really, really miss my life at home… So \'Hello\' is about wanting to be at home and wanting to reach out to everyone I\'ve ever hurt – including myself – and apologise for it."

Unlike some of her previous hits, the song wasn\'t written in the space of minutes. In fact, it took over six months to complete. Producer Greg Kurstin didn\'t even know if Adele was going to finish it. "We had half a song written," he told

that the pair were actually talking about Tom Waits "and different storytellers like that. I think that was the idea, that we wanted to do something that was very honest about where she was at right now, and she wanted to do something that was real and believable".

We\'d say they managed that, wouldn\'t you? 

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