Though someone of you might want to read this, Sade interviews are so hard to come by.

The Grammy Award-winning singer has come back stronger than ever, with a banging CD and refreshing views on music, motherhood, the fame game--and why she plays by her own rules

"I'm not so good at being a public figure," says the singer Sade in that deep, husky, accented voice that has helped so many of us mark the great and not-so-great times of our lives. She sighs as she attempts to explain what has kept her away from her art and fans for eight years. "I just feel, for me as a person, it is essential to be a part of the world," she says. "To actually be with family and friends. Not to be removed from the essential stuff of life."

Today, at 42, she is still effortlessly elegant. The simple pulled-back hair and those exotic features set off by a generous mouth are still instantly familiar, iconic. But now her look is as pared down as the music on her recent CD, Lovers Rock. And on the day we meet, missing are the trademark large hoop earrings, slender pants and wide belts. She wears a white tee and a black nylon hoodie over a long black skirt and moves with the easy grace of a woman who has figured out the things that matter most.

Backstage at The Tonight Show, she is calm and warm, laughing easily and often. She breaks into a story about arriving at her hotel in Los Angeles and discovering she had the bags of someone named Eric. "I don't know who Eric is, but he lives in Nevada, and I've had his clothes at my hotel since yesterday," she says. "I was like, `Oh no, Eric's not even my size.'" Fortunately, Eric left Sade's bags at the airport, or according to her, he would have had some explaining to do. "Eric," Sade says, laughing, "has something changed about you? Was it London that did that to you, Eric?"

In person she seems nothing like the remote, sophisticated siren who has stared back at us from her platinum-selling CDs and groundbreaking videos for nearly two decades. She is accessible, real.

"I think the fans get it," says the Grammy Award-winning singer. "They feel [who I am] in the music. They feel something about me from the songs, and the rest doesn't really matter."

The "rest" would include the fame game and its ugly downside. Although Sade has been dogged by rumors since her 1984 debut CD, Diamond Life, between the recording of 1992's Love Deluxe and 2000's Lovers Rock the rumors about her physical and mental state have mushroomed: depression, divorce, drugs--painful, serious, complicated stuff. Then there was that run-in with Jamaican authorities that landed on the front pages of international tabloids. Sade is philosophical about all of it. "I've heard things that are sort of hurtful and spiteful, but I think it just comes with the territory," she says. "I cannot be in the position I'm in and expect everything to be wonderful. It's life, and some things are good. It's like one day chicken, next day feathers."

For now, things are definitely "chicken" with Sade, and many naysayers who wondered whether she could come back after such an extended hiatus are eating crow. Late last year, Lovers Rock, which features reggae-influenced love songs, debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard album chart, selling about 370,000 units in the United States. Publicity-shy, Sade reached this height without ever making an appearance on MTV's TRL (Total Request Live), Live With Regis or any of the requisite top-market drive-time morning radio programs. Even after such a long absence, her voice, lyrics and melodies keep fans coming back for more. (Indeed, even her backlist of songs sold roughly 300,000 last year in the United States.) "It's the rare artist of any genre who can put out a record and people just want it because of who she is," says Sonia Murray, music critic for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "She can be away for eight years because no one else can do what she does."

A lot has happened in the music world while Sade was away. Major record companies have downsized or folded. A steady hit parade of sisters, pop-music queens and hip-hop It Girls have come and gone, while White teen sensations continue to claim ground left vacant by contemporary R&B. White boys mixing angst and rage serve up backpack rap to suburban schoolkids, while gifted singer-songwriters have had to take a backseat to the three or four music producers whose numbing cut-and-paste songs dominate urban and pop radio playlists.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with Sade. She built a career by being off-trend, by taking a music-first approach. Helen Folasade Adu began singing by accident in the early 1980's, before some of her newer fans were even born. After studying fashion at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, she worked as a fledgling designer, stylist and model, sometimes scrounging behind couches to come up with cigarette money. (She would later sing about those salad days, asking, "When am I going to make a living?") When friends started a band, they asked her to fill in as a vocalist just until they could find a "proper" singer. She discovered an affinity for songwriting and later began singing with the Latin funk collective Pride before forming her own group with fellow Pride members Stuart Matthewman, Andrew Hale and Paul Spencer Denman. Beginning in 1984 with its first Top Ten R&B hit, "Your Love Is King," the four-member band, which then began to call itself Sade, released pop and slow-groove hit after hit, including "Smooth Operator," "The Sweetest Taboo," "Never As Good As the First Time," "Paradise" and "Nothing Can Come Between Us." There were five albums, plus The Best of Sade (released in 1994). Forty million records sold worldwide. It was no ordinary love.

In the go-go, glam-rock 1980's dominated by Prince, Cyndi Lauper, Michael Jackson, Duran Duran and the like, Sade was an anomaly--this sleekly sophisticated biracial girl with the distinctive deep, smoky voice. And just like that, the band hit. For its lead singer, there was overnight success at 25. Madonna, who came along about the same time as Sade, reinvents herself with every project. Others have danced around the periphery of our cultural and musical psyche without ever finding a home, or they have become a part of the oldies-but-goodies crowd. A few become divas, their personas merely another instrument. But Sade has always managed to sidestep all that. She is antidiva. Or perhaps it is the others who are unSade.

Like Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin before her, Sade became, for many of us, the voice of a generation, immortalizing transcendent songs of love and loss--of pain she's known, and we have, too.

Sometimes art imitates life. When she recorded Love Deluxe in 1991, Sade had just moved to London from Madrid after a searing and dramatic breakup with her husband of three years, Spanish documentary filmmaker Carlos Scola. Back in London, she cared for an ailing relative and shunned the limelight for a while. Then, in 1996, she met her "rasta man," Jamaican record producer Bobby Morgan, and the following year, she had Ila, the couple's now 4-year-old daughter, who stays with Sade's mother in London when Sade is out on tour.

Now, smoking a cigarette, dangling a white loafer off one foot, the singer drifts, toggling easily from the lows of fame to the highs of motherhood, and all the life in between. "When you're in front of the mirror putting on your makeup to do a show, for Ila that means I would rather put my makeup on than be with her," she reflects. "I'd rather she's not with me if I'm not giving her my attention, because then she sees it as a choice. In her eyes, Mommy is doing that rather than playing with her. And you can't put your makeup on and play hide and seek." Keeping Ila in London, Sade says, gives her daughter stability and routine. "But I really don't want to be away from her."

Sade's music has always been intimate, but childbirth has both deepened that intimacy and expanded it. Her song "The Sweetest Gift" is about wanting to protect her daughter. "It's about what the universe gives and how the universe has given me Ila," she shares. "And what I hope for her is that she has that love for the world and those things that you can't buy."

Things like the sanctity of family and the wisdom of elders resonate with Sade. In naming her daughter, for example, she prayed for guidance from the spirit of her late Nigerian grandmother. Then she opened a book of names and found Ila twice. Her Nigerian roots even inform her music. Lovers Rock has a track called "Immigrant," which addresses the humiliation and indignities that her deceased father, like countless other transplanted Africans in Great Britain, experienced. Sade herself hasn't been back to her birthplace in about ten years. "I am Nigerian," she says emphatically. "I know it, I feel it." Still, she says pulling on a cigarette while playing with a lock of stray hair, "it's disappointing and it's worrying what people have to endure on a daily basis living in Nigeria. It hasn't been great, you know. They've been down a rugged road. It's been a hard journey for everybody."

While Sade can appear warmly approachable, her boundaries remain clearly marked. She says she and Ila's father are still together, though she declines to elaborate. "We made a pact that I'll never discuss our relationship in any way," the singer says. "I really don't like talking about my relationships in general." She knows that the more you give, the more people want. And that once you put personal information about yourself out there you can never get it back. That's partly why she doesn't like interviews. She believes most people understand that her reserve is an act of self-preservation, that fame drives her batty. Take that incident in Jamaica.

"I'm actually an international fugitive of the law," she says tongue in cheek. She is referring to the 1997 incident in Jamaica, where she was charged with reckless driving, arrested and now faces a court appearance if she returns. "I was with my mother and my child, and we were stationary at the time of committing the offense," she says. Sade contends a corrupt police official was looking for a bribe and she refused him. Then she refused to sign a document saying she had been driving recklessly. The story spiraled through the media, morphing and developing into something unrecognizable. Through it all, Sade continued to do what she loves best: music and motherhood.

Speaking of motherhood, Sade brings out some pictures from her life. These are not posed studio portraits, but the dog-eared candids she takes with her on tour: Baby Ila running full-speed in diapers and a jaunty hat; a family celebration with laughing faces; a distant rasta man with long, flowing locks; a close-up of her daughter's face. As she offers up each precious image for inspection, Sade is beaming.

Later she heads across the parking lot of the NBC studios to a waiting car. A warm, portentous southern California breeze blows. Tomorrow it's another taping, then on to New York, Puerto Rico, Paris and London. As she reaches the car, a group of three or four sister fans catch sight of her and begin calling out. "We love you," they say as they scramble to gain toeholds in the open spaces of the heavy iron gates. They want to see more of her, to thank her for the music that for almost two decades has reverberated through their lives.

Sade waves and puts her hand over her heart. She bows and blows them kisses and smiles widely. Then she slips into a car that pulls off. They don't know when, or if, they'll hear from her again, but it's okay. She has left them more than enough to cherish.

Lonnae O'Neal Parker is a writer for the Style section of The Washington Post

COPYRIGHT 2001 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group

Just yours.

These people don't exist in my reality.

i love that woman

not one bad album.

not one bad song.

her new one is waaaaay overdue.

I love that woman too, and I love most of her songs.

But I hated Lovers Rock with a passion! The whole thing just sounded so canned to me, very sample-heavy and not even a group effort.

I can't wait for whatever comes next.

I love her too.

I think that these few posts so far on this thread say it all. They are a microcosm of what those who appreciate music feel: Love for Sade.

Rudy said:

Thanks.

Sade´s cool!

I still have that issue of Essence...