Emeli Sandé Learns to Soar Again on ‘Long Live the Angels’

By Jim Farber

In the first song off her new album, Emeli Sandé puts herself in an usual place — back in the womb. “I’m kicking on the diaphragm,” sings Sandé. “I feel the choke of the umbilical.”

What comes after those lines presents a whole new point of view for the singer. “Rebirth may sound too dramatic,” Sandé allows. “But for this album, I really felt that I had to learn how to face the world again. I had to learn who I am. So that song sets the album up perfectly.”

At the same time, the music on the album — titled Long Live the Angels — retains many of the elements that turned Sandé into one of the biggest female stars of the post-Amy Winehouse U.K. boom. Sandé’s 2012 debut, Our Version of Events, spawned two long-running radio hits in the U.S.: First, “Heaven,” which set her soaring soprano over a roiling drum ‘n bass beat, then “Next to Me,” which boasted a roof-raising vocal idealizing the song’s gospel melody. The latter song broke the U.S. top 20 and shot to #1 in her native U.K. Sandé’s debut became the biggest-selling album in Britain in 2012, eventually breaking the Beatles’ record by spending more consecutive weeks in that country’s top 10 than any debut album since “Please Please Me” in 1963.

“It was a crazy, whirlwind adventure,” Sandé says. “It went completely beyond my expectations.”

At the same time, the crush of attention overwhelmed her, and the need to constantly promote her music worldwide over a more than two-year period left her spent. Though Sandé was grateful for her success, her career developed a life of its own, putting her on a path very different from her original vision.

Growing up, Sandé devoted as much time to academics as music. Her father, who taught at the school she attended as a teenager, met her mother while the two were enrolled at the Polytechnic School in Sunderland, Scotland. Joel Sandé was born in Zambia; his wife was English. Growing up, the singer says “I definitely felt like part of me was missing. This whole side of my family in Zambia I didn’t know. I was always aware that I looked different and I had different passions. There was a missing part of my identity.”

Those differences caused some problems in primary school, but Sandé says she later cloistered herself in music, minimizing her interaction with her peers. She also began writing songs. Still, the early interest in her music from the record industry made her wary. Always a practical person, and an eager student, Sandé stayed in school, attending University of Glasgow where she earned a degree in neuroscience. With a promising career in medicine as her backup, she finally felt emboldened to pursue music.

Sandé made her vocal debut in 2009 on a song she wrote for the rapper Chipmunk — “Diamond Rings,” which got to #6 on the U.K. charts. She broke the British top 10 again by singing guest vocals on the single “Never Be Your Woman” by hip-hop star Wiley. At the time, Sandé used the first name given to her at birth: Adele. She switched to her middle name after the other Adele became unstoppable.

When Sandé got her own recording contract, she also stepped up her outside songwriting, penning songs for Leona Lewis, Cheryl Cole, and Susan Boyle. “I love connecting with different artists through songwriting,” Sandé says. “But the past couple of years I haven’t written for other people. I’ve concentrated on getting this album together.”

That took a lot longer than some at her record label would have liked. “There were definitely questions, like, ‘When are you doing this?’ and ‘Can we hear some songs?’”

At the same time, Sandé experienced a rough change in her personal life. In 2013, the singer ended her marriage to marine biologist Adam Gouraguine. Though they were only married for a year, Sandé had been with Gouraguine since she was 17. The pain of their breakup informed the first single from the new album, “Hurts.”

“It wasn’t a great time,” Sandé says of the period after the split.

While many of the new songs seem to address lost love, Sandé downplays any connection to the end of the longest relationship of her life. “This album is really more about my reaction to the changes in my life when I stepped away from music and got to know myself,” she says.

Part of that process had to do with finding a new connection to her heritage in Zambia. Three years ago, she traveled to the African country for the first time. She wrote a song about it for the new album, “Tenderly.” It features vocals from her father and cousins, whom she billed as the Serenje Choir, named for the town her family comes from. “Going to Zambia was such a big part of my growth,” she recalls. “My dad would always tell me it was a very deep place and that there were very strong women in my family. The people I met reflected the stories my dad had spoken of.”

From them, she learned how “to take everything as it comes.” That attitude inspired the album’s opening song “Selah,” named for a mysterious Biblical term. “I have a friend who is a Rastafarian and he kept saying ‘selah,’” Sandé explains. “He said it means that you have to pause and really listen to what’s been said.”

Accordingly, the songs on Angels tend to be slow and intense. They’re almost all ballads, many amplified by gospel choirs. “Gospel is one of my first loves in music,” Sandé says. “Growing up in the hills of Scotland, I felt like I had such a connection to this music coming from across the world in the States.”

After all the distractions of fame, Sandé struggled to reconnect to Scotland, as well as to her family, and to music. At some points, she wasn’t even sure she wanted to continue her pop career.

“The whole time I was thinking, ‘Am I fully a musician, or do I want to go back to medicine?’” Sandé confesses. “I love science. But, in making this album, I found for the first time I consider myself 100 percent a musician. This album is about me learning what path I want to take. It’s about me growing up.”