Adele says her new album was recorded to help her nine-year-old son understand why she and his father got divorced.
"I wanted to explain to him through this record, when he's in his twenties or thirties, who I am and why I voluntarily chose to dismantle his entire life in the pursuit of my own happiness," the star told Vogue.
"It made him really unhappy sometimes. And that's a real wound for me that I don't know if I'll ever be able to heal," she added.
The 33-year-old pop superstar has given separate interviews to Vogue's British and American editions - her first for five years - as she prepares to release her highly anticipated fourth album.
It will be titled 30 - which is the age at which she married her long-term partner Simon Konecki, and then left him.
"My entire life fell apart and I had no warning of it," said the singer, acknowledging that she had "bit off a grenade" and threw it into her marriage.
On Tuesday, she released a short snippet of her forthcoming single, titled Easy On Me, which will be released in full on Friday, 15 October.
Explaining the lyrics, in which she sings "Go easy on me...", Adele said: "It's not like anyone's having a go at me, but it's like, I left the marriage. Be kind to me as well.
"It was the first song I wrote for the album and then I didn't write anything else for six months after because I was like, 'OK, well, I've said it all."
As she worked on the rest of the album, the music became a method of explaining things to their son Angelo when he's older, she said.
One song, described by Vogue as "an absolute belter of a relationship takedown", is "obviously about stuff that happened," Adele said, "but I wanted to put it on the album to show Angelo what I expect him to treat his partner like, whether it be a woman or a man or whatever.
"After going through a divorce, my requirements are sky-high. There's a very big pair of shoes to fill."
Despite previous reports that the often-secretive singer had married Konecki in 2016, she told the magazine they did not tie the knot until 2018.
"The timeline the press have of my relationship, my marriage, is actually completely wrong," she said. "We got married when I was 30… and then I left."
She didn't reveal how long it was until they separated, but said: "It wasn't very long." She filed for divorce in 2019.
Photo by Alasdair McLellan Caption: Adele told Vogue her new album is about the year "my entire life fell apart"