![]() ![]() “Just another day and nothin’s any good,” as the song also goes. But simply feeling the weight of it with the same ferocity that love could once be felt. Emotional suffering, too, can be an achievement. “King Of Sorrow” opens with the line “I’m crying everyone’s tears,” and it gets to the heart of what the album is asking a listener to believe. “By Your Side” is a song about love but also a song about exhaustion, about the impossibility of repeated lifting – a song that is romantic, that is platonic, that is motherly. It is clinical and maybe entirely devoid of romance when laid out this way, but the best Sade love songs treat love as what it can feel like sometimes: a series of negotiations, a measurement of staying against leaving, an understanding that some wonderful union might one day crumble but weighing its worthwhile goodness in the meantime. The moments where a person isn’t exactly sure how they got to where they got to, but they have come to fear what might rest on the other side more than their rigorous certainty. ![]() The parts that feel like work, that feel impossible. Not always the glamourous in-progress stages, either. The best Sade love songs tackle the in-progress stage of the relationship. ![]() It is possible to be obsessed with or curious about romance and not be a romantic yourself. “By Your Side” is both one of the great album-opening tracks of all time, and also makes plain what I have always loved most about Sade as not only a writer of language, but as someone who has always seemed to move through the world with an openness, a comfort with the possibility of intense feeling. The result of this reckoning was Lovers Rock, which was recorded in a little under a year. A story about love, about a public life, about trust. The covers of this trilogy of albums, released over 18 years, tell their own story, even before the music does. She is, instead, facing a small bit of desolate land that stretches into a body of water. On the cover of Soldier Of Love, Adu is turned away from the camera entirely. On the cover of Lovers Rock, we are met with a profile of the artist, her face shifted away from the camera, and her gaze turned downward. It is a pose that is vulnerable and empowering – a symbol that the pursuit of love begins and ends with the self. On Love Deluxe, Adu has her arms wrapped around herself, eyes closed and head tilted back. On each of them, Sade Adu shifts further and further away from the camera’s gaze. Even the covers of the albums tell a story of the latter. Love Deluxe, Lovers Rock, and Soldier Of Love are albums I consider to be linked by their commitment to endurance and retreat. I have always found it interesting to consider the work of Sade in two distinct trilogies: Diamond Life, Promise, and Stronger Than Pride make up the first, and then comes what I think of as the Lover’s Trilogy. Never As Good As The First Time (03:56)ġ4. ![]()
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