Sade. What can I say but I love the music of Sade. When I was in High School, I was like any other teenager in that I was looking for something to call my own. And like a lot of other teenagers I thought that the key to discovering who I was lay in finding some really cool band. Now I hung around with the ‘alternative’ crowd and we prided ourselves on the bands that we liked. Looking back now it is all very silly. In looking for a band that was new and interesting, we often chose the same band. So in discovering our individuality we flocked like lemmings to the same bottom forty. I was a little different though in that I understood what was happening and actually began to like the hunt for new music rather than the bands that I still have in my CD collection (I know it should be somewhere digitized but I still don’t have cyber-space room for it and in addition no time to go through all of my back catalog.
So I would read magazines like Q and Rolling Stone and really reach for those bands that I had never heard of. I am happy to say that I was one of the first (that I knew of) to ‘discover’ the greatness that is Sade. At this time she had had one hit and I had read about it from the English magazine Q. I then started to search for anything of hers and it was not until about a year later that she collected most of her singles into her first album. Then she took off and became what she is today; a popular songstress. So the world stole my music from me. To give you some idea about the freshness of Sade at the time I was hanging out with my older brother M (first initials only to protect the identities of my social network. M had a radio show on the local college radio station KUNR. Every Sunday M would play the most contemporary modern jazz, what I now know of as San Diego Jazz. I gave him my cassette tape of Sade and he loved it right away and subsequently put it into heavy rotation on his show. (I would later go to the same college radio station for my own show, “The Mood Mode” that I will write about someday.
So the world took the music but they could not spoil what the music meant to me. One of the things that I took from Sade is that music can convey so much of the mystery of the world. One mystery that it certainly helps with is love. Even though I, like all teenagers, liked to kid myself that I understood love; I didn’t. We understood lust, infatuation, and desire, but not love. Even then I knew this. Listening to Sade I could feel the love in her music. I remember thinking that here is someone who is in love in her life and lets me feel it. Here is someone who has discovered something about love that I can only try to understand. Try as I might though, I felt it without understanding it. I wanted to experience that love but was never able. Women are so shallow in high school, at least the vast majority. So are men at that age. I wanted to go deeper into a relationship than any young high school girl was willing or able to go. Instead, my intensity seemed to scare them off.
I have always been more concerned with the temporariness of life and knew that I would one day be able to feel that love when I found the right person. The only was to understand the love found in Sade’s music is to be in love like Sade. I never found that love, until I found A. I do not know how my Editors know these things, but it was very appropriate when D chose “Your Love is King” to write about as my first idea. Sure D shares his Birthday with our anniversary (a story that I will tell someday) but could he have known that October 4th is A’s birthday and on October 10th it will be our 20th Anniversary. I like to think D knew or if he did not it is just good kismet.
Because it was A who taught me how to love and be loved. It is A who continues to teach me about how to love and be loved. I do not know, and indeed do not want to know, what my life would have been like without having found A. By all the facts and evidence, I do not deserve the wife that I have. I had never felt love the way I felt it when A is looking at me. And that is the reason I asked her to marry me. So the first dance we had as a couple at out reception was “Your Love Is King” by Sade. So then that idea that it is the one who you love who is the King of your heart, the idea that you could spend your life together with someone, the idea that another is necessary for you to have a good life, that love is a mystery that can only be solved as a couple. That is the Idea I have when I hear that song and when I look at my Beautiful Wife. Happy Birthday.
