Helen Folsade Adu
      BORN: January 16, 1959, ADO-EKITI, Nigeria
     
      Lovers Rock is the first collection of new work by Sade in eight years. But it s a record that says less about those years gone by than the promise and vitality of the here and now. It s an album that s by turns moving, elegiac and beautiful. Like the tender, acoustic guitar-driven first single, By Your Side , a song about the tensile strength of love, it is music stripped back to its essential elements: voice, melody, and meticulously arranged instrumentation. The result is a record of bare, sometimes startlingly, immediacy.
     
      But then 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 at... (More SADE Biography)