Adele‘s album 25 is breaking records all over the place. She dethroned Beyoncé as the artist with the fastest selling album in iTunes history and knocked *NSYNC out of the top spot to become the new record-holder for single-week album sales. Here’s a look at the stories behind some of the songs on this history-making album:
“Send My Love (To Your New Lover)”
Originally titled, “We Ain’t Kids Anymore,” it’s a pop song (Taylor Swift and Britney Spears hitmaker Max Martin produced it) that still delivers an Adele-worthy punch to a former flame. “I was too strong you weren’t trembling/you couldn’t handle the hot heat rising.”
“Remedy”
Written and recorded in one day with Ryan Tedder, the ballad (which is inspired by her son) was a turning point in the making of 25. As she told Rolling Stone: “When I wrote it, I got my confidence back in my writing ’cause I believed in myself.”
“Water Under the Bridge”
The song, inspired by her boyfriend Simon Konecki, is “sort of about a relationship suddenly getting really, really serious and then getting a bit frightened by it,” she told Rolling Stone, “and then realizing that ‘I think this must be right. This is the relationship that I want to be in for as long as I can possibly be in it.’ ”
For more on Adele, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands now.
“Million Years Ago”
“I miss the air, I miss my friends/I miss my mother, I miss it when/Life was a party to be thrown/But that was a million years ago,” she sings on the nostalgic, last-minute addition she wrote after driving by a park she and her friends hung out in growing up.
“Sweetest Devotion”
A snippet of her son’s voice pops up on this ender. “The song is all about my kid,” she told USA Today. From mother to child she sings: “There is something about the way you love me/That finally feels like home.”
