“Strangers By Nature” is a homage to Judy Garland and opens with Adele taking flowers to the cemetery of her own heart and wondering if she’ll ever learn “to nurture what I’ve done.” She co-wrote the song with Ludwig Göransson, an Oscar-winning Swedish composer who worked on Black Panther and with Childish Gambino.

They worked on “Strangers” after she had watched the Renée Zellweger-led Garland biopic, “Judy”, and wondered why no one wrote songs like that anymore. She calls the track her “Death Becomes Her” moment, alluding to the camp classic starring Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn as two vengeful, youth-obsessed frenemies. Through “Strangers,” Adele acknowledges being a bit of a “hot mess.”

In her November 2021 interview with Brittany Spanos for Rolling Stone magazine, Adele revealed that the album’s tracklist is almost a chronological chain of events. The song is short and whimsical, is so unlike anything she’s done before that she almost thought about giving it to someone else to sing or sample.