Adagio

Description

Almost as soon as Stella Chronopoulou began writing Adagio, her fifth album as tella, she knew the time had finally come to sing in Greek, her native tongue. It would be a first. She started the record almost by accident in 2019, during an 11-hour boat ride to the island of Anafi. tella had recently gone through a patch of personal turmoil and needed a break from home. On the ferry, she pulled out her cell phone as the boat clipped through the Mediterranean and began with a simple melody, steadily piecing together a rough instrumental. As psychedelic keyboards twinkled and swayed above staccato drums, the track suggested some deep exhalation, as if tella were letting go of long-unnecessary baggage. For a spell, she set the instrumental aside. She understood the words would eventually need to be in Greek, given how and where shed written it, the mood of the moment. But she wasnt ready yet, or in a rush.

tella, after all, grew up in a slow place. Truth be told, she wasnt very far away from the hubbub of Athens, Greece, living just above the historic city in a relatively rural suburb. When her father bought land there several decades ago, his friends joked wolves may eat him. For tella, though, it was an idyll: The sounds of passing goats woke her most mornings. She and her friends played unfettered in empty streets, not worried about cars or permission. At night, doors remained unlocked. The living felt easy.

But during the last decade, life has steadily become busier for tella, who now lives near downtown Athens. She has become one of modern Greeces most popular musical exports, with three sophisticated and playful pop albums rendered with international lan. After releasing her Sub Pop debut, Up and Away, in 2022, she soon catapulted beyond three million monthly Spotify listeners. That success was a blessing, of course, but tella still sometimes found herself pining for the slower pace of her youth.

That longing is the thread that loosely binds together her fifth album, the entrancing Adagio. Borrowing its name, of course, from the term for music thats meant to be played slowly, Adagio is a pop record that feels like a very warm blanket, its nylon-string guitars and featherlight percussion swaddling its listeners for three minutes at a time. Written and recorded over the span of five years, with a consortium of international collaborators including !!!s Rafael Cohen and British songwriter Gabriel Stebbing, Adagio is a 27-minute meditation on love and desire, rest and time. The album was produced by tella and mixed by Edmund Irwin-Singer. Though the bulk of it is indeed sung in English, as all her records have been, tella also delivers her first two songs in Greek hereOmorfo Mou, the one that began on the boat, and a cover of a 1969 cult classic of the Greek New Wave, Litsa Sakellarious Ta Vimata. It is a sign of the self-assurance that radiates throughout these tender and smitten little tunes.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, tella opted to try some new approaches to writing. Upon the suggestion of a mutual friend, she began exchanging emails with !!!s Cohen (working now under the name Las Palabras), each sharing links to records and sounds they loved. There was an instant chemistry, and they penned five songs through Zoom and email. (Theyve yet to meet.) Three of them provide the framework for Adagio. Theres Baby Brazil, a suave tune about falling for someone, about letting go of the need to control everything. Together, Cohen and tella found a spellbinding intersection of Tropicalia, disco, and y-y. Pushing and pulling between verses of nylon-stringed guitars and choruses where soft strings and electronics rise like bioluminescent tides, 80 Days suggests giving into desire and into this songs sweet sweep.

But the pairs hallmark here is the opening title cut, Adagio, where tella sings to the concept of slowness like some long-lost lover. Youre one I know/too shy to show, she offers over gentle samba percussion and jangling chords. Why youre tormenting me? Her guitar solo then cuts through it with a Wes Montgomery verve, curling like a finger that beckons an object of desire. Maybe it seems strange to write a love song to the idea of slowing down, but who hasnt felt that way in our era of instant everythingthe desire to step back and let the world just come to you? When tella sings here, its hard not to long for that same state of grace. You can hear it again in the mesmerizing instrumental Corfu and the sashaying love song Can I Say, written in memoriam for tellas stolen bike.

A few years after that boat ride across the Mediterranean, tella finally revisited the instrumental she had written on board. Shed always resisted writing and singing in Greek because its words often felt too heavy and intense, the tone not suited to her lilting songs. Still, she knew this one had to be Greek. She thought about the beautiful phrase Omorfo Mou, a common pledge of Greek adoration that loosely translates into my beautiful one. It soon became a song of want and longing, the antithesis of the way she felt back on the boat, when she was getting away from rather than going toward anything. Whats more, its swaggering rhythm only emerges after tellas winning cover of Ta Vimata. The bass and percussion bounce beneath her curling voice, faithful and new, linking her to a lineage of sophisticated Greek pop and the countrys famed New Wave. Two circles close with these two songs, a kind of dual homecoming.

Start to finish, tella sounds more at ease and comfortable than shes ever been on Adagio. No, these fetching songs will not slow her career or grant her that title tracks wish. Still, for half an hour, Adagio does add an extra measure of warmth to the world, with time loosening its grip even if it doesnt slow down.