It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that Adele has grown up in the pages of Vogue.
She was first profiled in 2009, when she was just 20 years old and riding high off the novelty of celebrity (“I feel so proper,” she said, while looking at herself in the custom Barbara Tfank dress she wore to the 2009 Grammy Awards.
“From ladette to lady!”). In 2012, she earned her first Vogue cover after releasing her smash sophomore album, 21; in 2016, she graced the cover again after the release of 25; and now, five years later, she’s back with cover number three.
But who is the woman behind that incredible voice? Here are five things you likely never knew about Adele.
1. Adele wrote her debut single, “Hometown Glory,” in just 10 minutes.
The song was penned when the singer was a teenager, after her mother tried to persuade her to leave her—you guessed it—hometown of Tottenham, South London, for university.
“I played it to to her as a protest song and said this is why I’m staying,” Adele told The Observer Music Monthly.
2. Adele has fans in high places (including the British government). In 2009, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown sent Adele a thank-you note, singling her out her for keeping the country’s spirits high.
“It went, ‘With the troubles that the country’s in financially, you’re a light at the end of the tunnel,’” said Adele of the note at the time, adding, “I’m fighting the credit crunch on my own!”
3. Adele has publicly stated that she hates walking red carpets. “I don’t feel insecure, I just feel like, Oh, I don’t want to do this. I literally get a stomach cramp,” she once said. But it might surprise you to know that her anxiety extends to the stage, as well.
“[My stage fright is] actually getting worse,” she told NPR in 2015. “Or it’s just not getting better, so I feel like it’s getting worse, because it should’ve gotten better by now.”
Her uneasiness actually influences her performing style. “With my stage fright, I just don’t want to let people down,” she said. “I get so nervous onstage that I don’t have the guts to improvise or anything like that.”
4. The singer has a pair of tattoos on her hands, one that reads “Paradise” and the other “Angelo,” the name of her son. “Cause Angelo is my paradise,” she told Rolling Stone.
“All the things I really like about myself, he brings out in me, and he’s the only person that tells me no. He completely rules me.
He’s the boss of me, and it’s so funny for other people to watch, because I’m the boss of everything in my work life.”
5. Adele once told James Corden that she was a huge fan of the Spice Girls. “It was actually a really big thing,” she said. “It was a huge moment in my life when they came out.
It was girl power and it was these five ordinary girls who just, like, did so well and just got out. And I was like, ‘I want to get out.’ ” The now 33-year-old even had a Spice Girl—themed 10th birthday.
“I was always Geri,” she said. “And then she left. . . . That was the first time I was truly heartbroken.”
This originally appeared on Vogue US
