It’s not as well-known as those two hip-hop hits, but it’s unmistakably theirs - those synthesized guitar strums and minor epic am-I-high chord progressions keep up the original’s smooth elegance while tweaking the mood just a bit further toward tense longing. Chad and Pharrell’s take on “By Your Side” first appeared on a UK/European CD single that literally dropped four days before both Jay Z’s “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me)” single and Ludacris’ Back For The First Time cut “Southern Hospitality,” in case you’re wondering how good that one particular stretch of mid-October was for them.

Remixes don’t always have to outdo the originals, even when the remix in question comes from the Neptunes at their world-beating peak. “By Your Side” was most recently covered by English pop revivalists the 1975 - whose version was reportedly influenced by Bon Iver, Kanye West, and Francis And The Lights - but as this chronological rundown of its many interpretations reveals, the song’s sentiment can carry through just about any form. 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.

Sade by your side in movie