Adele's triumphant return a sentimental look back

Adele has had nearly five years to savor the massive success of her last album but, on a release that could be even bigger, she is looking back wistfully on what once had been.

On Adele's third album "25," which came out Nov. 20, the singer has little interest in gloating about fame or experimenting in style, instead returning to the emotional depths that have so resonated with her vast fan base.

Adele, her soaring but soulful voice possessing the same power, retraces the memories of her working-class childhood around London as she reflects from her new, uncomfortable perch.

"I feel like my life is flashing by / And all I can do is watch and cry," she sings to a delicate, Spanish-tinged guitar on "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."

Adele's last album, "21," was led by the raw intimacy of the heartache song "Someone Like You." But the man who broke Adele's heart - whoever he was - is long gone, and Adele has since become a mother and found new love.

Yet romantic tumult clearly still has a hold over Adele. "All I Ask," one of the most emotionally searing songs on the album, intimates at a future rather than a past breakup.

In a booming voice sure to leave many listeners in tears or at least with goose bumps, Adele sings over the piano, "All I ask is / If this is my last night with you / Hold me like I'm more than just a friend / Give me a memory I can use ... 'Cause what if I never love again."

Adele - who, despite the album's title, is 27 - has described "25" as a look at her life "teetering on the edge of being an old adolescent and a fully fledged adult." Adele owes her...