Song after song testifies to pain, loneliness and a longing for refuge.

“The ground is full of broken stones/The last leaf has fallen/I have nowhere to turn now,” Sade sings in “Bring Me Home,” a elegiac tune over a hip-hop beat. In the album’s closing song, “The Safest Place,” she offers her own affection as a sanctuary: “My heart has been a lonely warrior before,/So you can be sure.”

For the last five years Sade has had what she calls a “partner,” Ian Watts. They live together in rural Gloucestershire, England’s west country, where they are raising Sade’s 13-year-old daughter, Ila, and Mr. Watts’s 18-year-old son, Jack. Sade is considering marriage. “There’s lots of regrets about time wasted and all those mistakes in the past,” said Sade, who was divorced from the Spanish filmmaker Carlos Pliego in 1995. “But there’s something lovely about knowing that when it’s right, you really know it’s right because you’ve already been through all the wrong.”

Image 2001 Credit... Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images

Sade spends most of her time in the west country, only occasionally driving her Volvo into London. At her Islington house there were sheets over some furniture, and old cassette tapes on the shelves along with books of art and photography. For Sade the past decade was filled largely with domestic matters: gardening, parenthood, building a house (now nearly finished) in Gloucestershire, tending to someone terminally ill she declined to identify. “If you’ve got a sick friend, or someone you love is dying, to say, ‘See you later, I’m going into the studio’  I just can’t do it,” she said. “It doesn’t matter to me enough at that moment.”

Her daughter traveled with Sade’s 2002 tour, but Sade would put her to bed before going onstage. “She never saw me sing,” Sade said. “She’s just a little tiny thing, standing there, with her mum out on the stage in front of all those people? I thought it would be too weird for her.” A few years ago, Ila asked her, “Mum, are you famous?” Sade recalled. “Now she’s completely sure and aware what the situation is.” (Ila Adu sings backup, along with Mr. Matthewman’s son, Clay, on the song “Babyfather.”)

Sade hesitated to plunge back into songwriting. “That feeling of revelation, of exposing myself emotionally,” she said, “That was maybe something that held me back, subconsciously, from going into it again. But it isn’t all about me, and it’s not only me, and the only way I can forget about it is by doing it.”