FEATURE:
I Couldn’t Love You More
Sade’s Love Deluxe at Thirty
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IT is hard to follow up…
a trio of albums like Sade’s first three. Her stunning and celebrated debut Diamond Life was followed by Promise in 1985. Stronger Than Pride arrived in 1988. Her fourth album, Love Deluxe, came out into the world on 26th October, 1992 (in the U.S.; 1st November in the U.K.). I feel most critics really loved the first two albums. There was a bit more division for Stronger Than Pride, and Love Deluxe also split a few. That said, I feel Love Deluxe is a classic. Featuring timeless cuts like No Ordinary Love, this is Sade in the same sensational and regal form as in the early years of her career! Reaching ten in the U.K. and three in the U.S., Love Deluxe was a commercial success. I am not sure why any critics gave Love Deluxe anything less than full praise. It is a sumptuous and wonderful album from Sade, Led by the incredible Sade Adu, her wonderful and mesmeric vocals make the album a classic! I will come to a couple of extensive and praise-heavy features for the magnificent Love Deluxe. Some critics felt it was less potent and consistent than earlier Sade albums. Others noted how Love Deluxe packs less of a punch and has less of an impassioned rush as you might hear on Diamond Life. Perhaps smoother and more laid-back than some were expecting. I think that the superb Love Deluxe is a phenomenal album that warrants celebration ahead of its thirtieth anniversary on 26th October. I am excited, as the group are recording new music!
I will wrap up with some more thoughts about Sade’s 1992 pearl. First, Pitchfork provided their take on Love Deluxe in 2017. If you have not discovered the music of Sade or have not dipped into the back catalogue for a while, Love Deluxe is well worth a spin! Such a remarkable album framed and brought to life with the expressive, soulful, and sensational voice of their lead:
“In the mid-’80s, a new kind of jazz-pop emerged in the UK, mostly assembled by former members of post-punk and new wave bands. They blended jazz, bossa nova, soul, and some of the swollen negative space of dub into a sleek and buoyant composite. The sound was streamlined and modern, inasmuch as anything that scans as “modern” is just an effectively redesigned past. It was initially embodied in records by Working Week, the Style Council, Everything But the Girl, and—the only band included in this brief genre that, as of 2017, still records and plays together—Sade.
Sade began as a reduced lineup of the Latin jazz band Pride. Stuart Matthewman auditioned for Pride after reading an ad in a magazine seeking a saxophone player for a “fashion conscious jazz-funk band.” At the audition, he met Sade Adu, then one of Pride’s backup singers; after Matthewman joined the band, he and Adu started writing together. As Pride eventually fragmented, the band Sade solidified, with the final lineup including bassist Paul Denman and keyboardist Andrew Hale. During the sessions for their first record, Diamond Life, they would listen to Gil Scott-Heron, Marvin Gaye, and Nina Simone, and try to synthesize the sounds into a more seamless design. Often the mixture would produce crisp staircases of soul, like “Your Love Is King,” or liquid-crystal pop-funk, like “Hang on to Your Love.” Sometimes they slipped into a less material space; in live performances of the Diamond Life B-side “Love Affair With Life,” Hale’s piano, Matthewman’s saxophone, and Adu’s voice are held together by the song’s vast margins, given a ghostly shape by its silences. They were capable of producing a floating, haunted kind of music, and over time their attentions and their albums grew more absorbed by it. Just two albums later, on 1988’s Stronger Than Pride, songs like “I Never Thought I’d See the Day” and “Love Is Stronger Than Pride” seem to flow out of and recede back into a gently-constructed nowhere.
As their first U.S. Top 10 hit “Smooth Operator” described the jet-setting lifestyle of a debonair, dangerous, Don Juan-type, Sade came to signify a kind of cosmopolitan exotica—where one could travel to distant places on luxury airplanes, absorb an endless, glossy flow of champagne, and slowly sift through a hangover in a hotel bar. Their music was a portal through which one could effortlessly simulate such an experience, a virtual vacation in which the more severe physical edges of reality had been dissolved. Sade had also acquired, through their numerous love songs, the reputation of a generally romantic band. In reality, Adu’s songs are less romantic in form than they are glassy vehicles for a more introspective melancholy, seamless projections of love, devotion, and heartbreak that also seem to have just barely escaped the inner depth that produced them.
In 1992, Sade returned to the studio after a short break following their tour for Stronger Than Pride. They worked for four months, a shorter and less dislocated session than the ones that generated some of their previous recordings, and the album they made, Love Deluxe, is their most monolithic in sound. It is made of inhales. The album title comes from Adu’s concept of love: “The idea is that it’s one of the few luxury things that you can’t buy,” she said in an interview at the time. “You can buy any kind of love but you can’t get love deluxe.”
It’s this sense of blissful abstraction in which the album swims, a total slipstream of feeling and experience and longing in which one can lose themselves and their contexts. The band plays with an almost fluid dynamism, audible in the oceanic churn of Matthewman’s guitar on “No Ordinary Love,” or in the way Hale’s synth work tends to add long, drowsy auras to his piano chords. Matthewman is, in interviews, often quick to diminish the actual abilities of the band, and suggests they are guided less by supreme talent than by interplay. “I think one of the reasons we’ve been successful at what we do is that we’re all decent musicians, but we’re not great musicians,” he said. “I think we all play really well together.”
Sade had played against drum machines before, but Love Deluxe was the first time they recorded an album almost entirely without a live drummer, and the particular yawn and lurch of the programmed beats on Love Deluxe somewhat align it with the parallel development of trip-hop. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines had come out just a year earlier, and the distance between snare hits on songs like “No Ordinary Love” and “Cherish the Day” seems to open a space in which lushness and dread merge. (Trip-hop feels like a spiritual continuation of jazz-pop, but with the dub element having swallowed and warped everything else beyond recognition; it produced its jazziness less through polished holistic productions than through the harsh collision of samples.)
There’s also crispness, a vacuum-sealed quality to the percussion that links it to the Dallas Austin-produced R&B of the mid-’90s, e.g. Madonna’s “Secret.” The drums act as a skeleton around which the rest of the notes pulse, drift, and fuse into an immaculate surface, all of which feel like sensitive responses to the lunar gravity exerted by the band’s eponymous singer. The arrangements bend around Adu’s voice, its narcotic pull, the way that its range sounds finely sifted out of other potential vocal material, perfectly decanted.
By 1992, Adu had arrived at a particular economy in her expressions of desire and heartache; “No Ordinary Love” is a song about a relentless, almost sacrificial devotion, which seems to consume and replace the person giving it. “I gave you all that I had inside and you took my love/You took my love,” she sings as the band designs a kind of pulsing, amniotic fog around her vocal. In the music video, Adu plays a character that resembles the Little Mermaid; she sits on the ocean floor, reading a wedding magazine among great muscles of coral and fluttering plantlife. Lured by a sailor to the surface, she evolves legs and a wedding dress, and walks down a dock while throwing handfuls of rice over herself. She enters a dive bar, orders a glass of water, and pours salt into it, a visible gesture of survival which disconnects her from the people around her. She never encounters the sailor above water. It’s a perfect visual embodiment of a Sade song, in that it conveys the total isolation of desire, Adu’s mermaid caught not exactly in love, but in the continuum of fantasy and abstraction. In the end, she sits by the dock, consuming water from a bottle.
On Love Deluxe, Adu also writes her own character studies, though distinct from her earlier attempts in “Smooth Operator” and “Jezebel”; here she’s so thoroughly embedded in the perspectives that it becomes hard to distinguish her, or even them, from the feelings conveyed. “I collect ideas in my head all the time,” Adu said in an interview at the time. “The things that most depress you are often the things that you write about.” In “Feel No Pain,” she describes the suffocation and paralysis of unemployment; “Pearls” focuses on the trials of a woman in Somalia and the dignity of survival; “Like a Tattoo” forms itself out of the perspective of a war veteran Adu met in a Manhattan bar. “I remembered his hands,” she sings, “And the way the mountains looked/The light shot diamonds from his eyes.” It’s hard to tell whether Adu is remembering the soldier, or if she’s the soldier remembering someone he killed, or if the perspective has totally collapsed and is flowing back and forth unconsciously, less a documentary of something that happened than a kinetic sculpture of it, depicting an emotional vastness that floats somewhere beyond experience.
“Like a Tattoo” and “Pearls” are the most amorphous compositions on Love Deluxe; given their spartan instrumentation—one drumless, the other buoyed by strings—they feel as if they’ve been severed from their greater contexts and are floating in their own darknesses. But this darkness swells throughout the record, and marbles even the luminous compositions with shadow; it flows into Matthewman’s saxophone, which fills the margins of “Bullet Proof Soul” with smoke; it causes me to be unable to tell whether the guitar in “Cherish the Day” is spilling honeyed light into the song or is instead weeping.
Of course, this darkness could be native to the grammar Adu revisits most: love. This is a love with its genome completely unfolded, so that even when she sings of incandescent romantic delight, as on “Kiss of Life,” one is able to catch a glimpse of its origin, whether in loneliness, desire, or obsession. Conversely, in songs like “Cherish the Day” and “Bullet Proof Soul,” one is able to apprehend love’s expiration point, what it inevitably shores up against: its death. “It’s not hard to find love, it is to keep it,” Adu once said. “It’s something which is like [one of] the more mysterious things in life. It’s like death and it’s like birth, and it can’t really be completely explained”.
I want to keep it in 2017. Albumism explained why Love Deluxe was such a remarkable album on its twenty-fifth anniversary. Whereas some give Love Deluxe a few lines or are a little lukewarm, there are those that dive deep inside a stunning album. Love Deluxe still sounds sumptuous thirty years later:
“Co-produced by the band’s longtime studio confidante Mike Pela, who has also blessed projects by other purveyors of cool melodica like Maxwell and Everything But the Girl, Love Deluxe doesn’t depart from the musical blueprint Sade developed as they rose to sophisticated pop prominence in the latter half of the ‘80s. Not that we’d ever want their music to stray from the standard, when their signature sound is so distinctive and endlessly enthralling. “We don’t have any rules,” group co-founder and multi-instrumentalist Stuart Matthewman admitted to Ebony in 2012. “We have a sound that only the four of us make. Part of the sound is not overplaying; it’s sort of minimalistic. There aren’t a bunch of big fancy solos or big chord changes. We like to keep things simple so it resonates.” And the streamlined, sonically sublime Love Deluxe resonates profoundly.
Loosely inspired by the vicissitudes of frontwoman Sade Adu’s six-year marriage to the Spanish film director Carlos Pliego (which ended in 1995), as well as the band’s heightened social conscience at the turn of the new decade, Love Deluxe is a stirring celebration of the human spirit, both its strength and fragility. Coupled with the expert, seemingly effortless ensemble musicianship of Matthewman, Paul Denman (bass) and Andrew Hale (keys), Adu’s captivating contralto once again caresses and comforts weary souls and vulnerable hearts across the LP’s eight vocal tracks, beginning with the insistent and intimate album-opening lead single “No Ordinary Love.” Evoking the desperation of trying to secure an elusive love, the song begins with one of the most devastating intros ever, as Sade sings, “I gave you all the love I got / I gave you more than I could give / I gave you love / I gave you all that I have inside / And you took my love / You took my love.”
The theme of unreciprocated love resurfaces seven songs later on the dense, drum-machine driven torch song “Bullet Proof Soul,” which doubles as Adu’s proclamation of redemption and resilience, as she refuses to allow the emotional bullets of a wayward lover to penetrate her spirit, admitting near the song’s conclusion that “I came in like a lamb / But I intend to leave like a lion.”
Not all is doom and gloom when it comes to romance, however, as the band craft three of their most evocative and enduring love songs to date in the middle passage of the album’s sequencing. Paramount among these is the wonderful “Kiss of Life,” the third single largely propelled by Denman’s prominent bass groove and Adu’s endearingly sweet lyrics. I’ve adored this song since the first time my ears were seduced by it, so it came as no surprise to my wife that I dedicated it to her on our wedding day (for the record, her choice for me was Katie Melua’s acoustic version of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven”). When Adu declares, “There must have been an angel by my side / Something heavenly came down from above / He led me to you / He led me to you,” I can’t help but think about the life-altering moment that I first met my wife-to-be that evening back in October 2005. Pretty sure that the sky over Brooklyn was indeed full of love that night.
Accentuated by Matthewman’s saxophone flourishes throughout, the subdued “I Couldn’t Love You More” is Adu’s ardent articulation of fidelity to her paramour. On the soaring “Cherish the Day,” the fourth and final single released from the album, a wistful Adu sings of finding a love so supreme that nothing in this life or beyond can ever compete (“If you were mine / I wouldn’t want to go to heaven”). “If I had to pick one it would be ‘Cherish the Day,’” she confided when prompted to choose a personal favorite from Love Deluxe during a 1992 interview with the accomplished journalist Michael A. Gonzales. “But I don’t know why. I just like it. I think it’s really quite deep, but at the same time it’s a love song. It’s funny, most of the songs I can’t tell you if I really like them or not; it’s really hard to be objective about it. But, ‘Cherish the Day,’ I know if I heard it on the radio I would say, ‘God, this is good. Who is this?’ The rest of them, I don’t know.”
Three songs expand Sade’s thematic focus beyond the central concepts of love gained and love lost, showcasing the band’s appreciation and empathy for the human condition. Percussive second single “Feel No Pain” is a compassionate call-to-arms that reminds us to treat the poverty-stricken with the dignity and decency they deserve, while encouraging us to do what we can to ease people’s suffering in times of financial turmoil and family upheaval.
A powerful narrative of a poor Somalian woman foraging for food to feed her daughter, the symphonic, strings-laden “Pearls” finds Adu cleverly juxtaposing the material indulgences so many take for granted with the fundamental human needs that define the protagonist’s struggle and bravery. Introduced in the opening verse, the imagery of the pearls—revealed to represent grains of rice later in the song—reinforces the often stark difference in what people seek and value, depending on the life circumstances that fate has bestowed upon them.
Inspired by a conversation Adu once had with a man in New York City and imbued with Matthewman’s acoustic, flamenco style guitar work, the hauntingly beautiful “Like a Tattoo” examines the emotional devastation of war and the permanent, guilt-ridden imprint of regret that many embroiled in battle feel for the entirety of their lives (“Like the scar of age / Written all over my face / The war is still raging inside of me / I still feel the chill / As I reveal my shame to you / I wear it like a tattoo / I wear it like a tattoo / I wear it like a tattoo”).
The album concludes with the atmospheric, multi-layered instrumental jam “Mermaid” that conjures imagery of underwater exploration through its ambient textures, a preview of the sounds that would appear four years later on Denman, Hale and Matthewman’s debut album recorded under the Sweetback moniker and released in 1996 during the eight-year interim between Love Deluxe and Lovers Rock (2000)
If ever there was a band whose musical output embodies the notion of “quality over quantity,” it’s unquestionably Sade. Throughout the past thirty-three years, the group has delivered just six studio albums, and half of these have arrived in the past twenty-five years. Celebrated together, Sade’s recorded repertoire—while sparse relative to other artists who are prone to falling victim to the “haste makes waste” approach to recording—is one of the most consistently revelatory and rewarding discographies you’ll ever lay your ears on. And for my money, Love Deluxe remains their magnum opus, its unequivocal brilliance still shining as bright as ever two and a half decades on”.
I wanted to highlight the brilliance of Sade’s Love Deluxe as it is approaching thirty years. Although some may not consider it to be her finest album, it is most definitely a terrific work that features some of her best songs. I would implore people to listen to the album today and lose yourself in its wonder and incredible beauty. The mighty and immense Love Deluxe is…
A remarkable album.