By JON PARELES

LONDON - When a man from a radio station asked Sade what she had been doing in the 10 years between albums, she told him, “I’ve been in a cave, and I just rolled the boulder out of it.”

She chuckled as she recounted the exchange, with her feet tucked up on the couch at her Georgian house in the north London neighborhood of Islington.

An interview about her new album, “Soldier of Love” (Epic) - only her sixth studio album dating to her 1984 debut, and released February 9 - stretched into a four-hour conversation.

“I’ve got absolutely no real perception, properly, of time,” said Sade, 51, who was born Helen Folasade Adu in Ibadan, Nigeria. Her father was a Nigerian university teacher of economics; her mother was an English nurse, and raised her in rural England after the couple divorced.

Sade’s elegantly subdued ballads have sold more than 50 million albums worldwide. Her hits, like “Smooth Operator,” “No Ordinary Love” and “The Sweetest Taboo,” were ubiquitous through the 1980s and 1990s . Sade emerged in the musicvideo era , when many pop stars believe they need maximum media exposure to sustain a career. Instead Sade has hung back, letting the songs alone define her. It’s a decision that may, in the end, make her more cherished. Fans have not forgotten her; preorder made “Soldier of Love” Number 2 on the Amazon sales chart last week.

Sade and her band
release their first
album in 10 years.

As far as the music business was concerned, Sade might as well have been in some cave after 2002, when she and her band finished touring for their 2000 album, “Lovers Rock.” She vanished from stages, magazine covers, gossip columns and other celebritypromotion zones, though she did contribute a song to a 2005 benefit DVD, “Voices for Darfur.”

“With most artists they’re more of a big person in their public persona than they are in their private persona, and I’d say with Sade it’s almost the other way around,” said Sophie Muller, a friend she met while attending Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design who became her video director and, for “Soldier of Love,” the album-cover photographer. “Her whole self is not for public consumption.”

Sade had scheduled a meeting with her manager after our conversation, knowing he was going to try to talk her into more promotional efforts. Perhaps she was procrastinating.

“I love writing songs,” she said. “But then, going beyond that, I find it a little bit difficult, the sort of opening myself up to everything that’s attached to it in the music business generally, the expectations and pressures that are put onto you .”

Even as she was working on “Soldier of Love,” she said, “I ventured in with a little trepidation. I wasn’t eager to get back out there and be recognized again.”

The new album doesn’t radically change the sound of Sade, which is also the name of the band she has led since 1983 with Stuart Matthewman on guitar and saxophone, Andrew Hale on keyboards and Paul Denham on bass. “Soldier of Love” is another collection of slow, pensive songs, mostly in minor keys, often pondering lost love and uncertain journeys. The band takes pride in being proficient but not flashy .

Yet in their own quiet way, many of the songs on “Soldier of Love” hold a new desolation. Sade’s music began as a British take on the suave 1970s American soul of Donny Hathaway and Curtis Mayfield, often projecting a serene reserve . Now some of that reserve has vanished. On the new album Sade’s voice shows more ache and vulnerability, moving closer than ever to the blues.

The next round for Sade is a handful of television performances of the album’s first single, “Soldier of Love,” adding the drummer Pete Lewinson as the band did on its 2002 tour.


Sade has sold more than 50 million albums since her debut in 1984. / SOPHIE MULLER; RIGHT, TIM MOSENFELDER/GETTY IMAGES