The first single after eight years, filmed as a walk back into view
By Your Side reached United States radio on 3 October 2000, before the album it opened. Lovers Rock followed in Britain on 13 November. The UK single date was 6 November. Sade Adu, Andrew Hale, Stuart Matthewman and Paul Denman wrote it. Sade and Mike Pela produced it. The track runs 4:34. It is a pledge sung at speaking volume: if you are cold, lost, or down on your knees, she stays.
The sessions ran from September 1999 to August 2000 at Sarm Hook End in Checkendon, Oxfordshire, at El Cortijo in San Pedro de Alcántara, Spain, and at Deliverance in London. It was the first Sade album since Love Deluxe in 1992. Adu named the record after lovers rock, the romantic reggae she had listened to in London as a girl. The arrangement of the single stays spare: acoustic guitar, a soft drum pattern, her voice close and unforced. No guest rapper, no drum-machine era bolted on.
Sophie Muller directed the video in Los Angeles. Adu walks from a forest into the city, picks up a rose and a burnt stick, and ends in the median of a road offering the rose the way flower sellers do. Muller said the idea started on a drive to the studio, when she and Adu saw people standing in the middle of the road selling flowers. She thought it was sad to be rejected by every car, and also that looking at flowers all day was not the worst job. Eight years had passed since the last album. The rose at the end is the record, held out to traffic.
She had not done anything in eight years. There had not even been a photograph taken of her. I think I was being protective the day we did it. I did not want to push her to do something incredibly difficult, but wanted to ease her back in.
(Sophie Muller, on directing By Your Side)
The UK chart peak was 17, in the week of 18 November 2000, and the single lasted five weeks. The US Hot 100 peak was 75. At the 44th Grammy Awards, in February 2002, By Your Side was nominated for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and lost to Nelly Furtado’s I’m Like a Bird. Lovers Rock itself won Best Pop Vocal Album. In 2002 VH1 placed the song at 48 on a list of the 100 greatest love songs.
The comeback did not sound like a campaign. The band that had made Diamond Life was still the band: Adu, Matthewman, Hale, Denman, with Pela at the desk as he had been since the Power Plant days. By Your Side is the note they sent before the album, a promise that the eight-year gap had not changed the method.
