She has a voice that gives her listeners chills in a good way, and her songs can make them nostalgic for feelings they didn’t know existed.

Adele sold 3.38 million copies of her new album 25, a new record in first-week sales. Love her or hate her, she’s quickly becoming an icon. Her song, “Hello,” reigns at the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 song chart and shows no sign of dropping.

Her new album, 25, is soulful, wistful, and filled with passion and pain. Each song is a gateway into a nostalgic love affair, melodically strung together to form beautiful ballads. Her voice is angelic and seems to hit all the right notes in all the right places. Adele sounds just as wonderful live as she does on her record, which only underscores her true talent.

Adele’s love for music sprouted at age 14, when she applied to London’s BRIT School of the Arts. She still records songs with previous classmate and current guitarist Ben Thomas. After her school years, a friend posted some of Adele’s music on MySpace – when it was still in its prime – and she was instantly sought after by several record labels. Now she is making a name for herself and has earned her well-deserved recognition.

On Beats1 Radio Show, Adele was interviewed about 25 and told the listeners why she names her albums after different ages of her life.

“But I feel like the idea of calling albums after my age is showing a photograph almost of what’s going on in my life then and there,” she explains. “I feel like not that much is going to change profoundly in me from now on in terms of how important eras of my life are to myself. So I think the next one will probably be called Adele.”

But the album that made her considerably richer was almost never produced. She reveals that the stresses of trying to come up with popular content almost drove her to quit the music industry entirely. Adele told BBC Radio 2 that after she took a self-proclaimed maternity leave from music to take care of her son, she kept putting off producing any music.

“There was also a period where I thought, ‘Maybe I should just go out on a high. Maybe people have heard enough of me. Maybe that’s all they want to hear,’“ she added. “I didn’t want to come back with anything that people wouldn’t like.”

But she’ received an incredibly positive reaction from her fans. Her sales beat Taylor Swift’s 1989 record sales and sold almost one million more than NSYNC’s No Strings Attached back in 2000.

She mentioned how important 25 is to her in an open letter on Twitter.

“My last record was a break-up record and if I had to label this one, I would call it a make-up record,” Adele declared. “Making up for lost time. Making up for everything I ever did and never did.”

Adele may have released it for the public, but she also released it for herself as a form of closure. She is still releasing very popular and beautiful music, and many eagerly await what she will reveal to us next.