'Soldier of Love' returns reclusive Sade to spotlight

Sade's jazzy soul songs have often teetered between heartbreak and hope, and the title track of her just-out Soldier of Love album walks that emotional line over a crackling martial groove that returns the British chanteuse to the spotlight for the first time in a decade.

She says fans were always asking when she'd release a successor to 2000's Lovers Rock, which sold nearly 4 million copies, but she was never ready to set aside a block of time to record one.

"Life kind of gets in the way of it, and time always passes quicker than you think," says Sade, aka Sade Adu (51), by phone from her home in England.

"One of the reasons it takes me a long time to get back into the studio is that once I go in, I'm there for the duration.

"It's like embarking on a long journey on a ship, and once I'm on it, I can't get off."

She and bandmates Stuart Matthewman, Paul Denman and Andrew Hale broke through in 1984 with Diamond Life, which earned them the best-new-artist Grammy.

A performance at Live Aid exposed the group to a global TV audience of 1.4 billion, and all of Sade's subsequent, less frequent albums - Promise (1985), Stronger Than Pride (1988), Love Deluxe (1992) and Lovers Rock (2000) - went multiplatinum.

The band began crafting the 10-song Soldier of Love two years ago, and Matthewman and Denman commuted from the United States for a series of two-week sessions at a studio near Sade's home in rural Gloucestershire.

The four of them, who have worked together since their pre-fame days as part of the Latin funk band Pride, managed to rediscover their chemistry, even though they had seen little of one another in the past decade.

"It's like a real powerful long-distance relationship," she says.

"We really do pick up where we left off in terms of our musical friendship."

The new album is at once fresh and familiar.

The mesmerising rhythms and hauntingly sensual vocals that have been Sade's signature since the group's debut seem unaffected by pop music's changing flavours.

Sade says the band guards against letting outside influences infiltrate the music just to sell records.

"We've never been a trendy band," she says; the group's five previous albums sold a total of 17 million copies in the United States.

"If what we do comes from the heart, I kind of feel that there will be somebody that gets it.

"It's a privilege for us to be in a position where we can make the music we want to make."