Songfacts®:

• This tune finds Adele directly addressing the unnamed former boyfriend who inspired much of 21's lyrics. "It sounds obvious, but I think you only learn to love again when you fall in love again," the songstress told The Observer. "I'm in that place. My love is deep and true with my man, and that puts me in a position where I can finally reach out a hand to the ex. Let him know I'm over it."
  
  "My man" is Adele's go-to name for Simon Konecki, her longtime partner and the father of her son.
• Adele wrote the skeleton of the song when she was 13 on a guitar. It was originally titled "We Ain't Kids No More."
• The song's opening line is: "This was all you. None of it me."
  
  "I love it, it's f--king sick," Adele said. "Straight away, a million people in my life will be like, 'Oh s--t, what have I done.'"
• This was produced and co-written by Max Martin and his regular collaborator Shellback. Adele had never heard of Martin before hooking up with the Swedish hitmaker.
  
  It was "Remedy" co-writer Ryan Tedder who told the English songstress about one of the leading songwriters of the 2010s. The pair were having lunch and Taylor Swift's "I Knew You Were Trouble" came on the radio. Adele recalled to i-D: "I was like, 'I love this song, who did this?' and he's like 'Max,' and I'm like, 'Oo's Max?' and he's like 'Max Martin!' and I'm like, 'Oo's Max Martin?'"
  
  So Tedder sent Adele a YouTube clip of Martin's work.
• Adele said of the song's calypso vibe: "It's a bit of fun, innit? You ain't got to be dark all the time."
• Adele told Zane Lowe on his Beats 1 show that she wanted this as 25's lead single as it is "much more poppy" than "Hello." However, it was eventually decided that "Helllo" was more representative of the album as a whole.
• The guitar bass line that Adele used for this song was one she'd had since she was 15. The English songstress told The New York Times: "I used to cover 'Wonderful World' doing that riff. It sings over it really well."
• The video was shot in London and directed by Patrick Daughters, whose other projects include the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps" and Feist's "1234." The clip consists of multiple, colorful superimposed shots of Adele singing and dancing in a flowery Dolce & Gabbana gown.
  
  By layering different shots from this scene over one another, Daughters gives the visual a ghost-like effect. "Ghosts in this case are versions of ourselves that remain stuck at particular point in the past," explained the director. "So when Adele sings about letting go of all of our ghosts (the lyric, "We've gotta let go of all our ghosts"), I picture other versions of her that are in a different place than where she is now."
• Adele did 12 takes for the video, which were superimposed on top of each other to create the finished product. She's not a dancer, but she has some rhythm and moves pretty well - there was no choreographer, which kept it natural.
  
  "After a couple takes, once everybody was a little bit looser in term of us on the camera side, she just really let go," Patrick Daughters told Entertainment Weekly. "Towards the end, we were doing takes that were more about the movement and less about the emotional performance. They were about the patterning, how this was going to appear layered over many times, playing with the texture of the dress a little bit."
  
  Adele even picked out the floral dress she wears, which is by Dolce & Gabbana.
• "Send My Love (To Your Lover)" went viral on TikTok in late 2024 thanks to a dance trend.