Tenderly

Album: Long Live The Angels (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song features Sandé's Zambian teacher father Joel Sandé and her cousins. The latter are credited as The Serenje Choir, named after the town of Serenje in the Serenje District of Zambia.
  • The song was inspired by an Oxfam sponsored trip that Sandé made to Zambia in 2014 to investigate women's rights to health care and education.

    The singer and her father took the opportunity to take some voice memos of some of the Zambian songs they heard when they visited her grandmother's remote village. Sandé, who grew up in Scotland, told Radio 4's Front Row program:

    "They'd light the fire and everyone would sing. Me singing wasn't really that impressive at all, because everyone could do it. Everyone naturally had that musical ear. I felt a real big part of me was filled. Something I felt had been missing growing up, you know, feeling very different, not connected. Suddenly this, it was full. And I felt like a complete person."
  • The last day before Sandé left Zambia, her Zambian family were singing a beautiful song in their native language about love and forgiveness, which inspired the creation of this track.
  • This was helmed by Mac & Phil, who have worked with the likes of Beyoncé and Miguel in the past. They produced or co-produced eight of Long Live The Angels' 15 tracks.

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