Love Deluxe

Kyle: Today we’re talking about Sade’s Love Deluxe.

Or Love Premium for an additional 2 99 a month.

Cliff: You can buy any kind of love, but you can’t get Love Deluxe, which sounds like a thing that we’re bidding at the top of this episode, but is a real quote from an interview, and it’s probably the least serious thing I’ve ever heard come out of her particular mouth. but, uh, is a pretty good to me, uh, intro to the unexpectedly, ” in love in process” I’ve had with this record. another, one of the, I thought that I knew where this sat and then the more that I listened to it, something inside of me changed or became more like me. I’m not sure which one. Uh, but I found myself not only listening to Sade, but noticing that I was listening to Sade and liking it about myself quite a bit.

Kyle: Well, I love that I’ve had the CD in my truck since high school I always revel that contrast a little. you stretch me in new directions musically, and I, I bring you closer to center that’s the bargain.

Cliff: I don’t know whose directions you’re stretching with a Sade CD in your car in high school.

Kyle: This is yet another episode where we’re gonna try to not make it all entendre. We’ve already failed. it’s hard in 2025 not to make every episode political and to avoid making all art political, but my first thought when I read that quote that you just said it opened a new door in the record and then Shaday as an artist for me, because I’ve been thinking all the time because I’m forced to think all the time about the like 2000 people, the ultra wealthy, who dictate every aspect of our lives, how they’re swag, less sexless, fucking dorks.

And that money is. Is just an instrument that they think unlocks everything in human existence to them. And the one reassurance I can always give myself is that they can’t buy cool. They can’t buy things that genuinely connect them to other people. And so I would’ve never thought of Love Deluxe as a political record, uh, or a class consciousness record.

And I still really don’t, I don’t want to like poison the beautiful vulnerability and just the purity and the elegant, this is such an elegant record and mood. So I just wanna say this thought and get it out of the way, but like, there’s an interesting dimension of Sade is for us, or Sade is a good teacher and I think more like specifically Sade Adu the person than the rest of the band.

I don’t, I don’t wanna like apply this to all the dudes as well. real love is the one thing that money can’t buy is such a good and profound idea. And I would like to just ground us as we start in a, like every meme that you’ve seen of sensuous delight, you know, like the outline guy touching his face with his fingers, or SpongeBob with headphones in levitating into a rainbow.

Or just anybody doing like a sexy aunt dance in a gif. anything that’s like, dance, like no one’s watching type feeling, just real. Two glasses of red wine. Leanne Womac, wine mom out in the open at the Mexican restaurant. Vibe, just the truest possible. You, release your inhibitions.

Feel the rain on your skin. Is that the second or third time in a row? We’ve mentioned that on an episode. Natasha Bedingfield. She’s everywhere. I feel like we’re on a hot streak of just reminding ourselves to touch grass, like just another flavor of that. everything’s so fucked up and once again, here’s music as a reminder. This, is as good an example as I think we’ve had in the history of the podcast of like, don’t ignore it as a person who, when he was much younger, was always running around telling people to stay positive, and that felt like blissful, privileged ignorance in the face of the world.

What I love about this record is. It carries the full weight of everything and the sophistication of it comes from, and I still choose to love anyway. And in fact, that is the only thing to do.

Cliff: Hell yeah. Podcast over, I guess.

Kyle: No, I wanna talk about this music real bad. Ugh. Nothing sounds like this. Dude,

Cliff: Normally we’re putting on a play for all the people listening, where it’s like we build this big arc over to the thing you just did, and instead we just like, yeah, no, we’re there. Let’s go from here.

Kyle: I want us to get there. Yeah, you were like, let’s drop right in. So I was like, I want to get there and stay there because maybe I’m doing it for myself. the person that like when he was 16, started listening to Shaday kind of ironically, ’cause it was like schmaltzy, pure moods. Whatever, you know, but also I knew that like older swaggy people listen to it.

So I was like, if I can close the gap between how it makes me feel right now and how it makes people I think are cool, feel, then there’s a spark there. so anybody who can’t close that gap in their mind or they watch shit on TikTok with a Sade audio and it feels a little silly or schmaltzy or like something your mom and dad dance to in the kitchen, all that’s real.

And I’m here for you and with you on that. But I’m also telling you, like the way with Funkadelic, we were like, you’re going to be able to touch the dark matter directly. You know, you’re gonna hold the lightning in your hand. This is whatever. The opposite element in the yin yang is.

This is the white light that you can walk into and bathe in.

Cliff: Can I tell you the stupidest thought I had that aligns directly with what you are saying?

Kyle: Fucking always Baby

Cliff: I, yes. We, this is another record on the journey of Cliff’s Body moves in ways he didn’t expect when he allows himself. and.

Kyle: Cliff’s Body Podcast over.

Cliff: And well, well as a person who does not experience the excitement of music through, like, I really need to move all my limbs right

now. Okay. Well, we’ve talked some in the past about, uh, the unconventional combinations of like outdoor sports, and it puts my body in a place where it starts to interpret things in different

ways. And Sure. If anyone knew, and maybe they did as I rode by, I’m like, is that homie listening to Sade right now? as he careens at 30 miles an hour down the side of a mountain. And yes, first of all. Not only for the exercise of this podcast, but because once again, it unlocked some magical thing. But, okay.

My stupidest thought, combination of being fully blissed out, listening to this record, enjoying myself outside, beautiful everything. I’m alone with my thoughts and probably some amount of being Colorado stoned shore, but the, I start laughing out of absolutely nowhere because all at once the thought occurs to me.

Well, there’s one detail you probably haven’t guessed yet, but I start laughing, thinking about the Andre 3000 merch, and I think to myself, don’t just listen to Sade man, listen to Sade, and like it was the stupidest thing, and then I cannot leave it because it’s actually like a thing that’s helping me,

Kyle: You see it flash subliminally in your mind? The the highlighter yellow shirt with just her face? Yeah. Yeah. Just like boom. Listen to show. Yes. Yes. Like you’re receiving a message from on high A little bit. Yeah.

You were one with the new Blue sun.

Cliff: and especially that the reason that made me laugh so much is ’cause like we, we’ve seen that shirt a bunch, right? That became like the thing to wear in Atlanta, especially for a year. I received it, it maybe in the way it was intended, which was just like kind of a lighthearted joke in general, right?

Like, I am Andre 3000 making a band. I don’t really want to be here. Totally. And I don’t want your money. So like, this is sort of what it’s all about anyway, right? And like, cool, I get it on that level. And that was fun to me for a while. And it was like, it’s like it took my brain getting to its simplest place and most open place to go.

okay. But maybe those three words like mean something very important to you and maybe if you let it, it’s gonna let you, change your perspective on this record entirely. Because she, and they collectively as an artist are doing the thing that we talk about so much. They’re doing subversion and they’re doing it by playing you smooth jazz that feels sexy, and then they play shit like a tattoo.

And if you didn’t lock into it, it just sounds like something that belongs on the record. And then if you lock into it. You are maybe weeping, I mean there’s just like a fundamentally different set of emotions that you get to experience through most, but not all of these songs, which I think is what makes it so wild to have noticed that shift.

It’s like it’s not every song is some secret inverted underbelly, only some of them, and they’re kind of like hiding in the middle of the record and like To have discovered that some early nineties British casual jazz ass thing is worth the level of sifting and sorting that we talk about doing with other records is like that kept occurring to me over and over again until, and I kind of landed in this place that I shared with you. But, it confused me until I listened to it as a funk record with a different genre on top of it.

And then I got it. Then it connected to like, free your mind and your ass will follow. Or the opposite. There we go. and something about there helped it make sense to me in a way that made this different fundamentally from, it’s neither an overly serious political record, nor though is it. It’s not like Barry Manalow trying to make you sexy feeling music, you know?

Kyle: Right. I think what has sort of emerged very recently for me as somebody who’s like the idea of Sade, probably more than the, the real content of Sade for a long time. You know, I’ve always been like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m a shot a fan. there’s a deeply spiritual component. To it all. I think the smoothness of it belies the idea that like, it’s easy, it’s just, it goes down real smooth and it does, you can enjoy it like I have on that level for 20 years and it just works.

but there is sort of a sublime frequency that it’s operating on. and the Andre 3000 thing resonates profoundly with me ’cause you know, better than anyone, that, you know, I was like kind of in a mental health funk when New Blue Sun came along. And that’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to following a jam band on tour.

’cause I saw him in four different places and it was a totally different experience every time. And it was like. What my consciousness needed at the moment. But our buddy Colin and I went and saw the very first new Blue Sun show, and it was like a big secret and nobody knew what it was gonna be. And there were no cell phones.

And, it was like pure searching, you know, it could have been a whole production, but it was like a dude fumbling around with his flute collection laid out on a rug in a little black box theater in Brooklyn. And it was the most honest thing, as a guy raised on punk, it was like the most honest thing I’d ever seen.

And you walk in and the merch was set up right there as you’re filing in, and a bright yellow shirt says, listen to Sade. And it just you wanna talk about subversive, I loved the idea that it was just like an advertisement for, it’s, it’s so tuned Dig. It’s a bright yellow, it’s a golden yellow shirt and it’s listened to another artist.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Cliff: that’s actually a really good idea. I’m just gonna pin that. Keep.

Kyle: So I was like, well, I need, I need to have that. ’cause I don’t know if anyone’s ever going to see these shows. I, there was no real tour at that point. So I was like, I need to remember that I was here, but I really love what you just cracked open for me, which is, it’s it, like with Gang of four, we talked about how it was, the density of critical theory writers and philosophers.

You gotta crack open the, the Russian nesting doll of this idea. Building on this idea, building on this idea, sort of in the inverse, like pointing back to homage type spiritualist, right? it’s Andre 3000 telling you to go study the works of Thich Han or somebody, go sit. In your personal Walden or whatever, if you like how new Blue Sun makes you feel, go sit in the woods, cross-legged for a day or something, write a poem. Read some e Cummings. so I don’t want to attach the weight of political heaviness, but similarly, I don’t want to attach the weight of spiritual heaviness, but like, I don’t know, there’s something that Sade kind of naturally does, I think makes you feel comfortable and safe, going deep within yourself.

There is a real safety in the music. I think a lot of that comes from the vulnerability, not only of the music, the lyrics, but also in the sound. I think the, the vulnerability of the sound and the space of the band perfectly arranged. The dynamics creates a. Safety. I think it works as intimate music because it is like, it is a total safety.

Like you feel like you can trust them and what’s happening. even if you’re a little inclined to be like, all right, this is, you know, mom and dad shit. like it comes from a safety place. It’s really interesting to me.

Cliff: There are some tight moms and dads, so that could be okay.

Kyle: I’d like to think I’m one. Yeah. I’m a de, I’m a decently cool one. I think, God forbid my daughter gets older and unearth these recordings,

Cliff: it will happen at the most embarrassing possible moment, so I cannot wait and I will be there to support it.

Kyle: At least she’ll know. My heart was always in a good place. I cared a lot.

Cliff: I didn’t necessarily expect this to be such a good contrast then to the inaccessibility we were trying to discuss with Charles Mingus, but now that I think about it. Pretty good comparison actually, because what you’re describing to me at least is the sensation you get from jazz that is accessible. It is a thing you understand and can follow without being like super locked into the music itself or, uh, otherwise like super musically inclined.

Kyle: whoa.

Cliff: like it’s not,

Kyle: The, the, cognitive dissonance of this has all the ingredients of this should feel and accessible, but it really doesn’t. So maybe that’s a little silly. that’s really interesting, man.

Cliff: Yeah, I mean even, even just kind of comparing the first one minute of both of these albums, you will get the sensation you just described, the positive and negative feelings of it. I am welcome here. I am not welcome here.

Kyle: Charles Manus is Sade. Walk into a bar, sade’s like, all right, this was a mistake.

Cliff: My poor brain is trying to lay them on top of each other now. And that is wild. Sade leaves the house for the first time in a year, and then Charles Manus is there and corners her, and she’s like, my God, what have I done?

he’s like, I’ve played all of your songs in reverse upside down in this 22nd clip. Are you ready? It’s very creative.

Kyle: Kind of an ass isn’t.

Cliff: but yeah, I think this is a more helpful way of talking about smooth jazz, whatever smooth r and b. Fucking weather channel jazz type stuff. Yeah, it has a reputation and maybe Kenny G deserves some of it. Sure. But like, not all smooth jazz is simplistic or bad jazz. Right.

Kyle: I am just picturing you, you have to pitch to jazz dispensary, a not all smooth jazz bumper sticker.

Cliff: Keep honking. I’m listening to smooth jazz, but it’s good. Yeah.

Kyle: Keep on, I have my Bluetooth hooked up and I’m watching a YouTube loop of the Weather channel. Can I just say, when you were saying that shit about listening to Sade while mountain biking out in Colorado, like doing outside sports, there is such a joy and a comfort in the smooth jazz of not only the Weather channel, but I specifically thought of things like wave race and the fact that the aquatic ambience audio from Mario is literally a trending audio for nostalgia tiktoks.

So that specific flavor of things, it just, clicked into all of that for me because there’s, we’ve seen it in ways, good and bad the past half decade that the, the bliss of nostalgia is a safety and a comfort. But all that to say, I like the wave Race 64 style imagery of you out on a 64 bit mountain bike.

jamming out to weather channel jazz with your pit vipers on, just hell yeah, brother.

Cliff: But also just to get the full picture, right. I need to just try to imagine me, you’re standing at the bottom of a pretty big mountain. You see me at the top. I’m about to start riding down. Okay. I’m, it’s si, it’s silent. You can tell I’m maybe grooving, but it’s silent. And then about a minute and a half in, you just hear me do the harmony to no ordinary love at the top of my voice and just like I have been. man, this is a real little secret about myself. I guess I picked up the secret of. You can sing while you snowboard or whatever if you want to, because like the way that the outdoor works and speed, it’s like no one can really hear you. as long as you’re not riding super close behind besides somebody, no one can hear what you’re doing.

So it’s just like a fun thing to do. I have now crossed the Rubicon into, I don’t give a fuck if you hear me singing Sade on my bicycle. I don’t care. This is who I am. I’m happy with who I am. but it, it really got to where it was cracking me up. ’cause like I’d hit, you know, there are, there are real moments throughout this album especially, and it just like actually I’ll go ahead and mention especially that first bit on No Ordinary Love, like, first of all, an incredible song period, full stop.

But the way that you know what the hook of that song is, even when you haven’t heard it before and it makes you wait. For like an extra

loop.

Kyle: time.

Cliff: Oh, it pulls on you until you are desperate for that hook to come in. And like, it’s those little bits like that that we, often talk about, not necessarily knowing whether an artist means to do a thing like that intentionally, or whether they’re just like locked in the right way and it ends up that way.

But it feels clearly intentional here in the sense that, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this more, right? Their intentionally simplistic approach to writing and recording this music in the particular approaches that they took, they convinced me that. What decisions were made on this record were made with full intention all the way through, because there are a limited number of choices that they made here to me, like musically speaking. and all of them feel so honed and perfect. I’m sure part of that was not only like, we’ll talk about how they recorded it, but also, you know, as opposed to a lot of albums we talk about, which end up being like a big buildup and then they record it really quickly and then they’re done.

This one had more time to bake in the studio, and I think that maybe played out in the exactness of all of these songs. Mm-hmm.

Kyle: Yeah, they chipped away at it. yeah, yeah. Which is not, I would say my preferred approach. If I do some real quick napkin math on the records that I really like and what I know about how they got made, normally what I like is a very primal stamp out a photograph of yourself. You know, do a, do a real quick photo booth.

Thing of your face of that moment in time. the slow burn stuff tends to be like, I always think about the Dewey Cox making the, Graceland album where he just like keeps adding layers and like more monkeys, less monkeys, more tribal drums, less tribal drum. You know, like I’m a big believer that it’s like very easy to start over painting.

it rarely works, but proof’s in the pudding Here. Take all the time. You need Shaday. What, six albums in four decades? Whatever. Man, it’s all great. I’ll take it.

Cliff: That space between albums was one, just like little adjacent bit of trivia about Sade that I enjoyed immensely because she, I guess, has the kind of vocal front of this group, she never breaks character in the sense of, Hey, why did it take you so long to make this music? Because I don’t fucking make music to make money or to make you happy.

That’s why uh, just every time just be because I had a child it.

Kyle: She’s got a real cliff ass way about her with that type stuff. What do you mean? Why? Why would

Cliff: Right. Why did you decide that? Because I already decided it. Next question. Yeah.

Kyle: Yeah. I’m already bored of this conversation. You’ll get another one when you get another one. Jesus Christ

Cliff: See, yes.

Kyle: Don’t, wasn’t the last one enough. Like it’ll last man shelf stable. This music

Cliff: To that end, I am trying to make sure we used to kind of come right out with like, let’s give you kind of external accolades of music and then we’ll convince you. Uh, over, over time our conversations have shifted into, Hmm, that’s actually less important. We want to convince you in a more fun way and we can start wherever we want to.

That said, like, when we do have important ones to bring up, I think it’s worth making sure we at least make a quick pit stop at that. ’cause Sade as an artist. I had quite a bit of accolade in general, but this particular record too, like we don’t need to make this debate happen on this podcast one way or the other, but this is arguably not necessarily the best shot a album.

It could be maybe, but like, this isn’t like the pinnacle of the career and then everything else is sort of a supporting act the way it can be sometimes.

Kyle: right.

Cliff: and so I think that’s important because there’s a lot of space between releases, which means there is a lot of music to consume, but it, you can potentially digest it differently than artists who are doing records that twice that clip, right?

Like the, your interaction with genres are fundamentally different when you have like five-ish year gaps between the things that you’re doing. anyway, so all that preamble to say, First of all, no ordinary love, which we already talked about, like one in 94 Grammy, which I also did because I was a child.

I did not remember that. This one got most of its popularity from indecent proposal. a movie that

Kyle: I did not remember that either. Wow.

Cliff: things that were happening culturally, like right at the beginning of our consciousness and awareness. so yeah, so that’s not where I found out about it personally because I was seven,

Kyle: 92 you or no? 94. You weren’t, you weren’t rocking it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

For first grade, what was the first R-rated movie you watched? Do you remember?

Cliff: apocalypse. Is that right? The one with the asteroids?

Kyle: Armageddon was

R-rated.

Cliff: thank you. Yes. Maybe that was PG 13. Wow. You can tell I really worked my way up slowly. If I’m confusing R and PG 13 as a kid, I’m not sure. I’ll have to think about this.

Kyle: Mine was face off and Con air.

Cliff: Yeah, Coner was an early one for me too. Nicholas Cage. Speaking of accessibility in a genre, Nicholas Cage is a very good invitation into, the more fucked up of the movies than you would normally want to

watch. I was dragged to a horror movie not too many years ago just because he was in it. I did not enjoy it, but he was in it.

Kyle: Mandy,

Cliff: Yes,

Kyle: my man,

Cliff: it was good and I didn’t enjoy it. That is

Kyle: all ju just Shaday and Mandy. Two super romantic things. All about love. Love is the answer.

Cliff: so we got a Grammy for that song, but also like this album, four times Platinum. And. They

Kyle: Number three on the billboard 200, a consciousness cracking thing. And in the two hundreds on the Rolling Stone 500, which, you know, who gives a fuck, but it’s something.

Cliff: yes. But also like WI mean, many of the artists we talk about have some sense of international accolade, but Sade, by virtue of. Being British probably centered them in a way that also extended their popularity probably in different ways. So not only were all those things true about American sales, uh, and it was popular in Britain and all that, but Platinum and Canada, France, Japan, and Germany as well.

So well known, well appreciated. and arguably at the time, like a real cultural moment coming out of, speaking of nostalgia, there was sort of like a knock on movement to jazz nostalgia from the mid eighties in Britain, which this record sort of represented. And then, speaking of taking big swings here, like one thing we also mentioned was.

Even though so much of what we’re talking about here are effectively jazz elements presented, smoothly and pleasantly. The sort of downstream impact of a lot of this music was actually all the quiet storm and neo soul and r and b stuff. So like this energetically and culturally pushed things and less so in a sense musically, which I think is like a really cool thing to point out.

Like that’s not usually the trajectory that things will always follow. And in this case, like you can sort of see the reverberations of this band more so than here is a band that sounds like Shaday now,

Kyle: I would like to believe, I choose to believe that a lot of people probably sat in the studio and tried to one of one sound like this band. And then they were like, holy shit, we sound exactly like this band that only sounds like themselves. How can we get to this vibe? How can we back our way into this vibe?

you can’t facsimile the Sade sound at all ‘ cause it like. To this day, I don’t think anything sounds like it. There are a lot of moments on this record where I hear things and I know we’ll, we’ll talk about that at the end, but it’s like, oh, she’s such a clear influence on so many things, but nobody’s touching those key sounds or the depth of the mix or the sort of, lull, you know, the like out on the ocean, sort of light, rhythmic, bounce, sort of the anti can, like if can made an ambient thing.

Closest thing, I guess would be like future days can, absolutely. Nothing sounds like this.

Cliff: and if you think that what was just said is not like literally true, go listen to some of these songs and notice how they’re basically just using like the default Casio keyboard sounds and they still make songs that sound singular. Wild, wild stuff. To that end, I think one important bit worth drawing out here that maybe, and this is sort of a guess, but maybe draws out this, like how did they do less better and create a casual vibe type thing while also being so precise. Two things seem to change with this record in particular about the recording process. first of all, they, they did this over like a four month period physically making the album, uh, and did it in a bunch of different locations in 1992.

Kyle: Four, correct.

The Hit Factory in New York. LA Studio, a London studio.

Cliff: Condor in Venice Ridge Farm in Surrey, England, the hit factory in New York, like you mentioned in image recording in la

Kyle: Venice, man. I bet that sucked.

Cliff: Yeah, I was just thinking that is, that’s such a terrible sentence. Wow. You had to record across these multiple locations, and I’m sure everyone hated that you were there. Like what a cool moment for sure. so the, the band members come back, this is after a. Four year break that they’d taken after touring to support Stronger than Pride, which came out in 88.

So they’re already doing a pretty intentional, like almost mindfulness level band, mental health thing. and they come back together to record this over those four months. They do two things differently. One is they decide not to bring in an external producer. So this is self-produced, but with a familiar engineer.

So, over the course of this podcast, we’ve told a lot of stories that sort of are this, right? there is a moment when an, a lot of artists are reaching a place where they go, that producer used to pull me in a direction and now I’m in a place where I’m pulling production and I like, I need to be so on top of this that we take a different approach entirely.

So. Lot of self-direction with familiar engineering in beautiful places over a long period of time with people who know and trust each other and who have taken their own breaks to calm down and get energized and all this stuff coming back together. So they’re in charge of a lot of it. And secondly, uh, apparently at least most if not all of this was recorded without live drumming. So I personally, maybe I’m putting too much weight on that particular bit, but I have a hard time imagining that that didn’t create some of the vibe that we are like pointing at in this music where it can feel. Like it moves so much. the fact that they ostensibly would’ve put these things together prior to applying the rhythm to it means that they would’ve wanted to fill out those sounds and then use the rhythm to do another thing with it.

And like, I think, I would imagine that approaching it from that angle is probably what allowed them to open up and create such space with otherwise pretty concise music. Like I know No, or Ordinary Love is a pretty long song, which is itself super cool. But this whole record’s very concise to the point.

and I think those two things happening at the same time, I can only guess that some of those change factors help produce it. ’cause that’s a huge shift.

Kyle: I mean, if you are a a person of a rock and roll orientation where everything starts with the rhythm, the beat, it’s almost hard to fathom. How does a song. Move what are parts without, this thing has this rhythm and then you switch to this thing, it’s just a riff or a sound is just part of an idea.

I thought a lot when I was driving around listening to the record about how like tone, you know, like guitar tone or whatever, and texture exists on a continuum together. And I, I would’ve said that they were analogous, they were words for slightly different variations on the same thing. But I, and it’s probably not the right way.

It’s probably not the right binary. but there’s an idea in there that I’ve been thinking about a lot with the sounds on this record where like a tone is, it’s got some attack. it’s present. it’s a note with a shape trying to do a thing. And then a, a texture is more of a. A feel, it doesn’t present itself all the way.

And there’s so much of the ladder here, where like nothing gets all the way to a fully formed flavor. You know, there’s, there’s little keyboard flickers or there’s a saxophone that sits back in the mix a little on this one. Or when there is drum programming, it’s pretty flat. Like maybe if I have one beef with the whole thing is that maybe it’s arguably a little too flat, but that’s just my probably hip hop love bias.

And there is a little bit of like proto hip hop type vibe on this. But I also, as soon as I have that thought, I’m like, well, the bass guitar or the bass notes are occupying that mix. The nost part of the whole mix is the bass. For sure very base forward in a reggae kind of way. so think thinking about like how,

how much can you chew on a sound? how present and shaped is it versus like a thing stacked in space. Like when you’re, uh, when you’re in a PowerPoint and it does the thing where it like goes 45 degrees on you and you can pull things forward or backwards. I really get that feel visually when I’m locking in to the instrumentation here.

I wanna know your thoughts on, I’d like to get into the cold listen bit of things like what jumps out at you initially, where would you start with this? You’ve already talked about how no ordinary love right from the rip pulls you in. But the Mingus thing that you brought up last time of like listen to it very loud is still top of mind for me.

So talk about cold, listen and then tell me, because I’m curious ‘ cause I have a point of view, what volume do you most commonly listen to This? At

Cliff: You’ve prompted me in one way, you know, and one way you don’t know, so this could be fun.

Kyle: Neat!

Cliff: My cold listen experience this time. I will answer your question, but had less sort of to do with the volume experience of it, and more to do with my mental engagement. I listened again the first time, but with that old brain that me and you sort of talked about with the like, yeah, I like this. I know that I like

this. And I listened to it and I went, yeah, I like this.

Kyle: Check.

Cliff: Yeah. It was only the second time where I caught myself to the degree that I started laughing out loud because I realized, oh, well, I’m in the habit of never listening to what anyone says on a record at all, and all of a sudden feel no pain. So no ordinary love is just, it is, well, what it is, like, I’m not saying that to oversimplify it.

I’m just saying, uh, cold, warm, listen to me, that’s a gift that keeps on giving, regardless, just an incredible album opener. But song number two. Oh, oh. We, oh, everyone is getting laid off, aren’t they? Okay.

Kyle: Yeah, it’s a little too right now, isn’t it?

Cliff: y I have a word to say about the song. It can happen now or later, but it’s happening in this podcast. But

regardless, well,

Kyle: Start it now. Do it live.

Cliff: I was obviously immediately struck not just by it’s not like the lyrics to feel no pain are so complex. Like, I had to think through it to understand it. It was instead two things, it was the like, which we just laughed about. It was sort of the brutality of how prescient it still is. but secondly.

The, and this is a thing I think I’m putting on it, not a thing that was intended, but it still jives in that moment. I felt very aware of how normal it is for us to put that sort of conversation. Kind of under the covers, we got a life to live. I gotta stay happy. This stuff is happening. We know that it’s happening, but it’s sort of over there.

It’s in the song. This song is bouncy. It has a different vibe than that. so I’m gonna ride the vibe and I’m gonna leave the words over here. And there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with what I’m describing, but it was sort of the, that combo of like, this is still true for us.

Even though this is a record that was written in the nineties, which even as children in the nineties, we’ve talked about this before, like the sensation was America is over the hump of solving so many of its problems that we should become aware of the larger global problems that we can contribute to solving now. Whereas now we look 30 years down the road and actually it turns out we were rotting from the inside the entire time. And like that. Precision in the moment being

Kyle: And doing and doing liquor store robberies all over the world in order to stay, stay liquid.

Cliff: Yes. And that sharpness hit me really hard. And then, I tried to apply what I had laughed about before. If I’ll listen to Sade, what does this mean? And I had a sincerely profound kind of experience with this song. This like overly simple song.

Kyle: That, that, by the way, musically feels a little silly

Cliff: yes,

Kyle: Listen, it’s like,

Cliff: yes.

Kyle: am gold reggae type, whatever. And what grounded it for me was Oumou Sangare. Oh, this is a, grio telling a story. Type of moment. This is a wise person painting a picture for us in the simplest terms possible.

And doing it in a beautiful way, like tackling something ugly with beauty so that we can see that contrast creates hope. Right there. There’s an underlying hope in it. Uh, we don’t want people to have to sing the blues, teach them to strive. I, I just, I love the hope as a strategy bit of it. And so going from no ordinary love to that for a while I was like, man, I, I don’t know that I fuck with this.

but then I started to really like it. and it was nice that like, the music keeps you from being too down about the subject matter, but it keeps you thinking about it too. It doesn’t, it’s not like we’re in a recession. Go dance like Kesha, you know? you’re present with it, but you are more likely to wanna engage because of the overall feel of it all.

Cliff: Yeah, and that that is the unexpected dimension of the record. To me, it’s like that, that combination of feelings. Is unexpected. It’s not musical surprise here, and it’s not even lyrical surprise. It is like the specific combination and deployment of those two things. And to your point, like the way that the music sounds silly over the subject matter is I literally could not tell you are they winking into the camera or not.

It like, is this just a plain, simple song and this is the way it turned out? Or did they make a plain, simple song on purpose to make a statement? I actually have no idea. And it’s I don’t feel the need to figure it out, but specifically then when I engage with it that way, and to what you just called out in the chorus, like helping people, right, help them to strive, help them to move on, help them to have some future.

it was sort of like at first, again, it felt surface and silly. Hey, people are poor. You should help. Okay, thank you. Yes, I get it. the Somalian woman’s like, life hurts, like new shoes. Like I understand. I get it. but then it was, wait a minute, why did they say listen to the blues? And then that like kicked off a thing for me where, I don’t think I’m imbuing it with too much extra, but I feel in this moment comfortable saying, we’ve talked a lot about the blues.

We are not experts or like professional historians. but we’re pretty well-versed in this and what it means.

Kyle: I think being a lifelong enthusiast, grandfather, as I said, growing up in the birthplace of the blues.

Cliff: I have listened to Sun House enough times to be in this club.

Kyle: Yeah. Everything I ever listened to growing up was directly informed by

it. So there is that little bit.

Cliff: So in our, you know, tens of hours of discussion, you, I’m sure can hear about this from us. Like a, a lot of what we come to understand about the blues is like you, you engage with it at another level. ’cause at the surface of it, there are. Simple chords and open est stringed guitars and sloppy slide guitars and people singing stupid stories honestly, that like are overly simplistic and you know, sometimes they’re like heavily misogynistic and like there’re, there’s these sort of like simplistic problems that are all involved with it.

But the thing is that looking under it is where you discover all of what’s inside of there is like a people and a history and struggle and success and terror and horror and motivation and there’s so much packed into the little bit of it that you have to engage with it to sort of understand it.

And I think when it hit me that maybe this meant something specifically the line, like don’t let them stay home and listen to the blues. That clicked into 2025 for me, first of all. Okay, now we’re, now we’ve gotten to the word. Thank you for the preamble. there are a lot of people out there without jobs right now.

I know that we are sort of, we in a royal sense are in an unexpected amount of mounting propaganda that’s making you feel in different ways about how many people are and aren’t without jobs and how hard it is in a place. And like that’s not even limited to just the current Republican government. The governments do a pretty good job of telling you that what you’re looking at is not actually happening.

Don’t worry if someone lost their job. It’s easy for them to find one. We know though that that’s not true. We know that that’s not real and we know that a lot of people have lost their jobs and are having a lot of trouble finding jobs and that a lot of those people, and I’m saying like. I am positive that me and you, Kyle, literally both know people.

I am positive that everyone listening knows someone, like it’s pervasive. And it begins to stretch into I mean, when someone goes 6, 12, 18 months as a skilled professional without being able to find a job, in our culture, like this is, that’s death man. That is some of the hardest stuff possible to have to deal with, especially if, if you feel that someone relies on you for your income, once that settles and you start to feel like you can’t get out of that trap, that is a fundamentally different place for people to get stuck in.

And to me, walking the lines of this lyric and thinking about what’s our modern version of this, you know, in a realistic sense and realizing like. 30 years ago, people didn’t have the little boxes that changed our brains that we look at all day. And now the kind of version of this is just like you can just sit at home on your phone all day. I certainly don’t mean for this to be some like overly square put down your phone moment, but I do mean it like, if you know someone who is in that difficult place in life and they are struggling to like click into that next place of being able to participate in the economy and like do the things that we were taught we were supposed to do every day.

I think that’s an impossible situation to deal with well, in general. But the one thing you’ve got to do is keep people from going so far down that hole that our brains can go down now that you can’t come back out and see I’m a human being. I am worth things. This technology is fucking stupid.

I am worth a thing. I can do this. I will find a job eventually, or I will find a way to survive or something. And like that little device that we all learn to have to me Represents the dark side of the blues. That feeling that you can say, I live here now. I will not be leaving this depression like I exist here.

This is my identity. And now I will use it to say, my life is hard because this is who I am. that is the place we can’t let people get to. And the fact that this whole thought of bullshit that I’ve been on for the last five minutes came out of listening to a Sha Day song while I was outside casually is the point.

this took me to totally different places when I let me, or when, when I allowed it to. And this was just like the foremost example to me that like lit me on fire in the middle of nowhere. ’cause I’m listening to a song from 1992 that’s not even about right now. And I don’t know, I just, uh. On top of feeling like I wanted to say a thing to anyone who listens to us that came out of this.

Yes. It also was just another one of those moments that we talk about where I’m fully overwhelmed by the magic of music.

Kyle: Every time I. Read or hear someone do the, it’s the dam, it’s those damn phones routine. I’m always like, uh, but then I know it’s right. As much as we’ve been enriched by all the things, it’s given us access to all the unknown unknowns. It’s illuminated for us. It can make the good stuff lots better, but it damn sure doesn’t make any of the bad stuff better.

And because of the design of the hardware, and especially all the software in it all the systems in the little box, it’s designed to trap you in those holes. and as humans, our physiology can’t resist those traps. I mean, you work in this world every day and you talk about the philosophy and ethics of it with people in your field.

So I know, I know you live it, like I live climate and the planet type stuff. And it, you see it in every, atom of your existence. it’s radicalizing, but it is, it gives me that like Rick and Morty type of comfort. That’s actually not a comfort at all. It’s only a comfort ’cause it’s the truth that that thing that we’re experiencing right now that’s so brutal has actually always been there.

that doesn’t make it better at all, but it just makes it real and grounded and like, none of this. I agree with you. None of this is a direction that I anticipated going when we. Certainly when we like picked out Shaday on the calendar. but that’s probably what makes it, one of the, one of the more beautiful things that we’ve covered, period, is love and pain aren’t just flip sides of the same coin.

they’re like the two halves of yin and yang. And the older I get, you know, when I was younger there’s the debate about can artists create without suffering, like a suffering, a prerequisite for good art? That’s the thesis of the Teddy Perkins episode in Atlanta. And it’s been kind of a theme of this podcast.

The older I get, the more I’m like, unfortunately I don’t know that, that it can. There’s something like a brain receptor or a cosmic energy thing or some combination of all of those elements. But they’re all the same feeling with slightly different flavor. So that’s why Nirvana at the end of the journey is not happiness.

It’s not the plus side of the battery, it’s the absence of any of those things because they are in fact all the same thing. So here we are back at listen to Shaday on a yellow shirt,

The tao of Sade Adu. It really is that deep, for everybody having that debate raging on in the social media wasteland in 2025.

Yes, you illiterate fucks. It really is all that deep.

Cliff: This feelings conversation is also timely because literally today I had a therapy session and my therapist, as they do, will occasionally go, Hmm, okay, it’s time to bring out the feelings wheel so you can tell me what you really feel. And we talk today about how, um, uh, after my usual, uh, preamble about all of it, I was just like, is there a way that I could stand on the line between sad and mad though?

Because I, I actually don’t experience them as one or the other. For the most part. I sort of experienced this mixture of those two things as an intensity. And then what I do with it from there is how I feel about it.

Kyle: Oh, the next note is what defines the note. Yeah.

Cliff: Oh no. I have Miles Davis to my emotional life,

Kyle: Well, I mean the, the feelings wheel could be the Coltrane love supreme draw, you know, religious drawing thing. The, the

Cliff: the circle of his Yeah, The circle of fists. Yeah. Your feelings are a circle of fifths. That’s, that’s more jazz dispensary shit. The cliff seals circle of, circle of fifths feelings. I also cannot resist the temptation. when you said, bringing it into the present day, like this present moment, I really thought you were going to say, contrast this with the new Taylor Swift album, which is in emotion and depth. the actual complete opposite of this in every way and is for semi literate, emotionally stunted boneheads, Disney adulthood, the album,

you can buy any kind of love, but you can buy Love Taylor’s edition. Yeah,

Kyle: well, you can’t buy Love Deluxe, but you can buy Love Target Deluxe Red Swirl vinyl version 12 of 42 to keep me on the charts in lieu of Charlie XCX.

Cliff: I, I do

hate that you’ve taken.

Kyle: I will, violate the no hating rule that you, that you have worked me into for almost no one. I will observe the Beatles maxim of if we are about to start hating, let’s move on and talk about loving Taylor Swift and Drake can always catch these hands.

Proverbially speaking.

Cliff: I, I hate that you’ve dragged me down this road, which I had intentionally not turned down, but now that we’re here,

Kyle: That’s what I’m here for. Baby, to drag you down. you’re always wanting to leave the bar and I’m like, Nope, Nope. Not till we get in a fight.

Cliff: that Not till we leave in handcuffs, motherfucker.

I will say since I’m now a professional at finding Silver Linings, at least though she is doing a thing I wish other artists would do, which is she did a track by track commentary version and that from her, no, I don’t need, but

Kyle: I was gonna say, uh, yes, but anyone but her and then, and then going on another interview and saying, haha uh, satire doing the Tommy Wiseau. Yes. Thank you for coming to my comedy film. That was definitely a comedy.

Cliff: You should have to be pre-cleared

Kyle: Taylor, that that album is Taylor being like, anyway, mark has your sex life.

Cliff: At least we buried this discussion in the middle of the episode. This is good.

Kyle: No, this is gonna be the social media clip. We’re

Cliff: will

Kyle: doxed. We’re gonna get doxed for the Shawday episode. That’s how Tuned Dig ends. We went out with love. Hate love, hate, love. That’s the Allison Chain song is the theme of this episode.

Cliff: So I have a sense that maybe we have less specific answers here than we normally do, but now I’m curious to check the box. So we sort of touched on ways to focus, and for me that was just like listening to the words in general, which was a cool step. But like I can’t say that I had the same moments I usually have with other albums where I went.

I can find a thing to like hone in on, on this record. It feels wrong to me, to be honest with you. And I prefer to stay zoomed out on it. I’m curious if you found something else or if that aligns with how you were feeling.

Kyle: So I’m totally with you. I think that is totally fair and valid. I. I keep coming back to that idea of elegance and like, if you’re gonna focus, only focus a little, not too much for not too long, right? I’ve talked about the misfit she things on a number of episodes where it’s, that’s the best chorus ’cause they only did it once and then it goes away.

Doing a move that you know is a really great move not enough, is one of my favorite things in music. There’s a great Earl sweatshirt interview earlier in his career where he talks about the importance of mystery and like, that’s why Tom Waits is one of the greats because you never get to know him all the way, and when you do it’s wrong. It’s a lie.

So there is a sensuality to staying zoomed out, right? It’s, once again, it’s the Cliff Seal don’t turn the lights on in Space Mountain.

Cliff: Well said just there. Holy shit. Yes. Perfect word. Thank you.

Kyle: I respect that deeply. I do think there isn’t a bit of an art form to just like, oh, isn’t that nice? You know, like, don’t rewind the whole tape to make everybody go back and listen to the thing. But if you catch it on the next one, on your ride home, you know, just a little kiss on the cheek.

So a lot of it is lyrics. The string swell to open pearls and then there is a woman in Somalia, like five words. It’s like, I sat up in my chair and I was like, oh shit, I’m about to cry. It’s about to happen. She cries to the heaven above there is a stone in my heart. She lives a life she didn’t choose.

And it hurts. Like brand new shoes. The sun gives her no mercy, the same sun we lay under, burns her to the bone. Like there’s so many lines I wish I had written and the economy, I don’t wanna zoom in too much because the economy of words here is just so good. Oh my God. Hearing the words delivered, but then reading the words feels like walking around in a museum, like I feel reverent. About the words. So

Cliff: like I,

should be wearing pants when I listen to this record. Yeah.

Kyle: which is the opposite of what I would’ve said before we really started concentrating on it. Like no pants

definitely required.

Cliff: Deluxe.

Kyle: Ah, I no longer hope that my daughter one day listens to this episode. but then, uh, what was the one in Feel No pain?

Cliff: The bridge maybe.

Kyle: Oh, no. the third verse of like a tattoo.

Cliff: Okay.

Kyle: Which, the story of that song is crazy. Like she’s just relaying a story she was told in a bar in New York, which it’s good to know. That happens to other people too, where you’re just at a bar by yourself and then somebody tells you about the most harrowing experience of their entire life and the guilt that they live with because of it.

Alright, well I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna go and I’m never gonna see you again. But thanks for haunting me for the rest of my life. Uh, she said, I remember his hands and the way the mountains looked. The light shot diamonds from his eyes, hungry for life and thirsty for the distant river.

But even me reading it, even the worst possible way to, to have these lyrics delivered to you, sent a. Full chill, top to bottom of my spine. So there’s little like, oh wow. Oh wow. Moments with the lyrics. And then you gotta work for musical moments. the first time I really dialed in with Feel No Pain, I thought my phone was buffering.

’cause like at a minute and a half it stops and, she does the sing the blues, and then there’s the bass like, woo, move. it was so cool, but so understated. And then, the keyboard sound, the key’s tone in Kiss of Life, which if it were too high in the mix. Would probably make the whole song sound cheesy.

Cliff: Yes.

Kyle: So it was specifically like, Ooh, I really like the like mouth feel of that. You know, like a musical texture always has a, a real tactile thing to me. And then my second thing was like, it’s a good spice, but there’s not too much of it in the dish. It sits at just the right place in the palette.

And so there were a lot of moments of, I guess like walking around the museum feeling of just being like, wow, wow. You, oh, full O and Wilson. Wow. Like feeling the expanding feeling from it. it’s a lot of showing and not telling. I think it’s a very adult record in that way, and that it’s like, here it is.

We’ve captured a feeling perfectly and. Held it in our hands and stretched it out across a good amount of time and space. and most artists would be bragging about their ability to do that. They’d be flexing. And there’s none of that here. There’s so much, a gentleman as someone who can play the accordion but doesn’t.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: so it’s like an anti masterclass masterclass. I just really, really appreciate the elegance. It’s like, it’s full of secrets. It’ll never tell you, and you’re good with that.

Cliff: And on the off chance that you listener think that we are even being slightly like intellectually lazy by being like there’s sort of a thing. We don’t know how to talk about the inside of here, but it’s there. There is a quote from Sade that I think underscores all of this, and we can also talk about this song in particular if you want, but she was asked.

In a 1992 interview. So this album is still Fresh Charade. What is your favorite song on Love? Deluxe quote. If I had to pick one, it would be Cherish the Day, but I don’t know why. I just like it. I think it’s really quite deep, but at the same time it’s a love song. It’s funny, most of the song, I can’t tell you if I really like them or not.

It’s really hard to be objective about it, but cherish the day. I know if I heard it on the radio I would say, God, this is good. Who is this? there’s such a like detachment at play. Like the song is the song we made the song. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I like ’em. Yeah, I made them well like what’s your, what is your question?

And like that’s like a fundamentally different and unique. Perspective on music, especially again, because it’s slow rolled music that’s been like slow cooked for a long time. It’s been a lot of thought and iteration that’s gone into it. And most artists, maybe it’s because they feel the need to have it be self-important at that point, but like most of them are going to tell you like, yeah, here’s my favorite song, or that’s a stupid question.

Here’s how I th you know, here’s how I think about my songs. And like to be right on the other side of this multi-platinum record on the other side of touring the globe. And just be like, you know, now that I think about it and I’m not really sure which one is great ’cause really what makes them great to begin with,

Kyle: Yeah, it’s very self-actualized. That’s another dimension that makes it mature. Yeah, it never feels the need to explain itself, and one of them like famously. One of the most well known things about Sade is her reclusiveness. And there is so little material, interview wise or whatever, you’re just not gonna get a lot of source material.

So I don’t think it’s intellectually lazy. it’s, you just are, you’re getting to conjecture very fast. Like, here’s my opinion on this. They’re not out there talking about it a lot like some of these other artists, you know, where, where a gang of four have talked extensively about entertainment, where Missy and Tim have talked a lot about Super Dupa Fly.

There’s just not much of it. There’s very little from Sade and there’s borderline even less from the band. Do you have a favorite song on the record?

Cliff: Man, I hate that you asked me this right after I just talked about how Sade thinks about it because I, I’m defaulting to wanting to borrow that idea. I, I don’t have a favorite, I have favorites of different categories, the side of me Cliff, who likes intensity and Subversion that’s like directly in your face and making eye contact loves like a tattoo more than anything else.

it’s so intense and to the point. again, I always bring up how much I don’t like lyrics so that everyone knows when I’m talking about lyrics, I am doing it with like extreme sincerity. I do not feel the need to bolster anyone’s words ever. I think it’s a waste of time for the most part. But you just talked about the lyrics on like a tattoo and you mentioned the light shot diamonds from his eyes.

Like she in that song never says the word shot and uses that sentence to say the word without ever talking about what actually happens in that story,

Kyle: how many artists have we talked about lyrics are a third rail sometimes on this podcast, and how many times have we gotten into our, like going back to our AP English class level analysis of shot is only used in the context of eyes and not in the, not in the literal yet. That’s, God, I hadn’t even noticed that.

That’s

so good.

Cliff: She says the thing without saying the thing to me like that is, that was part of what makes that song incredible to me. It’s not like fun to listen to, but that the, the intentional subversion goes all the way down, all the way down into, I can tell you this story without actually having to tell you anything that happened in it because, and this got to me too when I started thinking about it, but like, because you’re a human being and it doesn’t matter who you are, you know what this is about.

And I don’t give a shit what war you’ve been in. You know what she’s talking about. like it hits you at such a place that goes beyond politics and religion and everything else that we put up as walls to decide what we think about things. And it goes right into you and looks you at the eyeball and says like, do you think you shoot a person?

Because this person regrets it forever. that level of engagement to the listener is powerful. Not only because it’s intentional, but because it’s rare on the record they’re engaging with you differently. But in that moment, like that song to me is a story from someone told by Shaday about you, the listener. I, and I know that’s me editorializing on it, but like the, the shape of the way that the story is told feels like a question to me. Do you see yourself in this? Or would you have done something different and like that to hit me with that halfway through a like 40 minute, smooth jazz record that I’m trying to shake my ass to, will you please support me?

I never do this. and then to just like to get hit with that is. It was deeply meaningful to me. And even further, I think, you know, we mentioned this earlier, but I had to like sort that out logically. How does that seriousness make its way into this? And that is where for the first time I again went, this is something like funk

Kyle: It not only doesn’t throw me out of the flow of the rest of the record, but feels necessary to it, which is, try thi having that thought and then going off and making your own album and trying to do that intentionally and it’ll never work.

Cliff: No. And I will then give you a separate and cheaper answer. One of my favorite songs is Mermaid. There’s an instrumental

Kyle: Okay. That’s why I asked. I thought it would be the instrumental and honestly I think it might be mine too.

Cliff: It has such a familiar sound to it.

Kyle: yeah, the, so the aquatic ambiance thing I brought up earlier, I think it’s like, if that were a love song,

Cliff: Hmm.

Kyle: I think it’s like meeting your person in a dream is what it sounds like to me.

And, and knowing, I always thought it was Kiss of Life. Like Kiss of Life is on my favorites playlist, my like all time favorites.

and I don’t mean that in a spiritual sense. I mean, literally on my favorites

Cliff: Yeah. Kyle has literal playlists. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s two, 200 songs deep. because I I love the way it makes you feel like somebody’s child-free aunt with her eyes closed and her hands above her head, my big fat Greek wedding style, just like L-I-V-I-N, there’s no pure feeling of freedom then the way that, so I was like slipping into a warm bath.

Kyle: Just, it’s delightful. It’s nerv. But mermaid caught me by surprise, and I was like, maybe I haven’t been listening to this record all the way through all these years. but man, it is a jam. And there’s, I guess another one of the like, don’t focus too hard, but if you focus a little, you’ll be rewarded.

This is not a guitar record. we, so many of the records we talk about are guitar records, or we find the guitar forwardness in them. Certainly there’s been a lot of that this year, but there’s a couple of moments of really interesting guitar and there’s not nearly enough of it. And I think that’s one of the things that makes what you get so good.

So like in no ordinary love, there’s really crunchy, what some critics described as heavy metal guitar, which is, you know, hilarious for in the context of this podcast. Um, like Trap Them and Sweetback or whatever the the band without Sade is called.

Cliff: Love that. Hm. Two they used in the Neo Soul records. Yeah.

Kyle: but then they do like a little bit of a crunchy solo, not even a solo. I mean, it’s like. Six or eight notes or something in No Ordinary Love. But then Mermaid has this cool, clean jazz tone Mac, DiMarco, EI, I can’t even Pat Metheny. I don’t like, I don’t know what it, what it reminds me of, but it’s the kind of guitar where I just want to sit and listen to an individual person, do that for long stretches of time.

and then it’s got some, like, you know, you’re talking about funk is interesting. It’s sort of like we talked about, it’s the inverse energy of maggot brain. But I think Mer Mermaid and maggot brain are like an interesting thing to mash up.

Cliff: For sure.

Kyle: right up against each other.

Cliff: Eddie Hazel could easily play a guitar riff over Mermaid and it would be very tight.

Kyle: Yeah. yes.

Yeah, for sure.

Cliff: then maybe we can now take the fun venture of saying what next? There’s a lot of what next potential here, which is pretty cool. I actually don’t feel nearly as walled in as I normally do in this sort of moment of like, I gotta tell, I gotta tell the people where to go. there aren’t a whole lot of wrong answers, including just very literally just listen to Sade in a larger sense beyond this album in general, until you’re tired of doing that. one thing I should say out loud, this was definitely, I noticed it about myself, my most repeated. A continuously repeated record ever that we’ve ever listened to for this podcast.

I was just getting to the end and just over, just keep going again, let’s do another, and like Mermaid was part of it. It just, it feels like an interlude that asks you, are you finished with this yet? Or would you like to do another round?

Kyle: Are you still watching?

Cliff: yeah.

Kyle: Yes.

Cliff: And that was, I don’t know why that is necessarily, but

Kyle: Do you feel like I, I feel like we’ve come too far in the podcast and we know too much now for it to be the same, but like. The religious transformative experience that I had with Voodoo that I’ve talked about a million gazillion times on this. Did you get some of that with this, it sounds like maybe.

Cliff: This made me, the sensation you’re asking me about made me feel even more capable of listening to even more music than I have before. And I didn’t even know that that was a thing I needed to feel.

Kyle: Hmm. Wow.

It’s beautiful. I feel so lucky to have them, her as a teacher, I know she would not want this. I can say that with certainty, but I am adopting her as a spiritual guide when we are constantly disappointed by the people who make the art that we love, and that’s become more and more of a theme, the more artists we’ve talked about.

It’s like there’s so little. Sade out there. And what it is, is a, a potent and directed energy, and we are told explicitly by her, it’s all there in the music. You don’t need anything else. I can take the teachings as good guideposts for my own life. So where do you go from here, bud?

Cliff: Currently I’m, trapped envisioning Sade being like, sent by a cosmic entity to help us. but in the, unfortunately my mind locked into like, but she’s Roma Downey and touched by an angel, and she’s just like, I’m an angel sent by Curtis Mayfield to help you with your music.

Kyle: Biblically accurate. Sade, be not afraid. My child.

Cliff: I think one thing that might be kind of unusual to say that might be cool to start with is like, maybe where not to go. And I don’t mean in a, you shouldn’t do this sense, but I think, and I’m not trying to place people in too strong a categories, right. But Sade, to me, represents. such a kind of singular moment and part of the genre that was such a collection of standout historical musical figures.

That to me, asking you to go back and try to understand who inspired Sade would just be like, go learn who inspired the Beatles and come back and let me know. I did learn that. I don’t know that I actually learned anything though on the other side of that, because everyone on the other side is a famous singular musician.

So I’m sort of saying that in the sense of even more than usual, I like the idea of sort of exploring where this went. So specifically. Then I think, and, and we mentioned this earlier, my biggest curiosity for listening next is the. Genre known as Quiet Storm, but like even we’ve talked about the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, we’ve talked about D’Angelo, we, we’ve touched on the places that ended up downstream of all of this.

And I think, I mean, even D’Angelo’s Voodoo, like listening to that record again, hot off of a Sade, listen, I think will actually change the way that you receive that record and what you’re hearing, because just like it might be overwhelming to try to go back and dissect what you know resulted in a Shaday, trying to map the precise places. That love Deluxe or Shaday in general impacted music seemed harder to me than looking for the places where people felt moved by her and by this artist. and I, again, I’m, I’m sort of like stepping back from being specific, only because it’s helped me to look more and better at what should I listen to now.

And to me that helps put quiet storm, neo soul, a lot of that stuff in more context. Like these records don’t sound like Sade, but they do sound like someone who listened to a lot of Shaday. And I think that helps me draw something else out, in other forms of music. So to me, like I, you know, I’ve sort of fully gotten stuck in that next step of things.

Like I, I truly didn’t know that that was sort of like an objectively agreed upon one, two step. What is happening on this record? And then quiet storms type stuff downstream. I, I would’ve thought that was more of a tangential conjecture level thing. And I do, I will say one more bit that, I mean, if I’m being honest as a bit like less interesting musically, but interesting culturally in order to feel out that sort of timescale and effect, I did learn a lot more about, and you mentioned nostalgia earlier.

There was a nostalgia jazz movement in the eighties in Britain especially, which sort of, interestingly enough did a, this’ll be fun to describe like a 1980s version of. What they thought listening to jazz was like for jazz heads in the sixties and seventies, and it’s sort of like a British cosplay of things a bit, but I think had like a.

Know, I, I’m trying not to imbue it with like bad vibes. Like it feels weird and kind of cheap, honestly. But I can also see that those were people going to jazz clubs. Okay. so now we’re connecting it again to the Mingus thing. Like you’re listening to a thing in jazz clubs, but what’s different between the people who were going to Mingus in the late sixties and seventies or whatever, and then people who were doing this sort of.

Jazz revival thing in the eighties is they needed more accessible forms of jazz. So then all this stuff gets smoothed out and compressed, and we come with new kind of flatter genres of jazz that are ironically still designed for the experience of you sitting there enjoying it, but instead of challenging you with it to sort of lock into it, it’s now it’s going back to the thing that we think of as a you know, as the jokey jazz stuff.

It’s dinner background music, it’s stuff that you can hear, but it doesn’t distract you from conversation. And so those things together to me, just like examining the time period sort of immediately before and after, which both felt unexpected were, to me, the more interesting places to go.

Kyle: I like all that.

I love that you mentioned Miseducation specifically because. This felt like a culmination of, it was like a greatest hits of everything that we’ve ever covered on the podcast. and to your point, not literally sonically, but the ideas that a lot of these albums have come to represent for us over the years.

So like you mentioned, they had these distinct soul influences, a big one of which is Marvin Gaye, Marvin Gaye being a forebearer of quiet storm type stuff. But I think I Want You specifically us having talked about that feels in the spiritual lineage of this because it’s like getting in a mood sonically and kind of staying there.

So if you like the idea, if you like the way that love Deluxe. Sort of hits a frequency and manages to sustain it for an unusually long amount of time. I want you does that as well. One of the things that surprised me thinking about this being 1992 when massive attacks, blew lines would have come out and sent shock waves throughout the uk and in addition to the nostalgia jazz thing, jazz is also getting refracted into house and dub and can’t underscore enough the importance in the UK of like club subcultures and how electronic music is starting to morph all of that.

But Portishead Dummy, one of the first albums we ever covered is not out at this point. When you talk about trip hop, which like this record, in my opinion, most definitely is a trip hop record, and I never would’ve thought that before the context of this podcast slotting it in with blue lines and Portishead, and even stuff like Nina Cherry, or tricky.

it’s really interesting, like trip hop and hip hop like I would’ve like put it perpendicular to all that stuff, but it is very similar to it. I heard some Bjork in this, especially when she gets orchestral or poignant or like the moments that stick out from the other moments feel like Bjork feel like homogenic, Bjork.

So if you like, uh, like a tattoo or Pearls,

Cliff: gonna say pearls could be on Homogenic.

Kyle: pearls could be a homogenic song. I think a lot of the textural nature of this felt like cocteau twins and specifically, uh, heaven or Las Vegas cocteau twins. there’s a lot of resonance in the way they feel sonically to me. I think it feels pretty clear that Fiona Apple as a lyricist would’ve been influenced by somebody like Sade.

Big feelings put into economical, turn a phrase. I heard some, maybe a little tangerine dream in the band. You know, trying to go kind of electronic, get kinda lush with it. I think if you like the character of sade’s voice. Being great, but mostly ’cause it’s unique, not because it’s Aretha Franklin. Chelsea Wolf could be an interesting place for you to go.

kick ass vocalist. all too easy to mention Jeff Buckley early to mid nineties. Highly emotive, very sensuous, one of one type music. Yes, I agree that you try not to say go listen to a bunch of neo soul after this, you know, do the DeAngelo Maxwell. And the band did help produce the first two Maxwell albums, so natural lineage there.

I should probably be physically restrained from continuing to tell people every time I open my mouth to listen to DeAngelo’s Voodoo. But there are a couple moments specifically where I heard Erica Badu. like a tattoo. The chord progression reminded me of AD2000 from Mama’s Gun and a little bit of Andre three thousand’s prototype.

So like we talked about Stan Conia on the podcast, but I hear a lot of love below. It’s so funny that you opened Comparing 3000 and Sade. Sade, obviously huge influence on Three Sacks, but

Cliff: Damn. Oh ho. Sorry. Yeah. I need to go listen to that record with that in mind now. Holy

Kyle: Lo Love

Cliff: stuff’s coming to mind.

Kyle: Yeah, Yeah,

Cliff: Wow.

Kyle: yeah. Spread pink and blue,

Cliff: That would’ve been the first time that DRE could be like, this is my Sade influence here, right here. Oh, that makes so much sense.

Kyle: Yeah. Love Below and love Deluxe. I kind of want to hear somebody do a gray album, mashup of them. if that doesn’t exist, it needs to, the thing that I thought I hated about Frank Ocean, we talked about Channel Orange, but I’m thinking more specifically of blonde, the formlessness of it, the lack of percussion and how tones and textures occupy the space first.

and on a lot of blonde, he didn’t even feel the need to do the drum programming like they eventually did on Love Deluxe. But, there are songs that fade in and out on Love Deluxe that feel very Franco like Fran Ocean has not been shy about talking about what an influence shot a is. But if you like that, fleeting in and out of your consciousness, ethereal aspect of Frank Ocean, I, you have a really good spiritual ascendant in Sade here.

we talked about awakened my love. I don’t think that record would exist, especially the more ethereal moments, like a terrified, like the quieter parts of me and your mama, um, or baby boy. that to me is still the best stuff Donald Glover ever did. cause it was just really pure distilled. He called it an exercise in feeling.

So if you like that record, you know, there’d be no red bone without Sade. I feel pretty strongly about that. And then another thing that like, is still so shocking to me that TikTok made it popular. I don’t know if you remember, but the Deftones covered no ordinary love. and it’s very tune diggy in the fact that on that covers and BSides whatever.

Record that is to call it a mixed bag, is a, is about as complimentary as I can be about it. There’s also a simple man cover, and it feels very, very Kyle Stapleton, in his Ford F-150 in high school, CDR, that Sade and Skynyrd would be on the same track listing. But if you like the Sensuousness of Deftones and you can’t listen to any other heavy shit, but you love the Deftones, that is because of Sade.

Huge influence on the Deftones and on Chinos specifically. And Greg Puciato from Dillinger and now better lovers has also cited them as an influence. And if you don’t like his heavy vocals. That makes you wonder, like, why did Jerry Cantrell pick him to be the guy to go out and sing Lane Staley vocals every night? That’s why. ’cause he is got a soul thing, a dimension. So like all of the things that are like the capital R, capital a real artist, things to all those folks we just mentioned, that’s why they all love or are spiritually connected to Sade. Like there, there’s, there’s such a pure, it’s not even punk, it’s, it’s like disrespectful to be like, wow, it’s so punk.

I think subversive is a good word for it, but even that signals intent. And she’s not trying to surf, she’s just surfing. You know, that’s, that’s what makes her a bit of a spiritual figure is like, it all, it all just is man. It exists in a pocket dimension beyond time. And it really is all that deep with Sade.

and the other thing that I saw, was an Elton John quote. Another great in their own right, sir Elton John said they made so many great records and when you go back and revisit ’em, pure class, pure beauty, and maybe that’s what it is, man. It’s just it’s such a rare thing to feel pure beauty in this world, and that’s what they managed to bottle and deliver.

I love it so much.

Cliff: I love that you mentioned both Chino and Greg. Those were two little quotes I wanted to make sure at least got tossed in here somewhere as evidence of the broader sense of influence that Shawday has had on music. Like these are people who care about doing vocals well, who are doing very different styles of music, who are all telling you, this person, this person inspires me.

This was really, really good.

Kyle: Do you remember, how many Sade shirts we saw at Furnace Fest that we pointed it out to each other like, and we thought it was just to be cheeky and then eventually realize oh no, it’s just like game recognized game. Anybody who music makes them feel very deeply, no. Like this is, this, is it You look, you’re staring directly at the Sun of Deep Feeling.

Cliff: You do the cheeky thing enough and you tell on yourself. So yeah,

Kyle: Yeah.

Cliff: a lot of people wearing Sade shirts and a lot of good vibes between them. And to that end, like, just how really fill in this picture, like this is like Sade as a person. Let me give you the funny ones first, Drake has tattoos of Sade, okay?

in 2010, like Kanye West was like, Sade just had new music, and this is better than everything else in existence, right? but then like MF Doom, sampled Kiss of Life, right? Rakim Tole Kule, Joey Badass, LL Cool, J Mob, deep Nipsey Hussle, Freddy Gibbs all sampled Interpolated something Sade’s music so it’s, People doing vocals? Well, it’s people doing soul. It’s people doing hip hop. It’s all the trip hop people you mentioned. It is maybe even more than most of the other records we talked about, a downstream just constellation of people who were not inspired specifically by a musical thing. They could pick out and reproduce, but instead somehow by the vibe.

Just the vibe.

Kyle: you know the through line that I hear when you run down that list, we talk about Furnace Fest and seeing somebody wearing a big shot, a shirt in the Mind Force pit. We talk about somebody like Freddy Gibbs who’s the most machismo dude ass rapper you could possibly imagine. You talk about Greg Puciato, who literally breathes fire on stage.

And the thing that I hear reminds me of that thing we said on the Brooks and done episode of like, men simply do not be yearning anymore. Maybe Sade is a gateway drug to ending the toxic masculinity crisis. You know, ’cause the signal that I hear from the man averse in there being an appreciation for Sade is like, well, I can’t talk to my boys about anything deep.

You know, I’ll go two days hanging out with my boys and still not know that his pet died or whatever. But I guarantee you, a group of dudes who all listen to Shaday, have cried together or, or like actually know things about what’s going on in each other’s lives. So, once again, maybe the lesson in this is, um, men don’t deserve women.

But I sure am happy that we can learn from, we can be blessed by the matriarchy.

Cliff: Honestly, that’s a very good takeaway for everybody is the next time you’re around some people that you care about. you need to evolve just a little bit to be a little bit more closer together, and you look directly into the camera and you put on Love Deluxe. And when they ask you, Hey bro, what’s up? You do not falter. Do not move back. Do not second guess. This is Sade’s Love Deluxe, and we’ll be listening to this now. Okay.

Kyle: I am, I just cannot shake the visual of you putting on Love Deluxe very loud when you pick up a friend from the airport and doing the Paul Walker, staring directly at them from the driver’s seat and saying, me the deepest fear that you haven’t been able to express to anyone.

Cliff: Tell me something

you’ve never told anyone else before.

Kyle: that’s right, and then they’re totally and thoroughly fucked up.

You park the car and you say, all right, we’re here at dinner. Let’s go eat. That’s the Cliff Seal friendship experience, and I hope everybody gets that in their life.

Cliff: Not too far from the truth.

Kyle: Go have yourself a yearn, gentlemen. The world will be better for it.