At its core, “Broken Hearted Sade” threads together elements from three of Sade’s celebrated songs: “No Ordinary Love,” “Cherish the Day,” and “Is It a Crime.” These are not full replications or straightforward covers; instead, the track weaves lyrical fragments and emotional resonances from those originals into a new sonic fabric. Over that, Dawn Richard’s voice flows, inhabiting and reshaping the lines, while Shabason’s instrumental bed—rooted in his piece “Broken Hearted Kota”—gives the piece its foundation
The genesis of this collaboration is as organic as the track itself. While touring in the fall prior to the recording, Shabason would routinely soundcheck with “Broken Hearted Kota,” his own instrumental piece. On more than one occasion, Dawn Richard, arriving early, would begin quietly singing Sade lines over his chords. The spontaneous melding resonated. As Shabason put it, “Almost immediately after the first soundcheck, Dawn would come in and start singing Sade songs over the chords.” Over time, what began as impromptu improvisation turned into a nightly concert fixture. After the tour ended, the pair decided to immortalize it in the studio.
In building the recorded version, Shabason took charge of the mixing and recording processes at his own Studio Aytche, while Joe Lambert handled mastering. (Pitchfork) The lineup includes guitar by Thom Gill and drums by Phil Melanson, whose contributions help ground the piece in a texture that’s both spacious and intimate.
Listening to “Broken Hearted Sade,” one hears Richard draw on emotional intensity—deliberating between longing and subtle restraint. The lyrics echo Sade’s originals: “I gave you all the love I got / I gave you more than I could give … This is no ordinary love … Is it a crime? That I still want you?” (Shazam) But because those lines are refracted through Richard’s tone, phrasing, and the supporting instrumentation, they feel both familiar and new. The result is not a mirror, but a prism.
What makes the track particularly compelling is how it balances homage with interpretive agency. Dawn Richard has spoken of Sade as a deep influence, one whose capacity to blend soul, jazz, and narrative has shaped her approach to music. She described Sade’s music as “not just heard, it’s felt—embodying depth and elegance that transcends time.” (Pitchfork) By choosing to draw from multiple Sade songs and thread them into a newly conceived arrangement, Richard seems to embrace both her debt to that influence and her own creative identity. (Pitchfork)
Shabason, too, shows sensitivity in folding his “Broken Hearted Kota” into this new narrative. The original version of “Broken Hearted Kota” appears on his 2019 EP Anne.But here, it is reshaped. Its harmonic contours and mood become conduits for Richard’s questions, longings, and refrains from Sade’s canon. The blending is subtle: it doesn’t feel forced, or like two tracks pasted together, but rather like a carefully grown hybrid
The sonic palette is tender, with breathy spaces, soft attacks and releases, and room for emotional detail. Shabason’s saxophone and synthesizer lines float with restraint. The drums and guitar don’t push but support, offering enough rhythmic and harmonic weight without overwhelming Richard’s vocal lines. The production leans into nuance. The spaces between notes, the quiet descents, the pauses—these all matter. In many ways, the track invites close listening; it rewards attention to tone, inflection, and what is unsaid as much as what is sung.
Because the lyrics are sourced from Sade, there is a powerful intertextual tension: Richard is both echoing and interrogating. When she sings, “This is no ordinary love,” we hear both Sade’s original sentiment and Richard’s new perspective on that sentiment, filtered through her emotional landscape. When she asks, “Is it a crime that I still want you?” we hear Sade’s rhetorical urgency, but also Richard’s ownership of that question in a new moment. Because the lines are situated anew, they accrue additional shading.
There’s also a metatextual gesture here: by explicitly referencing Sade in the title and weaving in multiple Sade songs, the track reflects on legacy, influence, and the artistry of adaptation. Sade is evoked as a presence—not just a voice from the past, but a living interlocutor in the emotional terrain Richard and Shabason chart. It’s a testament to how music can traverse time, not as static artifact but as dialogue.
Critically, the track stands in conversation with both artists’ recent output. Dawn Richard, in collaboration with Spencer Zahn, released Quiet in a World Full of Noise last year, a record that already reflected her evolving voice and exploratory sensibility. (Pitchfork) Shabason, meanwhile, issued Ample Habitat and Shabason, Krgovich, Sage in 2024, works that showcase his facility with ambient textures, chamber pop influences, and nuanced instrumentation. (Pitchfork) The coupling of their sensibilities here feels like a meeting point: Richard’s vocal adventurousness and narrative impulse with Shabason’s instrumental sensitivity and textural awareness.
In choosing not to simply replicate a Sade song, but to craft something new from the pieces, “Broken Hearted Sade” sidesteps a kind of reverential paralysis. Too often, tributes get stuck in mimicry; here, the tribute becomes transformation. It acknowledges Sade’s influence without surrendering the collaborators’ agency. It allows for a layered listening experience: you can hear the Sade originals, but also hear Richard and Shabason moving through and beyond them.
The reception of the track, at least in early coverage, emphasizes that duality of homage and reinvention. Pitchfork describes it as a tribute blending Sade lyrics with Shabason’s “Broken Hearted Kota” and Richard’s vocal sensibility.The Needledrop calls it a “unique single” that “blends Richard’s take on three Sade tracks with a reworking of Shabason’s ‘Broken Hearted Kota’.” Those accounts emphasize the hybrid nature of the piece, its respectful reach toward the originals while situating it in a fresh context.
From a listener’s vantage, “Broken Hearted Sade” offers multiple modes of engagement. On one level, it is pleasurable and nostalgic: hearing lines from “No Ordinary Love,” “Cherish the Day,” and “Is It a Crime” evokes memories and emotional associations tied to Sade’s originals. On another level, it is new: the phrasing, the instrument choices, the pauses, the emotional shading—all of these make it not a cover, but a reinvention. In that sense, it asks the question: What happens when we love a musical predecessor so deeply that we want to bring them forward into our own present, not just remember them?
In paying homage this way, Shabason and Richard remind us that influence need not imprison. Influence, properly engaged, can be a source of generativity. One hears this in how the familiar lines feel refreshed, as though slightly out of position so that new emotional creases emerge. The version we hear is not entirely Sade’s, and not entirely Richard’s solo: it is a kind of shared space.
What’s more, the track signals something about music’s capacity for reanimation. Sade’s originals were created in particular times, with particular production aesthetics and emotional distances. “Broken Hearted Sade” carries those lines forward into 2025, asking what happens when someone with a different voice, aesthetic, and set of emotional commitments re-enters them. The past is not flattened; it is questioned, prolongated, and conversed with.
From a structural standpoint, the track leans toward a spacious form. It allows room for instrumentals, for breathing, for instrumental interludes. That space is part of its emotional logic: love, longing, pain—they’re not neatly resolved. They exist in echoes, in suspended moments. The production does not rush to closure. Instead it sustains a tension between memory and presence, between the lines we inherit and the lines we must draw ourselves.
It is perhaps fitting that a tribute to Sade should be gentle, spacious, nuanced. Her music often trades in understatement, in tone as much as in lyrics. The coolness, intimacy, and emotional subtlety have long been part of her appeal. In “Broken Hearted Sade,” Richard and Shabason adopt some of those values even as they recalibrate them. They bring warmth, questioning, vulnerability. They push and pull.
As we live in a moment saturated with revivals, reissues, and “influence calls,” this piece suggests a different posture. You don’t have to cover someone fully to honor them. You can enter their work, speak into it, let it speak back, and yield something that stands beside the originals rather than beneath them. In that light, “Broken Hearted Sade” is less about replicating the past than dialoguing with it, letting it shift under pressure, and letting new lines emerge.
In sum, “Broken Hearted Sade” is a thoughtful tribute that leans not on mimicry but on transformation. Through combining lines from Sade’s classics with Richard’s vocal interpretations and Shabason’s instrumental reworking, the artists open up a space where old and new converse. The result is emotionally resonant and quietly daring: it respects the source, but refuses to remain tethered to it fully. It reminds us that love, heartbreak, influence, and artistic lineage are not static—they’re living, breathing things. And in that breathing, new music can find its place among the echoes.
