Sade’s 1992 album, “Love Deluxe,” arrived four years after “Stronger Than Pride.” Ms. Adu smiled as she told Mr. Beck she might not have gone back into the studio to record — except the guys in the band wanted to return to work, he said. “I thought that was so sweet.” (In a 1992 interview she said, “It’s good that we stopped and didn’t try to make another one off the back of the previous album. You get some perspective on why you’re making a record.”)

Then, she did the photo shoot for the album and Mr. Watson, a contributor to Vogue who directed a number of Sade’s videos, proposed shooting her topless with metallic body paint, her hands covering her chest.

“She said, ‘I don’t mind. I’ll do that for you, but I don’t want it to be anywhere near the album cover,’” Mr. Watson said. “I said, ‘The shoot is for you. You control all the images.’ Then she looked at it and said it was too sexy.” Eventually, in conversation with the band, she agreed to use it, but the image remains an outlier in the way she has chosen to display herself.

A year later, Sade declined to release a house remix of “Pearls,” perhaps because there was something a little unseemly about people dancing to a song about the Somalian civil war. Then, a bootleg of it began making the rounds to D.J.s such as Junior Vasquez and Frankie Knuckles, who turned it into one of the era’s defining club tracks.

In 1995, a marriage to the Spanish film director Carlos Pliego ended. Ms. Adu later said the pair had a difficult time navigating the demands of global fame with their private relationship. For a time, she lived in Jamaica with Bob Morgan, and they had a child.

An eight-year stretch between albums yielded “Lover’s Rock,” which had lots about romance but also brought a quiet force to songs about issues facing black people. The video for “King of Sorrow” was a masterstroke of Sade-ness, where she wore ball gowns and a bandanna, scrubbing a child’s shoe clean. Was it a cautionary tale for single parenthood or a fashion spread devoted to it? Who could say. It was lovely.