Adele Holds Her Broken Grammy Together With a Lemon in Honor of Beyoncé

When Adele won Album of the Year at the 2017 Grammy Awards, she took a moment to praise Beyoncé in her acceptance speech. Adele said Lemonade, which was also nominated for the top prize, was her favorite album of the year. Afterward, she spoke to Beyoncé about how much the album meant to her. When Adele took her award home, she paid tribute to Beyoncé in the way she displayed it.

Adele honors Beyoncé with her Grammy award

Though Adele’s 25 received critical acclaim, she expected and hoped that Album of the Year would go to Beyoncé’s Lemonade. She made a point to tell Beyoncé how much she loved her album after the ceremony.

“My personal opinion is that Beyoncé definitely should have won,” she told Vogue. “I just got this feeling: I f***ing won it. I got overwhelmed, with, like, I will have to go and tell her how much her record means to me.”

She shared why she thought Lemonade was the best album that year.

“For my friends who are women of color, it was such a huge acknowledgment for them, of the sort of undermined grief that they go through,” she said. “For her to nail that on the head, and also bring in the entire globe? I was like, This album is my album, she just knows what I’m going through. That album was not written for me. But yet I could still feel like, This is the biggest gift.”

While giving her acceptance speech, a visibly shaken Adele twisted her Grammy in her hands and accidentally broke off a part of it. Luckily for her, the award was just a mock-up; artists receive the real thing in the mail after the ceremony. Unluckily, the real one arrived broken. Adele used this as an opportunity to honor Beyoncé. She wedged a lemon into the broken part to hold it together and put it on display.

“It got broken when it was getting sent to me,” she said. “There’s a lemon in it.”

Beyoncé won Album of the Year in 2025 for Cowboy Carter.