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Lovers Rock is the first collection
of new work by Sade in eight years. But it's a
record that says less about those years gone by than
the promise and vitality of the here and now. It's
an album that's by turns moving, elegiac and
beautiful. Like the tender, acoustic guitar-driven
first single, 'By Your Side', a song about the
tensile strength of love, it is music stripped back
to its essential elements: voice, melody, and
meticulously arranged instrumentation. The result is
a record of bare, sometimes startlingly, immediacy.
But then Helen Folasade Adu is a woman who has never
had anything to hide. Born in Ibadan, Nigeria and
raised in Colchester, Essex, where she moved at 4
after her English mother separated from her Nigerian
father, she's spent her life trying to do what feels
right, honest and true. Because by comparison
nothing else has seemed as important. When she was
growing up, Sade would listen to soul artists like
Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway and Marvin Gaye.
Singers uniquely attuned to the complex
sensibilities of heartache and hope, who were
skilled enough to create from those feelings,
something lasting and transcendent. Still she didn't
think about singing herself.
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