| Product Summary | | Label: Sony/epic | | UPC: 00696998518520 | | Release Date: 11/14/2000 | | Buy.com Sku: 60448649 | | Item#: MG92PY | Format:  CD |
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(C) (P) 2000 Sony Music Entertainment (UK) Ltd.
| This 11 track album is her sixth album and her latest release in 8 years. Her previous albums includes Diamond Life, Promise, Stronger Than Pride, Love Deluxe, and Best of Sade. The first hot title is "By Your Side" and another mentionable title is "Somebody Already Broke My Heart". Producer, songwriter, and singer... Sade, is bound to rock lovers on this album.
"...a CD full of aural comfort food." Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly
| | Album Notes and Credits |
Notes & Personnel Info |  | Personnel: Sade Adu (vocals); Leroy Osbourne (vocals); Stuart Matthewman (guitar, woodwinds, programming); Andy Nice (cello); Andrew Hale (keyboards, programming); Janusz Podrazik (keyboards); Paul S. Denman (bass); Karl Vanden Bossche (percussion). | | Recorded between September 1999 & August 2000. | | LOVERS ROCK won the 2002 Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Album. | | Personnel: Sade (vocals); Leroy Osbourne, Sade Adu (vocals); Stuart Matthewman (guitar, woodwinds, programming); Andy Nice (cello); Andrew Hale (keyboards, programming); Janusz Podrazik (keyboards); Karl Vanden (percussion). | | Recording information: Deliverance Studio (08/1999-08/2000); Sarn Hook End, El Cortijo (08/1999-08/2000). | | Photographer: Albert Watson. | | Arranger: Sade. | | Examining the career of former model/fashion design student Helen Folasade Adu, it's apparent that the span between studio albums increased exponentially. Eight years after LOVE DELUXE, the original members of Sade's band regrouped and here recapture the magic of the former ensemble. The vocals on LOVERS ROCK are unmistakably sensual and enchanting. Guitarist Stuart Matthewman steers clear of the crunchy electric sound that was his signature on LOVE DELUXE, the one exception being "Somebody Already Broke My Heart," which has some tasty understated percussive palm muting in the choruses. | | From an instrumental perspective, LOVERS ROCK leans a bit more to the electronic side, but technology doesn't dampen the atmosphere and simple beauty of the music. Not surprisingly, the focus continues to be the sweet, often mournful melodies of a unique pop vocalist. |
Producer: Mike Pela; Sade |
Engineer: Andrew Davies; Mike Pela |
| | Compilation Appearances |
| | Associated Artists and Works |
| | Technical Info | | Release Date : 11/14/2000 | | Original Release Date : 2000 | | Catalog ID : 85185 | | Label : Epic (USA) | | Number of Discs : 1 | | Studio/Live : Studio | | Mono/Stereo : Stereo | | SPAR Code : n/a | | UPC : 00696998518520 |
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| | Professional Reviews | | Spin (1/01, pp.113-4)
- 8 out of 10 - "...An airy album, demo-like in its simplicity....Sade has never put out anything quite so ephemeral....practically hanging in the air like mist....devastating..."Q (12/00, pp.132-3)
- 3 stars out of 5 - "...Attractively bespoke..." Mixmag (12/00, p.181)
- 5 out of 5 - "...Her glorious, bretahy vocals and raw and emotive production are as untainted and timeless as ever..." Vibe (12/00, pp.195-6)
- 4 stars out of 5 - "...proves that such a remarkable voice can survive 8 years between albums and still sound vital. Her voice is controlled, elegant, and radiantly cool - so beautiful, so simple, so necessary..." Mojo (Publisher)
(12/00, pp.110-1)
- "...[Her] appealingly blank vocals are intricately layered and the delicate, spacious arrangements...underline her desolate quality....it still goes well with cocktails..." Billboard 9 of 10
It's been a while...since Sade's last collection of new material. ...To say that the singer's loyal fans are foaming at the mouth for Lovers Rock would be a major understatement. Fortunately for all involved, the sterling set is signature Sade. Without question, she remains the consummate smooth operator--and quite frankly, her fans wouldn't want her any other way.
Rolling Stone 9 of 10
Lovers Rock is her first [original album] in eight years, and guess what--it sounds exactly like Sade... Needless to say, it's also pretty damn good, because this smooth operator shrewdly sticks to the tricks she'd already mastered before turning pro.... The point is that amazingly languid, permanently post-coital voice: the woman sounds like she had one big cosmic orgasm twenty years ago and has been recovering ever since.... - Rob Sheffield
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| | Bio | | 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; rather, she studied fashion, only signing on as vocalist when a couple of old school friends started a band "until they found a proper singer". From there to singing with early eighties Latin funk Collective Pride, she discovered a rare delight in songwriting. It was while she was with that group that she wrote "Smooth Operator", and it was from there that Sade abandoned diffidence and finally stepped centre stage to form her own group with fellow pride members Stuart Matthewman, Andrew Hale and Paul Spencer Denman. In 1984 their first single "Your Love Is King" became a top ten hit, and quite abruptly Sade herself became an icon. If during the eighties, she seemed to embody newly discovered values of aspiration and elegance, there was, and remains, something more fundamental to account for Sade's popularity. Her music has a resilience that belies its apparent softness. It stays in the heart and in the head long after the last notes have fallen silent, in the same way that the embers of a love affair never truly go cold. That's why, just a year after the first single, she became one of the few recording artists ever to appear on the cover of Time magazine, because from the very beginning her music transcended the pop moment. Indeed, with the release in 1984 of her debut Diamond Life, Sade was speaking to a global audience. The album spent 98 weeks on the UK charts and 81 weeks on the Billboard charts. Sade received a BPI Award for best album and a Grammy for best new artist. After Diamond Life came 1985's Promise, the rich, evocative second album that yielded hits such as "Is It A Crime" and "The Sweetest Taboo". There has been intense public curiosity about Sade's private life, as though its uncovering will reveal how she comes to make such compelling music. But modern celebrity culture, with its prurient demands for increasingly intimate revelations, has its perils. And sensing these from early on, Sade has tried simply to remain true to herself by only doing interviews and only making music when she has something to say. Wary of the press clamor that was building in the eighties, the singer relocated temporarily to Madrid, although she strongly refuted "the myth that I'm a shy, reclusive diva. I'm not shy or reclusive. I just spend my time with people rather than journalists." Three years later, she and the group recorded the hit Stronger Than Pride album. In the album's wake came a pan-continental tour across Europe, Australia and Japan that included Sade's first full-scale arena tour of America. Throughout their history, the group have always attracted a diverse, multi-racial audience who are drawn by the band's open-minded approach to music. Sade has created dance floor classics, songs for film soundtracks, radio favorites and late night love anthems, at the same time refusing to be classified simply as a pop group, an r&b act, a soul band or anything else as one-dimensional. Instead, like the multi-cultural London streets the group hails from, their music has thrived by embracing diversity as a guiding principle. In 1992, Sade released Love Deluxe, a bold, emotionally honest album that won huge critical and commercial acclaim. In America it spent 90 weeks on the Billboard charts, while the single "No Ordinary Love", featured prominently in the Robert Redford movie Indecent Proposal. In 1994 came the 16-track Best Of Sade, but now, eight years since her last new work and after 40 million record sales, she releases Lovers Rock. On Lovers Rock, as she has done with earlier albums, Sade continues to describe the secret murmurs of the heart's desire, remaining true to herself in her work by always reaching further, always stretching higher.
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