Its lyrics, simple as they are, are so directly open that they manage to make what starts out as a defensive reality check (“You think I’d leave your side, baby/ You know me better than that”) feel like a once-strained bond reinforced two times over. Whether it’s through remixes, samples, or cover versions, “By Your Side” has long outlasted its apparent initial fate as a low-key single from an artist and band then on the verge of becoming a 20-year concern.

(Its most prominent exposure came in a 2002 episode of Sex And The City, when the track scored a scene in which Samantha and her on-again, off-again love interest Richard shared a tender slow dance on a Manhattan rooftop.) But even in a context where the charts feel like a definitive tallying of a song’s impact, using them to work out a song’s legacy seems less valuable than another, more abstract metric: just how many bands wind up reinterpreting it. Hitting #17 in the UK in 2000 isn’t failure by any stretch, and even if its pop success in the States fell short (#75 in 2001 is as high as it got on the Hot 100), it reached all the way up to #2 on Hot Dance Club Play. (That, and it’s romantic as all hell.) Yet its wedding-dance canonization was far from instant.

It’s certainly one of Sade’s more renowned songs, a fine example of how the group’s post-genre sophisti-pop-laced R&B could evolve from the ’80s onwards into a sound that only benefited from its trend-averse formlessness.

Ever since the Nigerian-born, English-bred singer/composer Sade Adu released her 1984 debut LP, Diamond Life, she and her eponymous band have released countless high-charting hits - it’s just debatable if “By Your Side” is one of them.

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