After her 2011 album, Modern Romantics, Adaline ran out of “emotional fuel.” She was lyrically drained and wanted to take on different challenges.
So she dove into the world of songwriting and scoring music for film and TV shows. In the six-year interim between then and now, her music found a place on shows like Grey’s Anatomy, 90210, Flashpoint, Lost Girl and Ringer. She also teamed up with Broken Social Scene co-founder Brendan Canning to score the Bret Easton Ellis film The Canyons.
That work brought Adaline a new sense of joy, one that eventually inspired her to sit down and write a new album.
“I hope people can feel my honesty and desire to connect.”
“I felt ready to share my life again,” she says. Another big inspiration for her was water. Bodies of water became a constant wherever and whenever she wrote and, for her, there was a sense of romance that came from that. “Water has the ability to sustain a whole ecosystem, with millions of mystical living things; it’s incredibly spiritual,” she explains. “But on the other hand, water has the ability to completely destroy and bring panic and immense fear — and isn’t this so true with love? It both sustains and destroys.”
The result of those writing sessions was Aquatic, an emotionally-charged collection of songs that runs the pop-rock spectrum, from upbeat, guitar-driven numbers like “Commotion” to more subdued, lush piano melodies like “Break Me Apart.” Somewhere in the middle lies its most vocally stunning and effective track, the soaring “Stronger.” All of this is done with one goal in mind: to connect to listeners through her forthright songwriting.
“I hope people can feel my honesty and desire to connect,” she reveals. “Over the years, I’ve realized the thing that gets me out of bed and into the studio every day is connection.”