Adele and Beyoncé Had the Sweetest Celebratory Moment at the 2023 Grammys

Years after Adele and Beyoncé went viral for the way Adele gave her Album of the Year award to Beyoncé onstage during the 2017 Grammys ceremony, the two women united at the 2023 Grammys. Both are nominated for Album of the Year again, Adele for 30 and Beyoncé for Renaissance.

They posed together in the ceremony with Lizzo and also popped some champagne to celebrate together as Beyoncé broke the record for the most Grammys won by any artist. Photographers captured the sweet moments.

For context, Adele is a huge Beyoncé fan. In her 2017 Grammys speech, Adele refused to accept the Grammy for 25 over Beyoncé’s Lemonade. She said, “I can’t possibly accept this award, and I’m very humbled and very grateful and gracious, but my life is Beyoncé, and the album to me, the Lemonade album, Beyoncé, was so monumental and so well thought out. And so beautiful and soul-bearing and we all got to see another side of you that you don’t always let us see, and we appreciate that. And all us artists adore you. You are our light. And the way that you make me and my friends feel, the way you make my Black friends feel, is empowering, and you make them stand up for themselves. And I love you. I always have. And I always will. I appreciate it.”

To Vogue in October 2021, Adele explained that she had a private talk with Beyoncé after that moment, going to Beyoncé’s dressing room after the show. The room was cleared out and Adele recalled, “I just said to her, like, the way that the Grammys works and the people who control it at the very, very top—they don’t know what a visual album is. They don’t want to support the way that she’s moving things forward with her releases and the things that she’s talking about.”

Lemonade deserved to win “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,” Adele told the magazine. “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.”

Adele said she got her Grammy in the mail later and “it got broken when it was getting sent to me.” So she paid tribute to Beyoncé with it, adding a very specific fruit to the broken part of the trophy: “There’s a lemon in it.”