Adele Reveals Her Record-Breaking New Single Actually Left Her Close Friends Feeling Cold

While Adele’s fans have quickly embraced her new song, “Easy on Me,” her friends were not impressed at first. In a new interview with BBC1 Radio, Adele said it took her friends some time to warm up to the track. “Easy on Me” is Adele’s first new song since she released her album 25 in November 2015. The song will appear on her next album, 30, which will be released on Nov. 19.

“I sent a snippet of me singing it as I was writing it to three of my closest friends here,” Adele told BBC1 Radio Breakfast Show host Greg James on Oct. 15, reports Entertainment Weekly. “And one didn’t like it, the other one was like, ‘Well, yeah, maybe, keep trying though,’ and the other one was, ‘I’m busy working.’ So that was the perfect response for me.”

Although her close friends had mixed feelings about the song, they “loved” her patience with the song. “I’m such a knee-jerk person. I’ll be like, ‘I don’t like it, forget it!’ I’m like that with my music,” the “Rolling in the Deep” singer said of her songwriting process. “I’m like that with just things I want to do. I’m like that with my feelings and stuff and I think it was clear to them in the lyrics that I’ve bided my time and I wasn’t reacting to a reaction or anything like that. It was just a feeling that I had stirred on for a while.”

Some of her friends were just happy to hear her sing again, Adele admitted. “I don’t do any music in my time off,” she told James. “It’s not a muscle that I use, writing or singing. So most of the time, my best friends and even my manager, most of the time their first response is ‘it’s just nice to hear you sing again.’”

“Easy on Me” is the lead single for 30, named after the age Adele was when she began working on it. Most of the songs were inspired by her divorce from ex-husband Simon Konecki, with whom she shares 9-year-old son Angelo. In an interview with British Vogue, Adele said she hoped her son could understand the divorce through the album. “I just felt like I wanted to explain to him, through this record, when he’s in his twenties or thirties, who I am and why I voluntarily chose to dismantle his entire life in the pursuit of my own happiness,” she said. “It made him really unhappy sometimes. And that’s a real wound for me that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to heal.”

Although “Easy on Me” is inspired by Adele’s personal feelings, the song has clearly resonated with everyone who has heard it, much like the music on 21 and 25. On Friday, Spotify announced that Adele set a new record, with the most streams in a single day for one song. BTS previously held the record when “Butter” notched 11 million streams in a day in May. As of Sunday afternoon, “Easy on Me” already has over 40 million streams.