I wanted to drop in real quick and provide an update. This wasn’t planned but I haven’t posted in about two weeks now.

Nothing terribly drastic has happened. The short of it is that we were looking to buy a house and it took up a ton of our time. Also we were running into various issues that were slowly sapping time and money away from us, so we made the call to pause our house search until the beginning of next year when we’ll have a bit more money to play with. Things are totally psycho in house-buying land right now.

Suspending our house hunting leads me to some unfortunate news for you, the reader – I will be back to posting next week. I am going to switch up the format a bit for one week. I’ll have four posts and each will be on a song. The songs will hail from 1984, 1994, 2004 and … well, I’ll let you guess the fourth one. After that I’ll resume my normal posting and also get more into the year-long celebration of 1984.

And on that note, let’s go ahead and use the rest of this post to talk about a song from 1984, that being the hit single Smooth Operator from Sade.

Smooth Operator hails from Sade’s debut album Diamond Life. This was the third single from that album. The song was originally written by Sade Adu and Ray St. John in their prior outfit Pride. St. John did not follow Adu into her new namesake band, but the song did.

This single would be a hit, scoring spots on a great deal of international charts but showing especially well in the US, where it landed at number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and took the top spot on the Adult Contemporary Chart.

As a quick note before I go on, the name Sade clearly references singer Sade Adu, but she very much intended for this group to be considered as a band unit, something she was adamant about through the years.

I’m not going to get too much into it, let’s just kick back and enjoy this great song. It’s a smooth, jazz-based track that gathered about as much crossover appeal as an artist could manage. The song’s about a con artist who gets by with their double crossing ways, though in some extended versions of stuff featuring another song from the album, the perpetrator does get busted. The song would help launch Sade’s career internationally, and the band would go on to have massive sales in the decade after. Cheers to a fantastic cut from 1984.