Songfacts®:

• On January 21, 2015, Adele offered her first Tweet of the year when she shared a link to Vancouver singer/songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr.'s "How Could You Babe," adding, "This is fantastic, click away."
  
  Adele later flew to Los Angeles to meet up with Jesso and the pair wrote this piano ballad together on American composer Philip Glass' piano. She recalled to NME: "It turned out he was a really big fan of mine – and he totally kept his cool together, being thrown in the deep end, for our first co-writing session... His grandparents were friends with Philip Glass, and Tobias had inherited Philip Glass's old piano. We wrote our song, 'When We Were Young,' on that piano."
• Adele told the story behind the song during a SiriusXM interview. "It was based on us being older, and being at a party at this house, and seeing everyone that you've ever fallen out with, everyone that you've ever loved, everyone that you've never loved, and stuff like that, where you can't find the time to be in each other lives," she explained. "And you're all thrown together at this party when you're like 50, and it doesn't matter and you have so much fun and you feel like you're 15 again. So that's the vibe of it really."
• A video was filmed by Paul Dugdale (Rolling Stones, Ed Sheeran). It shows Adele and her touring band performing the song at London's Church Studios, where some of 25 was recorded.
• Adele said during the 25 release party that this song, inspired by old friends, is the most meaningful song to her on the record.