As a young girl, Adele Lassiter was inspired by the love of music her mom and grandmother exuded, and felt drawn, early on to singing and songwriting as her own mode of expression.
During her high school years, Adele developed her musical skills in a number of separate ways at first. While she continued writing songs for herself that she only shared with friends, show choir introduced her to performing, and work on the high school tv station gave her some experience with how music and video could work together.
When she went to Nashville to attend Belmont University, Adele started playing out. “Even though it’s kind of embarrassing now, looking back at some of my earlier gigs, I did like every open mike night…It’s important to find those situations where you have…people who see the value in your music and want to help you improve. Because nobody’s perfect when they first start.”
It took a dramatic event to clarify what was truly important for Adele. While living in Montana to initially attend college there, she rolled her SUV on a gravel road, ending up with a broken neck and other injuries. “I woke up in the hospital, and literally right before that I had been praying and thinking that music was so important to me, that I really wanted to do something with music, like ‘please let there be a path toward this’…
“I made a full recovery, but during that recovery process that’s when a light bulb went off in my head, like, I need to just go all in with my music.
American Nomad is Adele’s debut five-song EP, which has taken a while to come to fruition, but she says, “I wanted to have the best people on the album…” Eli Beaird of Beaird Music Group played bass and produced, and along with a team of session pros, “ kind of helped me…bring my vision to life,” Adele says.