Making of Rolling In The Deep. When was it written?

[shadesofblack]

This is really interesting to me. Can someone add the interview with Paul Epworth that talks about creating the song with Adele?
And a huge thank you to someone who can get the date the two wrote the song beyond a doubt. I know wiki page on 21 says that both Take It All and Rolling in The Deep were recorded in April 2009. Wiki's right only about half the time, if that. Any way, I've read conflicting accounts. A lot of them.

From Demo To Platinum Hit

Paul Epworth co‑wrote and produced ‘Rolling In The Deep’
‘Rolling In The Deep’ was co‑written and produced by Paul Epworth, and began with an idea of Adele’s in which she envisaged “the verses and bridge as one long mantra”. Epworth adds: “She said to me, ‘I’ve got this riff that just won’t go away,’ so I grabbed an acoustic guitar and found some simple Tom Waits‑like chugged chords underneath, both for the verse and the chorus changes. The whole thing happened in under five minutes.”
Adele and Epworth were working in the latter’s London studio — he’s since relocated to Beethoven Street Studios in central London and renamed it Wolf Tone — where he recorded their basic ideas in Logic. “I wanted Adele to put her vocal parts down immediately, just to prevent her having to sing over and over again while I worked out my parts. I’m quite indecisive when starting a track about the arrangement I’m going for, as I need to feel the track out first. In order to make sure she had something to sing to, I put down some low piano chords in the key, added a click and recorded Adele singing the whole riff she had in one take. I counted her in — you can still hear this mumbled count-in at the top of the master. I left that in because I felt that it gave the song a stamp of authenticity. Later on we spent a bit of time structuring the arrangement of parts for her vocals. We worked out the bridge section, which came together quite quickly, and then Adele said ‘I think I’ve got something for the chorus.’
“I recorded all Adele’s vocals with my Rode Classic 2, going through my UA 6176 mic pre, and never went back to them. The vocals in the final version are all from the demo. She was really going through something and you can hear it in her voice. I think I also used quite a bit of Logic overdrive on her voice, too, to add harmonics. I then recorded the acoustic guitar chords, following which we set about working on a beat. We toyed with a skiffle tempo in double time, a break, but in the end it just made sense to make the track thump. The staccato element was always there. The acoustic and electric guitars were absolutely exhausting to play, because the part has to be played so evenly with right and left hands muting. You can barely hear the electric guitar that I added, but it helps give the track a seething tension that it otherwise would have missed Also, I was aware that the intention was for Rick [Rubin] to re‑record and produce the song, so we knew it was better for the arrangement to be stripped‑down and heavy.”
With the demo in hand, Adele went over to Malibu to re‑record the track with Rubin at the helm (footage of these sessions can be found on YouTube), but everyone involved appeared to have a serious case of demoitis. Epworth: “Rick’s version was awesome, but there was a rawness in her original vocal performance and in the stripped‑down nature of the demo that was impossible to replicate. And in my experience as a producer a good demo is often hard to beat, particularly if people have lived with it for a while.”
And so Epworth was asked to upgrade his demo, something he decided to do at Eastcote Studios in London. “The final master was pretty much the demo with a few embellishments. I had played everything live on the demo: drums, bass, acoustic, electric and piano. I like to use a bit of live kit on a demo, because it makes a big difference, if that’s how it’s intended to sound. On this song, we used a ’60s marching band bass drum up against the front head of my 1972 Super Classic kick to get a tight attack and a big boom. A lot of the stomp of the kick drum was actually Adele stamping on a wooden step in my studio. We tracked it up so it sounded really heavy. Blended with the kick, it had a real blues sound. At Eastcote, drummer Leo Taylor added more life to the demo drum recordings. The issue was trying to get an ambient sound without it being splashy. The ceiling is low in Eastcote, and we wanted a live take of the drums, so there was some juggling. Also, when you get a 26‑inch kick tuned low like that, you have to tailor the decay with mutes, a little bit of tape and a blanket, while being careful not to kill the impact or tone.
“The piano was replayed and embellished by Neil Cowley, and I replayed all the acoustic and electric guitars as I felt they should have been played. The main reason for recording at Eastcote was that I wanted to try and emulate Tchad Blake’s binaural head sound from those Tom Waits records from the late ’80s and early ’90s. We recorded into Pro Tools at Eastcote and used a binaural head but with a couple of Schoeps [mics] either side — we couldn’t get our hands on a Neumann — and we placed stuff around the room to get the stereo width. Mark Rankin [the engineer on the Eastcote sessions] close‑miked everything too, and we blended the close mics and head mics to get the desired depth. For recording the acoustic guitars, we used the [Telefunken] Elam 250 as a close mic, three feet from the front of my 1964 Martin to get the body and presence, and we used a head with Telefunken Elam 260s positioned horizontally at the listening position. The electric was a 1957 Les Paul played through a Mesa Boogie combo, and recorded with a Royer mic.
“As I said, the demo had been very close, but we managed to add a rich, organic quality with the live performances at Eastcote. Mark and I then pre‑mixed the song in the box, which mainly involved lots of shaping stuff to get the dynamics right. Tom then really nailed it in his final mix by refining the sound we had into something more focused. He got the ODB ‘Brooklyn Zoo’ piano sound we were after, and blended Adele’s stomp with the live kit, et al. It was a tricky track to balance. Because there’s so much space and so few elements in the song, it can easily slip. I had a hunch that the track would be really successful, but I never thought I’d have a US number one single! Just gotta make the next thing even better now!”

[LouieArmstrong]

I'm not sure but I believe she wrote a part of the song in San Francisco and a part in Amsterdam.

[shadesofblack]

I'm not sure but I believe she wrote a part of the song in San Francisco and a part in Amsterdam.

Like the first verse in the basement of a Chinese restaurant right? (random, but I'm pretty sure I remember that). She says in Q interview that she wrote RITD and He Won't Go on same day. Must be that session with Paul Epworth. Take It All was written sometime before this. There are a lot of contradictions out there. One thing for sure, it was a messy time. Created a masterpiece in the middle of it all. Love that song so much.

[ImAlina]

I'm not sure but I believe she wrote a part of the song in San Francisco and a part in Amsterdam.

Like the first verse in the basement of a Chinese restaurant right? (random, but I'm pretty sure I remember that). She says in Q interview that she wrote RITD and He Won't Go on same day. Must be that session with Paul Epworth. Take It All was written sometime before this. There are a lot of contradictions out there. One thing for sure, it was a messy time. Created a masterpiece in the middle of it all. Love that song so much.

I remember all this as well. I doubt it was written the same time as Take It All. The first part, the one in the basement of the Chinese restaurant was written right after they broke up. But we don't know when they broke up. In RAFH she says its been 2 years since they broke up, so that would mean around september 2009. But who knows? You never know with her. She has been contradicting because she's protecting herself and can't really blame her.

[Georgina]

I'm not sure if that's the interview you are asking for, but it's an interview... Here is a fragment:

Q. We know her music, but what is Adele like to collaborate with?

A. She’s very focused, and she is an absolute professional, even down to being punctual. She’s just a joy to work with, and she keeps in touch as well. One of the funny things of being a producer, you have these fleeting, intense relationships with people, and they go off to global megastardom, and you don’t see them.

Q. Tell us a little about how “Rolling in the Deep” came about.

A. I had all these chords I thought would be perfect for her. You know, little musical riffs or themes. I tried all these out on her for about two hours. She literally sat there with a pen in her hand staring blankly, and she just went, “I’m not feeling anything.” And then she went, “I’ve got this riff, this idea, that’s going round and round my head,” and I went, “Go on then, what is it?” And she went, [sings] “There’s a fire.”

I said wow, and I just grabbed a guitar and quickly tried to figure out what the key was. She had all the verses, that thematic melody that she uses all through the song. I put all the verses down as one long recording, and then we put spaces in the track to start work on a prechorus and a chorus. We wrote the core of the song — her verses and the chords — in under 15 minutes. And the rest of it was structured over two hours.

Q. Her vocal track that you recorded that day for a demo ended up on the album. Why didn’t you redo it?

A. Adele was going through something. She had had her heart broken, and she was in pieces, and you can really hear that, her anger and her sadness. Sometimes I just don’t think you can recreate that or fake it. My hunch is that we captured something in her vocal performance that was going to be very hard to recreate.

:

Before the interview itself there is an introduction which starts thus:

IN October 2009 Adele arrived at Paul Epworth’s cramped London studio for a songwriting session in ragged shape, sad and wrung out from a breakup with her boyfriend. That afternoon they composed and recorded “Rolling in the Deep,” the song that dominated the 2011 charts and became one of the biggest crossover hits of the last quarter-century.

You can find the whole piece here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/arts/music/paul-epworth-on-producing-adele.html?pagewanted=all

In December 2009 The Idolator published an interview with Ryan Tedder:

I’m working with Adele right now, who’s inspiring me like crazy. I hadn’t written a song in about a month, literally, until yesterday. The less I write, the better the songs are. When “Halo” came about, I hadn’t written a song in two months. Then two months after that I wrote “Battlefield,” and two months after that was “Already Gone.” When I don’t do a ton of writing, then typically the quality of the song is a lot better.

The complete interview:
http://idolator.com/5316661/the-idolator-interview-ryan-tedder

That's what I found so far from the times, or shortly after, Adele was working with Epworth and Tedder.

[LouieArmstrong]

Amsterdam sounded to good to be true. Bummer ;)

[Georgina]

The first part, the one in the basement of the Chinese restaurant was written right after they broke up.

Noo... I don't think so. I'm pretty sure she said that the first verse was written much earlier, as you say, but also that it actually did not refer to Mr 21 but to some other guy who I think really had an idea to "sell her out".

[megustapiano14]

I don't know if this is true or not, but I've heard she wrote some of it in 2009 (Probably just like a rough copy of ideas, maybe just some of the chords or something). Then, when she was in a Chinese restaurant in somewhere around 2011, inspiration struck her and she wrote the first verse of Rolling in the Deep.

[Georgina]

I don't know if this is true or not, but I've heard she wrote some of it in 2009 (Probably just like a rough copy of ideas, maybe just some of the chords or something). Then, when she was in a Chinese restaurant in somewhere around 2011, inspiration struck her and she wrote the first verse of Rolling in the Deep.

This timing is completely off as the album was recorded by June 2010 and came out in January 2011. No way RITD was written after the album was published, isnt'? ;)

[RunrigCorvusCoraxFan]

Wasn't TIA the last song Adele wrotefor 21?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/arts/ ... .html?_r=1