Emeli sande

She became one of the biggest singers in the world after her performances at the London Olympics. She is now back with a celebratory new album and reflects ...

It felt like a time where I could actually fall back in love with music again.” And she has fallen head over heels back in love with music, crying at everything, all over the place. It made her a perplexing prospect for the industry she was in: not just her lack of interest in the trappings of success, but her resistance to being defined, by culture, genre, indeed, by anything. “It was a panic,” she remembers now, “because, globally, everybody was struggling and alone. In 2019, after her third album, Real Life, she parted ways with Virgin, and by the start of the pandemic, she had “cut cords with the industry”. She’s terribly tactful about record company execs, but not just as a reflex. “I definitely feel, as a woman at a certain age, if you don’t fit into a certain box, it becomes hard for everybody else.” Four years passed before the release of her second album, Long Live the Angels, which was her favourite until the forthcoming Let’s Say for Instance. “I definitely felt like I’d said everything I want to say.” Then came the pandemic, which she saw out living with her sister (also a teacher) in Hertfordshire, writing the album nobody thought she was going to write, which nobody was necessarily going to produce (she is now signed to the independent label Chrysalis). It’s not the album you’d expect – less introspective than her last, and as celebratory as anything you’ve ever heard. It got to a point where instead of trying to find one box for myself, I was OK with just being who I was.” “I’d always seen myself as a black woman,” she says of this time, “but I learned so much about how to be that through music: through people like Lauryn Hill. But obviously that’s an American culture, I didn’t really have anybody in Scotland to look up to, to refer to.” So she went to Zambia, to meet her grandmother for the first time, “because I thought, like: ‘Gosh, what am I doing here? “I don’t think it was even planned that I was in the opening and the closing ceremonies, it was just two different teams that asked me.” “It’s one thing to think: ‘I’m gonna go back and finally realise who I am.’ But then you get there and realise: OK, I’ve grown up in the UK. I’m culturally British. I did grow up in Scotland and yes, it was difficult being different, but it was a beautiful time as well. She has talked in the past about her faith, the various times when it’s been weaker or stronger, and how that has affected her ability to compose and perform – but not in terms of any formal religion. “All of that was a dream,” she says, looking back.