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Classic Recordings: Sade – Lover’s Rock

Eight years of silence, then eleven songs that sound like nothing else she had made. Lovers Rock is Sade's strangest and most durable record.

Lovers Rock, 2000

Sade — the band, not just Sade Adu — released Love Deluxe in 1992 and then disappeared for eight years. When they returned in November 2000, the record was markedly different: the smooth jazz surfaces of the 1980s were largely gone, replaced by acoustic guitar, brushed drums, dub bass and a great deal of empty space.

The title references lovers rock, the romantic strain of reggae that developed in Black British communities in the 1970s — Janet Kay, Carroll Thompson, Louisa Mark. Adu grew up in England and the reference is not decorative; the album's rhythmic feel and its bass-forward mix come directly from that tradition.

It won the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album and has quietly become the record a great many people consider her best.

What to listen for

"By Your Side" is the single and one of the most sincere love songs in her catalogue — no ambiguity, no distance, which is unusual for her.

"King of Sorrow" is the other pillar, and the one where the band's restraint is most audible. Listen to the drums: almost nothing, placed perfectly.

"Slave Song" and "Immigrant" are the political tracks and the reason this album is more substantial than its reputation as mood music suggests. "Immigrant" in particular — about a man arriving in a country that will not look at him — is one of the sharpest things she has written, and it was released a year before the political weather made it unavoidable.

"Flow" and "The Sweetest Gift" are the quietest, the latter written for her daughter and barely two minutes long.

"Somebody Already Broke My Heart" and "It's Only Love That Gets You Through" are the ones that reduce people.

Throughout, notice how much of the record is silence. The band — Stuart Matthewman, Andrew Hale, Paul Denman — have spent forty years demonstrating that the most powerful thing an arrangement can do is stop.

Go deeper

Love Deluxe (1992) is the other essential, and Soldier of Love (2010) is the late one.

For actual lovers rock: Janet Kay's "Silly Games," Carroll Thompson's Hopelessly in Love, and the Dennis Bovell productions that defined the genre. It is one of the great British musical inventions and is barely documented.

And for the band's other work, Sweetback — the instrumental project by Sade's musicians — is a genuine hidden gem.

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