Adele

Adele was nineteen when her first album came out, and she named it after her age. She did the same with 21, 25 and 30, so that her catalogue reads almost like a diary, each record a snapshot of where her life stood when she made it. 21 became one of the best-selling albums of the century, and the habit of naming records after birthdays turned into a promise her audience understood: this is exactly how I felt, at exactly this point.

She was born Adele Laurie Blue Adkins on May 5, 1988, in Tottenham, North London, at 8:19 in the morning, the time given in Sean Smith's biography of her. Her Sun is in Taurus, a sign traditionally linked with the throat and the voice, and Jupiter is in Taurus nearby. Taurus voices tend to be rich, grounded and unhurried, and astrologers could hardly ask for a better example than the low, full instrument that made her famous.

Both of those Taurus planets fall in her eleventh house, the area of a chart connected with crowds, friendships and shared hopes. Fittingly, her career began through friends. A schoolmate from the BRIT School posted her demo on MySpace, and XL Recordings signed her in 2006. Her songs have always felt communal in a particular way: huge numbers of strangers singing along to someone else's heartbreak as if it were their own.

Cancer is her rising sign, so the Moon rules her chart, and the Moon here is in Sagittarius. Cancer brings sensitivity and a protective attachment to home and family; Sagittarius adds bluntness, laughter and a big, open-hearted honesty. That pairing captures the contrast audiences notice at her concerts, where devastating ballads are followed by cackling, profanity-laced chats with the crowd. She grew up in a single-parent household with her mother, Penny, and has spoken often about how closely they are bound.

The Moon sits in her sixth house, the domain of health and the body's daily maintenance, with Saturn and Uranus, both retrograde in Capricorn, in the same part of the chart. In 2011, at the height of 21's success, she suffered a vocal cord hemorrhage, cancelled her tour and had surgery. She came back to win six Grammys in a single night in 2012, and later an Academy Award for "Skyfall."

Mercury and Venus both fall in Gemini in the twelfth house, where things are processed in private before they surface. Adele famously disappears between albums, sometimes for years, and returns with songs that have been worked through slowly. Her son, Angelo, was born in 2012; 25 arrived in 2015 with "Hello," and sold more than three million copies in its first week in the United States.

30, released in 2021, was written about the end of her marriage and addressed partly to her son, explaining why his parents had separated. It was followed by a long residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Through all of it, the Taurus voice did what it has done since the first album: it took one person's feelings and made them big enough for everyone to sing.