Top 5 Sade Songs

Until a new album arrives, this will suffice.

No Ordinary Love

What are favorite songs, anyway? Moments in time. Markers of mortality, the transcendence that is possible.

A song enters your life and breathes for you. The ambition, the bass line, the sentiment that something special and unique lies \just beyond your grasp—this song is always me one step in the future, the quest of becoming.

Rather than frustration, such a sensation is the ultimate embodiment of hope. It pulls you out of yourself, for a moment. When it’s over you feel reborn.

Slave Song

There are many Sades, and mine is dub.

The sheer pain that can be expressed through song—and redemption. They travel together. Possibly none as beautifully as in her voice.

I see them gathered, see them on the shore
I turned to look once more
And he who knows me not
Takes me to the belly of darkness

The Sweetest Taboo

But I digress.

Dub Sade, yes, but her popular offerings represent some of the best pop music in history. She has gone through stages and every one is elegant.

The scars of the eighties—premature drum machines, brightly tuned synthesizers, unfettered capitalism—they hold no sway in the hands of mastery.

What is bitter turns sweet.

Feel No Pain

That bass line.

Pain is a necessary component in life. Rob Boddice captures it perfectly in Pain: A Very Short Introduction:

To see pain, suffering, anguish, grief is, most of the time, to understand it and enter into it.

Sade is both invoker and healer, blade and balm. They too often travel together.

Everything else, sure, but that bass line. Where it takes you.

By Your Side (Cottonbelly Remix)

A remix would normally be sacrilege on such a list.

But.

In the hands of Stuart Matthewman, aka Cottonbelly—Sade’s longtime saxophonist and guitar player—even a classic gains currency when reformed. None of her catalog ages, a feat beyond time.

That’s where I’m carried to: a space where I can let my guard down and be content.