Adele

A single SNL appearance in October 2008 moved her debut album from No. 40 to No. 1 on iTunes in under 24 hours. That kind of momentum doesn't happen on resume alone. She'd been signed at 18 off a MySpace demo and released 19 earlier that year. 21 in 2011 was a different scale entirely. It topped the Billboard 200 for 24 weeks, won six Grammys including Album of the Year, and became one of the best-selling albums in chart history. Getting dumped, it turned out, was extremely good for her career.

Her Las Vegas residency, Weekends with Adele, became the kind of show where people flew in from other continents for a set where half the draw was watching her cry and give unsolicited relationship advice between songs. The show confirmed her public standing: whatever she does, audiences treat it as an event. She's said she wants a break and plans to explore other creative work when the residency ends. There's no fifth album announced. She's earned the right to make her audience wait.

She wrote 30 to explain her divorce to her son Angelo when he's old enough to understand it. She told Vogue she wanted him to know 'who I am and why I voluntarily chose to dismantle his entire life in the pursuit of my own happiness.' Most pop stars would have a PR team vetting that sentence for years. She grew up in Tottenham, raised by a teenage single mother, and has said watching Pink in concert is what first made her want to be a singer, which doesn't quite fit the Ella Fitzgerald and Etta James records she found at 14 but here we are.