40 Years Later: Sade, “Promise”
November 20, 2025 at 03:30PM
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Hanif Abdurraqib | Longreads | November 20, 2025 | 3,416 words (12 minutes)
Throughout the fall, Hanif Abdurraqib will contend with major anniversaries of some of his favorite underconsidered albums. This week: Sade’s Promise, released in the US by Epic Records on November 15, 1985.
How you begin matters a great deal. All of my favorite poets know this. With image, Robert Hayden begins the poem “Middle Passage”: Sails flashing to the wind like weapons. In rage, with rhetorical curiosity, June Jordan begins “Poem About Police Violence”: Tell me something / what you think would happen if / everytime they kill a black boy / then we kill a cop? With longing, and a sense of whimsical disbelief, Gabrielle Calvocoressi opens “At Last The New Arriving”: Like the horn you played in Catholic school / the city will open its mouth and cry.
I believe, very deeply, in the urgency of the opening. When the song closes, when the poem closes, when the day closes, you are not obligated to be who you were at the start, but who you were at the start does matter. It can be the first, most immediate thought. It can be the thing that has weighed on your heart for what feels like as long as you’ve been alive. It can be the most vulnerable place you’ve ever been willing to go, and you can shout it into an empty landscape and then build a small world around it. The voice of Sade Adu, also one of our greatest poets, arrives slowly on “Is It A Crime,” the opening track of Sade’s 1985 album, Promise. It waits about 25 seconds, for Stuart Matthewman’s saxophone to blare itself to a sense of calm, a steady moan. And then, she enters: This may come, this may come as a surprise, but I miss you.
This is one of my favorite lyrics to open any album in the history of albums and in the history of lyrics, in part because it isn’t only the language itself, but how the language is presented. Adu’s voice beginning light and airy in the first two fragments, before dipping, suddenly, when we arrive at but I miss you, the final sound in you stretched out for a few seconds, creating a brief tunnel of oooohhhh that isn’t mournful or even revelatory, but more a sigh. It is what it is. Against all of my better instincts I have surrendered to my own heart, and this is where it has dragged me. It matters a great deal what comes next, but it also doesn’t. Sade Adu has presented a dilemma which is uniquely hers, but it could be yours. Might have been yours, at some point before this one. Yes, the man is a liar; yes, the man lays with someone else. You know the type, or you’ve been the type. You have been the criminal, or you’ve loved the criminal and, through your loving, you become them.
Read Hanif’s previous essay in the series:
• Little Brother, The Minstrel Show
• Groove Theory, Groove Theory
The challenges of a second album are measured alongside the scope of the first album’s greatness. If your first album says nothing and moves no one, there aren’t many people who will give a shit about what comes next, though Sade didn’t have the dilemma of no one caring in early 1985, when the band set out to make Promise. Their massive first album, Diamond Life, had smoldered before burning, first finding purchase in the band’s home base in the UK and then across Europe before eventually catching hold in the States in September 1984, when “Smooth Operator” hit the Top 10.
It would be easy, and perhaps encouraged, to luxuriate in the success of the Certain Thing before rushing into whatever uncertainty awaits next, but Sade decided to carry on with the work as if it was an extension of the same project. The band pulled all of the same producers who had worked on Diamond Life, and went right back into London’s Power Plant Studios, where they had recorded the debut, and locked themselves away from February to August in order to write and record. This was only two years after the winter of 1983, when Sade Adu was living in a cheap and cold apartment, dreaming of an exit strategy. That can present a kind of hunger that might make a less precise artist become haphazard in their pursuit of success, especially in those moments after they’ve tasted success for the first time. This is what, I think, makes Promise such a triumph, and one that evades the issues that tend to crowd many other second albums that follow a successful debut. There are artists who try to reinvent themselves, to get away from that which carried their first work, because to even call a first album or first book or first film a “first work” is a bit flippant—it is the thing you’ve been making and reaching for. You have your whole life to not just make the work, but to become it. And then you have to do it again, sometimes in less than a year.
Sade Adu has presented a dilemma which is uniquely hers, but it could be yours. You have been the criminal, or you’ve loved the criminal and, through your loving, you become them.
I get it, is what I’m saying. I get the artist who wants to dislodge themselves from that kind of pressure, the very large mirror and the reflection in it. I even get the second type, the artist who, after having immediate success, wants to just put out anything, the artist who wants to ride the wave for fear of the wave vanishing. But what I admire first about Promise—the thing that I love before I get to the music, or the writing, or the presentation of it—is the care and patience that went into building it. If there is an anxiety or a pressure the band felt, it doesn’t come through in the songs. It’s a group not trying to reinvent themselves, but trying to hone what they already know they are capable of. It takes great confidence, I think, to commit oneself to a steadiness like this, amid all the things the heart is trying to convince you that it wants, all of the things it thinks it needs to survive.
In 2012, the poet Sharon Olds released the book Stag’s Leap, which begins with the poem “While He Told Me,” which begins with the line, While he told me, I looked from small thing to small thing.
Stag’s Leap is considered one of the great Divorce Books of our time, perhaps of all time. I think to call it a divorce book alone dulls the magnitude of its brilliance, but we have to start somewhere, so let’s call it a divorce book. A book of poems where the heart begins broken, and then has to learn structure again. The second poem in the book, “Unspeakable,” begins: Now I come to look at love in a new way, now that I know I’m not standing in its light. And I am haunted by that line, as I am haunted by the dip in Sade Adu’s voice when she sings . . . but I miss you, and the haunting arrives on the wings of the same ghost-bird, singing a similar sad song about a loss of control, a loss of what someone thought they knew. What I adore about Sade Adu’s writing is what I adore about the writing of Olds. It matters what comes next, of course it does. But, even if it didn’t, you’d maybe know or understand it all, just from a single line of text. And so, I suppose it’s better to say that it’s less about what comes next, and more about how the next thing unfolds, and the next thing after it. In “Unspeakable,” Olds has already demolished the heart. She is sad, and now, by extension, you are a little more sad than you were before she arrived to you. Welcome to the party, to the Misery Corner. And sure, there is much that comes next. The speaker in the poem cannot reach her once-beloved. Cannot make sense of anything he is saying, because he isn’t speaking at all. He loves someone else, maybe—you, the reader, do not know for sure, but you can sense it, even (or especially) when the poem ends with we do not speak of her.
The miracle of Stag’s Leap, for me, is in its wrestling with the profound confusion that comes with heartbreak and the immediate moments after. Sharon Olds is a reader’s poet, in that her work is most often speaking directly and plainly to the heart of a large dilemma. Sure, there is imagery and the occasional metaphor which extends, but so much of the work is pointing at something that you know and understand, and then complicating the seeming simplicity of it; the language, while beautiful, is plain enough for a reader to follow, because the central function of her work is to bring you closer to her, so that we, collectively, might seek these answers together. And Stag’s Leap tries, repeatedly, to do this, but the beauty of it—a devastating beauty, to be clear—is that the speaker in so many of the poems is losing touch with her understanding of clarity. Yes, plainly speaking, someone loved me once and then stopped. But that’s not the end point. The book begins there. What do we tell the children? Are any of the memories I have actually real? Did they mean anything? When was the last time we loved each other? The poet, banging up against the wall, seeking answers that she does not have, and you surely do not have, and so you are there, in the room with her, perhaps packing a box, sinking further into an ache that wasn’t yours, but has now become you.
Promise is not, on its face, a Divorce Album, and it is not often considered within the pantheon of great breakup albums within music history, but a part of that, at least the latter occurrence, is because of what Sade Adu offers you, lyrically, and then what she holds back. I liken her to Olds, or to any number of great poets, because she understands what to give a listener, and when. Promise strikes a balance. After “Is It A Crime,” the album turns to “Sweetest Taboo,” one of the band’s sexiest songs, a song that cashes in on a level of intimacy that, given the song before it, starts to feel almost forbidden. The man you don’t want to love but can’t resist. The man who calls you beyond a reasonable hour, and you find yourself picking up the phone and cursing silently before saying hello. There’s a tension built in these first two songs that revolves entirely around restraint, what someone isn’t willing to give in to, until they are.
But then, wrapped around the constant hum of this existing tension, is an album that isn’t necessarily about love, or even about surrender, but about giving your heart over, repeatedly, and enduring the failures that come with the exchange. That can be enticing for a song or two, but it takes a poet to keep dragging a listener to that doorway and pushing it open. On “You’re Not The Man,” the trick of the device is a late volta, a sharp turn back toward the self. Nearly the entire song bemoans a man who maybe once was shit, but now ain’t shit, ain’t living up to the expectations, his side of the deal. And it is sad to consider that ever-growing distance beyond what we can colloquially call the honeymoon phase in the relationship, a space some people just aren’t meant to traverse. But then, in the song’s final act, when you’ve grown an adequate amount of pity for the singer, she says, well, hey, look, it ain’t all that bad. I’m not who I was either, so maybe we don’t need to keep playing this foolish game after all.
I was talking recently to a friend about heartbreak, and I insisted that I’m too old for spectacular sadness. I would prefer a breakup or a letdown to be unspectacular in nature. Sure, it’s still sadness, and I’d rather not endure much of it at all, but that’s just how it goes, that’s just how my heart works, it doesn’t clock out for good. But I prefer the unspectacular. A large inciting event to kick off a slow, sometimes prolonged sadness that weaves in between the everyday of our living, where sometimes good things also happen. Your friend’s kid scores a goal in a soccer game. The bakery holds the last cinnamon roll for you even though you run through the door a few minutes before closing. Underneath it all, the sadness is there, but the sadness is not always immense or amazing enough to drown out the good. Things end, people ache, and life moves forward. When I was younger, I sought the spectacular. The breakup brought on by some massive betrayal, a big story to tell my pals while they leaned across a table, wide-eyed. Something that incited a depressive spiral, something that kept me in bed for days at a time, so that I felt like I was earning my heartbreak.
Sade’s music, specifically on Promise, is like a constant ode to the unspectacular wound, which still deserves to be honored, but, in honoring it, you get to peel back the complicated layers of living alongside it while it doesn’t overtake you. Here’s what I know for sure: It is always going to be easy to sell people on sadness as a primary color, that has nothing else happening underneath it. As long as people are willing to feel sadness, a singer, a poet, a band, can always find some pain to point to and say look, isn’t that just the most amazing thing? And nothing else is required of them. They’ve done their work, they’ve gotten you your fix: a sadness so flexible it fits any size.
Sade understands the necessity of blending the many colors together to create a new one, which sits inside of a grander collage. Many of the narratives unfolding on Promise operate with a yes, AND approach. Yes, this man let me down, AND I’m figuring out how to not take that out on myself, or on the world. Yes, I feel like I can no longer trust, AND I still want to fall in love again and again and again. The sadness itself is presented almost as a shrug. Sade Adu is one of the great “it is what it is” writers and presenters of language that we’ve ever had in music. This is not to say that her singing style isn’t evocative, it’s simply not evoking the height of drama within the language. On “Never As Good As The First Time,” one of the most upbeat tracks on the album, churned forward by guitar and bass, Adu’s chorus of it’s never as good as the first time isn’t presented with pain, or exhaustion, just a matter-of-fact shrug. You want to go down this road, you get what you ask for, and then you don’t want it as much as you thought you did. But the twist of the song, of so many of the songs on Promise, is that this feeling is not the conclusion. The facts of the case allow for a secondary exploration, which is weighing the matter-of-factness of what we know against the realities of our heart. Yes, all of these things fade, and you step into the sun which, in a moment, will become a storm. But surely you wouldn’t swear off the sun for the rest of your life, would you?
Sade’s music is like a constant ode to the unspectacular wound, which still deserves to be honored, but, in honoring it, you get to peel back the complicated layers of living alongside it while it doesn’t overtake you.
Promise also intensifies the band’s opposition to flash and flair, which—if you let Adu tell it—comes from her time on the art scene, where she watched the avant-garde become the status quo. Fluorescent hair, shooting off in several different directions, becoming the norm, which then robs it of the ability to stun or shock anyone, and so it is natural that the singer and her band may have an aversion to dramatics, particularly in the mid-’80s, when high drama was all the rage. In a 1985 Rolling Stone interview, Adu said, “I’m not over the top; I’m not wacky. I’m fairly understated, and that reflects in the way I sing. I don’t necessarily think you have to scream and shout to move somebody. Sometimes I am screaming and shouting: To me, I’m really putting something in and really saying something.”
It returns, again, to the poet’s central logic: Sometimes it’s how you say the thing. You draw people close and you can deconstruct the simple feeling into one hundred more complicated pieces. Sade, as a band, is complex and precise; most of the arrangements are sparse, organized around Paul Denman’s bass playing, which can please the casual ear because the bass lines sound simply pleasing, but his playing is complex, rhythmic, highly intelligent. The “Sweetest Taboo” bass line sounds like it is made up of two or three total notes, but throughout, Denman is playing with note length, timing, and variations, weaving in and out of vocal pockets. When it isn’t Denman as the foundation of sonic worldbuilding, it’s Matthewman, who, on a song like “Tar Baby,” lets the sax build a slow-swelling stretch of sound for Adu’s voice to arrive inside of with incredible ease.
All of this is to say that the band’s impulses reflect the singer’s impulses, and so the language at play isn’t only words. There’s also a sonic exchange taking place. A summoning of a feeling that the singer, then, tells you is real. You aren’t imagining it. There are layers and levels to it all. We can sit together and figure it out for a while.
I suppose it matters how you end, too, though fewer artists I love have figured out how to exit the room with the same flourish with which they entered. I understand that. I don’t begrudge anyone for running out of gas at the end of it all, and, exhausted, slinking quietly out the door. The final poem in Stag’s Leap, “What Left?,” ends with the lines I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me, and you understand it is more for the speaker than the reader. But I still love the conclusion it arrives at; after a book overwhelmed with the turmoil of the mind, it offers a glimpse of freedom, and the thing about it is that you don’t even need to believe it. This revelation isn’t for you, necessarily, even if you may need to hear it. It doesn’t matter how much you do or don’t trust the speaker, you are simply a witness to an exercise in progress, like at the end of “You’re Not The Man,” when Sade Adu says hey, you know what, it actually ain’t all bad. It could be a lie, or it could be the truth. There are greater sins than lying on what the heart knows. Poets do it often. Lovers do it even more.
Promise closes with a song called “Maureen,” a song that makes up one of my favorite exits on any album, in part because of how, on an album where sadness is a collage of many colors, “Maureen” reverts to a plain offering: grief, elegy. I love someone, and they are dead. And I’ll never see them again. The song ends with Adu, on a loop, singing never meet my new friends, which is an extension of the line before the loop begins: You’ll never call around to see me again, you’ll never meet my new friends. And she sings it as if it is a revelation she just arrived at, and she can’t stop repeating it, because if she does, that means it has really and truly ended. Time has stopped, and the world where loss has taken on a new and different shape has to begin. The song ends on a fade-out, a repetition that grows smaller, and smaller, and then gone. This revelation, too, isn’t for you, even if you need to hear it. Even if you need the reminder that it’s still worth running after the possibility of love. It’s still worth imagining that someone could love you. They may love you and later leave you. They may love you and then die, or you may die. You may hold their hands in a gray and unromantic hospital room, and then they’ll be gone. But at least, for a little while, you had hands for reaching, and hands that reached back.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a writer from the east side of Columbus, Ohio.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/11/20/sade-promise-40th-anniversary/
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