Sade - Soldier of Love

same -- love the posts, map

ty, glad it prompts a relisten.

"babyfather" is wonderful, it's honestly not my favorite thing here because of the subject matter but it's very seductive.

"babyfather" is a major-key, positive, chill song that sounds bright. but ironically it might be the most painful song for me to listen to on this album because of the failures of my own father.

“be that easy” <333

i am still listening to this in the car on repeat! not much new to add, other than i went back to love deluxe for a few weeks and noticed that "cherish the day" shares some of the thesis of "be that easy," with a different emphasis. for a long time i heard those first words of the chorus, "i cherish the day," with an implied "when" after it. as in "i cherish the day (when something unnamed but wonderful happens)". i think this is a construction i picked up from a religious upbringing (as in, "the day of the lord's return" or whatever). anyway, i only recently realized that she means "the day" as in "the daytime" as in "the present". and the song is a meditation on the sacredness of the conscious present. similarly, the thesis of "be that easy" is that after a lifetime of being propped up ("that's just like you to tell me i've nothing to fear") or torn down ("i am a broken house"), she sees clearly that what life is is a "falling", stripped to its essence of being-in-time ("full of air / sun on my face wind in my hair"). as a falling, it isn't just the day, it's a succession of days arranged in this beautiful arc of grace. i hope that's not overdescribed. anyway, now i'm curious to go back further and listen for other traces of this kind of meaning-of-life-is-the-present-moment stuff in the 80s records.

"in another time," the whole effect of the song is right there in the title. how to make a peaceful time in the future speak to the hurt of the past, like clean water clearing out a stagnant pond or a breeze bringing in something new that smells safe and alive. that whole outro with the violin and the piano and then the saxophone is this gentle wave that crests right in the last few seconds.

"bring me home," i just want to highlight this line: "the small step i need to take is a mountain / stretched out like a lazy dog." makes me shiver every time. like, can someone call and check on sade i'm a little worried about her. i mean obv the song is from the pov of someone seeking death, not a personal reflection, but that kind of image can't come from anything else but deeply felt experience imo.

I'm loving this live blogging.

I haven't read all of this thread but I just recently re-listened to love deluxe/lovers rock and I was very struck by how out of time Sade's musical progression is. I haven't listened to Soldier of Love or the 80s records in a bit but it struck me that as much as Sade was influenced by things going on musically around them (I get a strong Ibiza vibe at times on Lover's Rock for example) they also seem totally out of time. Or maybe more correctly in their own timeline. Like the hints of Soldier of Love already exist in Lover's Rock 9 years earlier and the same goes for Love Deluxe/Lover's Rock. Unlike say, Portishead where Third feels like an entirely new thing strung together by Gibbons' voice Sade feels very in touch with their earlier music over the long stretches of time between their records.

excited to read through the rest of your thoughts map.

map forced me to buy a copy of Soldier of Love (I'd burned several tracks + remixes long ago). I'm loving it, certainly their best since 1988.

i'm not totally sure how to articulate this but one thing they've always seemed to have to some degree is a version of "jazz" that i would say is organized around sade's vocal performances. on soldier of love the flow and spaciousness of her vocal lines and delivery feel very deliberate to me, a sort of highly conscious minimal construction akin to miles davis' playing on, well, what's in my mind is the first track of jack johnson, but whereas that's channeling a boxing performance, sade is gesturing towards things like the passing of time, love, birth and death. songs about injury and resilience, specifically on soldier of love.

i think how they have melded jazz and rhythm into pop song structures is very sophisticated, very much their own construction, has been a throughline through the decades, and is maybe part of why they feel so "out of time". there might be a few instances over the decades where the construction of that depth and spaciousness slipped but i think they've always had a very high "batting average" with it so to speak, on every album from the beginning. need to go back to the first few and revisit. the way they do it is so interesting to me. of course it's very subtle, but also very attuned to every moment. they take the space and embodiment of jazz and rhythm and marry it to the urgenicy of 'song'. each era and album has a few formal experiments with it and then tracks that just go for the bleachers with emotional saturation for fuel.

i know this is the soldier of love thread but just a side note that 'give it up' on stronger than pride is one of my favorite rhythms they've ever recorded, that stopped crash cymbal repeating. it's a shorter track and you'd be tempted to think it was a tossed off thing at the end of the album but i just think it's so intense and spiritual and just rhythmically electrifying.

will i think the 'ibiza' sound has always been strongly identified with sade, in some ways they may have been progenitors. i'm not an ibiza expert. "the sweetest taboo" video comes to mind, sade alternately jamming in the loft and then riding a white horse through the spanish countryside with a free spirited hunk - quintessential ibiza it seems to me.