‘I’ve never felt this depth of love’: Emeli Sandé on coming out, race and making music again

msn.com:

Abide With Me so seriously, and yet so joyfully, she looked as though there were some kind of elemental life force trying to burst out of her.

At the closing ceremony, she was back, with Read All About It, one of her many hit singles. “All of that was a dream,” she says, looking back.

We’re in her house, which is in the heart of east London, yet somehow feels calm and almost cottagey, as though she has brought the spirit of rural Scotland, where she grew up, with her. “I don’t think it was even planned that I was in the opening and the closing ceremonies, it was just two different teams that asked me. ” She was already doing well – she had signed a deal with Virgin and released her first solo single, Heaven, in August 2011 – but she also seemed to encapsulate the spirit of the time: a pure and warranted faith that a person could come from nowhere and become the biggest thing in the world, just by being brilliant.

In real life, quite a lot of hard work had gone into her achievements: she had spent three years at medical school in Glasgow, writing songs in lectures while other people were counting the number of cells in organisms.