Adele’s soulful “Easy on Me” at the NRJ Music Awards definitely showed that she’s the real deal as a vocalist. Her band delivered the sparse ballad with only a lone piano and electric bass as accompaniment, leaving nowhere to hide as a vocalist. The English songstress rose to the challenge though, delivering an emotive performance that powerfully told the story of the lyrics.

Adele’s passionate delivery showed how much the song means to her, and made the performance hit hard. It’s refreshing to see such a sincere delivery in today’s modern market of endless Auto-Tuned throwaway numbers. Her vocals are superb, and the imperfections in the performance just make the live version more distinctive.

Like many songs from Adele’s fourth album 30, the lyrics of “Easy on Me” address her split with her now ex-husband Simon Konecki. She told The Guardian she hoped the album would help her young son Angelo understand the divorce, saying, “I just felt like I wanted to explain to him… why I voluntarily chose to dismantle his entire life in the pursuit of my own happiness. 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.”

The NRJ Music Awards performance went down a treat with Adele fans, who tuned in 154 million times to the video. This made it one of the most popular videos on Adele’s channel, and her second most popular live performance. This places the live cut of “Easy on Me” behind only her version of “Set Fire to the Rain” at the Royal Albert Hall, which has 797 million views.

“Easy on Me” has continued to be popular with fans since its release in October 2021. The ballad currently has 1.6 billion streams on Spotify, making it her third most popular song on the platform, behind only “Rolling in the Deep” and “Someone Like You”.