In recent weeks, Sade's new album Soldier of Love has received both good reviews and publicity from acts that include Talib Kweli, Drake and Kanye West, who have all expressed admiration for the singer.

"If I auditioned for X Factor, I probably wouldn't get through the first process," laughs British singer Sade (Helen Folasade Adu), on the phone from a hotel in Los Angeles. "They'd say, 'Oh God, not her.'"
Plenty has changed in the music industry in the 10 years since Sade, now 51, released her last album, Lovers Rock. Simon Cowell and his reality shows The X Factor and American Idol have reshaped pop music, and the Internet has become both a blessing and a curse for the recording industry. However, even after a decade away from it, with her new record, Soldier of Love, sitting high atop the U.S. Billboard charts, the reclusive singer can claim a seamless return.
The success is no surprise, really. With 50 million records sold, Sade is the best-selling female act in British history, and has, since her breakout single "Smooth Operator" in the '80s, been very popular in the United States, as well. And in recent weeks, Soldier of Love has received both good reviews and publicity from acts that include Talib Kweli, Drake and Kanye West, who have all expressed admiration for the singer.
In the 10 years since Sade's last album, the singer says she's been busy with "the good and bad and ugly of life." She moved from London, where she lived most of her life, to the countryside in the west of England, where she's been renovating a house and raising her daughter, who sings backup on Soldier of Love. There was a successful world tour in 2001, and in 2002, she was awarded the Order of the British Empire. In 2005, she contributed to a Darfur benefit compilation and soon after, her band - which includes Stuart Matthewman, Paul Spencer Denman and Andrew Hale, and has since 1984 - reconvened, and work on the new album got underway two years ago.
With the band members living on several sides of the world, Sade points out that songwriting "doesn't happen until we're together. It is kind of pressure-filled. It's a bigger moment. As soon as we [got] together, we sort of tricked ourselves into making a record."
After the songs were sussed out, the band dug into Peter Gabriel's residential studio, Real World, to record the tracks. Sade found the retreat to Wiltshire, England, an important creative withdrawal from daily life: "You can completely cut off. You don't have to stop and say, 'OK, it's dinner time, I have to go and boil the pasta.' You can immerse yourself in [another] world and you don't have to deal with the realities of life. I can't function in normality."
While Soldier of Love contains a few new stylistic elements - a slight trip-hop vibe on the lead single, and some reggae sewn into a later track, "Babydaddy" - Sade insists the changes are elementary: "It's not such a radical departure from what we've done. We're never pragmatic. We don't have a manifesto."
And in describing her music, she leans once again toward the elements: "Our music is almost an organic thing. It's in a way inspired by elements and feelings. I feel proud to be part of a beautiful world, when you can stand and look at the stars and look at the mountains. I hope that's what our music is - close to trying to be part of something that is a great world. Something good."
It's an image that brings to mind the album's cover, which features Sade, back turned to the camera, facing a set of ancient ruins.
"I thought it would be nice that the person looking at me almost became me, in the sense that I want the music to become someone else's. I want it to have some significance and role in someone else's life if possible and so that was the idea: That I am whoever, looking over the future and looking at the history and the battles of the past, and looking forward - looking for the light."
Soldier of Love is in stores now. For more from Sade, including her thoughts on Amy Winehouse, Kanye West and collaboration, visit theampersand.ca.

At just 26 years old, he's battling two aggressive forms of cancer -- lymphoblastic lymphoma and stem-cell leukemia.

But he's also fighting for other people's survival as well.

"It takes a village," said Adebiyi, who is in need of a bone marrow transplant. "I want to find my match but I also know there are thousands of other people in my position, too."
Adebiyi has been determined to register more minorities, especially African-Americans, for the National Marrow Donor Program.
Minorities have been historically underrepresented in the registry for potential bone marrow matches.
Adebiyi, who was born in Nigeria but moved to the U.S. when he was 6, is aiming to register 10,000 new donors in both the U.S. and Africa. He has already begun his effort in the U.S. by partnering with non-profit DKMS, which shares his mission.
In December he traveled some 5,000 miles to a Nigerian law school in Lagos to register new donors. The event was the first in that country's history.
A simple cheek swab is the only step required to join the registry. The process takes less than 30 seconds.
Adebiyi is also an aspiring Olympian. He swam competitively for 16 years and missed qualifying for the 2004 Olympic Games as a sprint swimmer by less than tenth of a second.
But for the 2014 Winter Olympics, he has a different sport in mind -- skeleton. He wants to race down an icy track representing Nigeria - a country that doesn't know winter.
"You're pretty much a human missile and it feels like it sounds," Adebiyi laughs.
If Adebiyi succeeds in qualifying, he will become the first Nigerian winter Olympian in the country's history.
Adebiyi said his doctors consider him a "pain in the butt" because he has continually risked his health by training for the Olympics and promoting his mission to register new donors.
"I don't like being the 'troubled patient,'" Adebiyi admits. "Sometimes, you just have to hang on and you'll get through."
Footage from the documentary film "More to Live For" coming in 2010

By Siddhartha Mitter, Globe Correspondent

The best African act category at Britain's prestigious MOBO (Music of Black Origins) awards last year was a heavyweight affair. Among the nominees were such global pop icons as Femi Kuti, Oumou Sangaré, Baaba Maal, and Amadou & Mariam.
And the winner was . . . Nneka.
The waters are parting for Nneka Egbuna, the 28-year-old Nigerian singer with a slight rasp in her voice and a singer-songwriter's full gamut of quirkiness, earnest politics, and candid emotion.
In the past few years she has become a presence in Europe, living in Hamburg and releasing three albums on a local label. One yielded a hit single, "Heartbeat,'' a soulful cri de coeur set to a hypnotic pulse, with a video shot on the streets of Lagos, Nigeria.
Her arrival this side of the Atlantic, however, has waited. But now Nneka is making up for that with a two-barrel blast. "Concrete Jungle,'' her first US album, comes out Tuesday. It gathers some of the best material from her work so far. And "The Madness (Onye-Ala),'' a mixtape by reputed DJ J.Period, comes laced with Fela and Stokely Carmichael samples and guest verses from the likes of Nas and Talib Kweli. Touring behind these releases, Nneka visits the Middle East in Cambridge on Thursday.
On the line from Lagos, where she has moved back after close to a decade in Germany, she admits surprise and some unease at her growing fame.
"It was not my plan to get an award!'' says Nneka (pronounced NEH-kah). "But it is a good thing to win an award. It opens more doors to affect an audience. If I am able to tame myself, I can only use it as a positive.''
In conversation and her songs, Nneka projects a kind of self-awareness that goes past vulnerability to some other, complicated place. She's not a confessional artist, but she wears her fears on her sleeve, as well as her remedies, which include conscious politics of the Fela variety along with unabashed Christian faith.
Music may be her craft, but a music career was never the plan. She was studying anthropology and archeology at the university and making songs on the side. "A record company got interested,'' she says. "I gave them all the tracks that I had. My songs developed spontaneously; I wasn't trying to make an album.''
Born to a German mother and Nigerian father, Nneka keeps parts of her history private, including the circumstances of her abrupt move to Germany at age 18. "I can't tell that,'' she declines politely, save to confirm that she spent the first months confined in a facility for refugees and asylum seekers.
She alludes to other tribulations she encountered once settled. "Before I went abroad my eyes were open,'' she says. "When I got abroad, I ate from the bad apple, the one Eve gave to Adam, and that poisoned my mind. I lost myself in some ways.''
But she found herself too: "I became more passionate about being African. Living in Europe gave me my identity, made my proud to be Nigerian.''

Once, Nneka says, she was ashamed of her accent and would affect American speech instead. Now she rocks her Nigerian accent with pride, and she sings in English, Igbo, and Nigerian Pidgin, the rich street language. "De ting wey not fit kill you wey go mek you strong,'' she sings on "Kangbe'' - what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Her story and her sound, with its Afrobeat, hip-hop, and soul influences, put Nneka in the lead of a new generation of cosmopolitan African singers that includes fellow Nigerians Asa and Ayo. They are picking up where Tracy Chapman, Lauryn Hill, and Erykah Badu left off, only with roots set firmly on the African continent.
Nneka shrugs off any comparison. "I think it's a coincidence,'' she says, before conceding that perhaps a greater awareness of the diversity of African music is allowing artists like her to find a global audience.
But J.Period, whose documentary-style mixtape follows the style he has used for other artists including Hill, sees Nneka and other young Africans - like Somali rapper K'Naan -bringing something important back to American music, especially hip-hop.
"Music has been this thing that copies itself over and over to make money,'' J.Period says. "There was a time when hip-hop was about speaking the voice of the community, positive things. Then it got watered down. But far away, those elements resonated in Africa in particular, and it's now coming home.''
Nneka, ever the accidental star, says there is no guarantee she will keep making music. She continues her anthropology research, and recently visited Yoruba shrines in the countryside. But for now, she finds mission in song.
"By the grace of God I am still loving it,'' she says. "I still believe I have a lot inside of me to let out. And there are a lot of people who are suffering, and I want to be the person who can speak for them.''

(Source: http://www.boston.com)