This week, not only did Drake break streaming records on Spotify and Apple Music with the release of More Life, he also fulfilled another life goal: meeting Sade Adu. Drizzy has publicly shared his admiration for the highly reclusive British singer over the years, and so when the pair finally met at Drizzy’s Boy Meets World London show people started to get all the feels.
Here at i-D there is nothing we love more than celebrity friendships (or crushes), so in honour of this one, we look back at everything we know about the evolving Drizzy-Sade relationship thus far.
Drake’s crush on Sade came to light way back in 2010, when the singer said that he wanted to collaborate with her on his album Thank Me Later. He told MTV News at the time, “Her brand is so strong and she’s such an amazing woman. So I just want to try to experiment and see if there’s a way to bring her into the hip-hop world.” Unfortunately Drake’s dreams did not come true, and Sade reportedly chose to collaborate with Jay Z instead. Fingers crossed though that this colab isn’t dead yet.
Skipping ahead to last year and Drake’s 30th birthday, he woke up on October 24 to an epic surprise: Sade has sent him a framed picture of herself with the message, “The 24th of October 1986 was a good day… Shine on, Drake. Love Sade,” scrawled across it. Sharing the moment on Instagram Drake captioned the post, “Woke up to see the most beautiful woman ever in my house.”
As mentioned, he finally met Sade earlier this week at the the Boy Meets World London show — even snapping a rare picture. He can, quite literally, be seen smiling from ear to ear at the whole experience, and how can you blame him? Drake captioned this shot, showing him standing in-between his mum and Sade, “Two very important ladies in my life.” Fans of both artists went crazy on Twitter with one user @thisisIRV tweeting “There’s only like 40 pictures of Sade in existence and Drake manages to get one lol incredible.”
The star decided to immortalise his love days later by getting a tattoo of Sade on his torso‚ proving that even record-breaking artists can fan out as hard as the rest of us. Swedish tattoo artist, Niki Norberg, the person behind most of Drizzy’s recent new ink, posted a picture of the beautiful new tat on Instagram earlier this week. The portrait is accompanied by a (presumably) handwritten note that reads “with love, Sade x.”
We can’t wait to see what the future has in store for these two, and keep dreaming about an eventual collaboration at some point. And hey, now that J-Lo and he are back to being just friends, maybe we could even see this bloom into the romance of the century.
Credits
Text Georgia Bretherton
Images via @champagnepapi