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The singer (who released a greatest-hits album in 1994) says she waited for calm to settle over her life before getting back together with her band and beginning work on Lovers Rock. "I've just really been living my life and waiting for a peaceful moment where I could go into the studio and concentrate again," she says. "When I go in, I like everything in my life to be very peaceful because I can't split myself up. I have to be able to just focus on that one issue and then put myself in 100%."
Motherhood also prompted a shift in her priorities. "It changes the way you work. I used to just go into a studio and just stay there until the album was done. I could be completely selfish and immerse myself," she says. "[Being a mother] made me stronger as a person. To be a mother you must be strong. Even if you don't feel it, you have to pretend."
She doesn't have to pretend to be resolute. Born Helen Folasade Adu in Ibadan, Nigeria, the daughter of a white English nurse and a Nigerian teacher, she's been overcoming obstacles--cultural and artistic--virtually her entire life. Sade says she has always felt "accepted," but when she was 11 and living in England, she recalls being surrounded by white schoolboys and assailed with taunts such as, "Go black home, you'll be all white in the morning."
"I was perfectly happy about being black and didn't consider it an insult," she says. "So I just singled one of them out--he had really lank, greasy hair and acne--and I said to him, 'What about the way you look? You should look in the mirror. I know who I am.' Once they were afraid of being singled out and humiliated, they left me alone."
Lovers Rock draws deeply on Sade's past. It's a solemn album, and although not religious, its soulful vocals and reggae-inflected grooves have the quiet power of prayer. In the meditative song Immigrant, Sade revisits the discrimination her father faced when he came to England. "He didn't know what it was to be black," she sings, "'Til they gave him his change but didn't want to touch his hand." On Slave Song, she draws inspiration from the suffering of her African ancestors: "Teach my beloved children who've been enslaved/ to reach for the light continually." But just as prayers are ultimately about love, Sade's CD is suffused with that emotion as well. Not groping adolescent love but reflective, mature love in various forms. The Sweetest Gift explores love between a mother and a daughter (Sade wrote it for Ila); King of Sorrow is a pessimistic take on breakups; and By Your Side is a tribute to friendship.
Critics sometimes dismiss Sade's music as being too soft, too bland, too lovelorn. Sade says her critics should adjust the volume on their stereos, that her music sounds better when it's "played loudly." She lets tiny fluctuations in her music carry emotional weight, and she wants listeners to hear the particulars. After all, isn't love best measured in miniature?--a look across a breakfast table, a forgotten anniversary, a hug that lingers past hello.