D’angelo has become one of the most important and reclusive artists of the past few decades. He was one of the originators and icons behind the neo soul movement, which included more high profile names like Erykah Badu, The Roots, Common, Lauryn Hill, J Dilla, and many more. He’s most well known for the video to his hit “Untitled” where the entire video is him naked singing the song while the camera pans over his entire body.
Unfortunately, that video led to the popularity of D’angelo as a sex symbol to overtake D’angelo the musician, and that, along with other things, led him down a dark path of alcoholism and drug use climaxing in a car crash and charged for marijuana and cocaine possession in 2005. After finally coming back to the limelight in 2012 where he played some live shows in Europe, it took until December 2014 for him to release his third album, just under 15 years after the release of his second album.
As of now, D’angelo is back to living a normal life among the rest of us. After his tour in 2015, he’s done very few things in the public eye. The two most notable are him honoring Prince on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon where he covered “Sometimes It Snows in April,” and releasing a new song inspired by and for the hit video game, Red Dead Redemption 2. Only time will tell when D’angelo will bless us with his talent once again, but until that happens, he’s given us three magnificent and unique albums that are worth dissecting and continual listens.
3. Brown Sugar (1995)
Brown Sugar is D’angelo’s debut album, and shows the pure songwriting talent that he possessed. Despite the album being released in 1995, he wrote the majority of the songs in 1991 and 1992 when he was only 18 and 19 years old. As well as writing all of the songs, he also played many of the instruments on the album, including drums, saxophone, bass, guitar, and keyboards. His love of Prince was one of the main reasons he chose to do this, stating that, “I was one of those guys who read the album credits and I realized that Prince was a true artist. He wrote, produced, and performed, and that's the way I wanted to do it.” And do it he did.
The album starts off with the title track, which is a hip hop leaning, thinly veiled song about smoking weed with an infectious chorus. It shows off a lot of the instrumental themes of the album; drum led grooves, watery keyboards, and D’angelo providing some great, falsetto harmonies during the chorus. “Lady” is another highlight, and it still holds the highest a D’angelo song has ever reached on Billboard, with it cracking the Top 10. The song was originally written by Raphael Saadiq for Tony! Toni! Tone!, but they didn’t want it. D’angelo came in and remixed it and added the keys and vocal harmonies, and it was pretty much finished. Even though it was written by Raphael, it still has a very D’angelo feel with the heavy groove and emphasis on a repeated chorus. But it’s the bassline that really stands out in the song, and if Thundercat says it’s one of the best basslines ever, then it is.
Brown Sugar does end up falling into a lot of the same tropes and problems of many debut albums. He’s not a fully developed artist at 21 years old, so the uniqueness that’s to come later isn’t quite here yet, but it shows the insane potential that he had. Not many debut albums are full of this many high quality and well written songs. For many artists, an album of this quality would be their best album, but it ends up being D’angelo’s worst.
2. Black Messiah (2014)
D’angelo came back after almost 15 years with Black Messiah, an album he released with his band, The Vanguard. He still has some of the soul and traditional R&B inspired songs on here, like “Really Love” and “Another Life”, but this project is full of experimentation and new sounds for D’angelo. The guitar driven call to arms that is “1000 Deaths” is nothing like he’s ever released before, but yet, he still played almost every instrument on the song. “Sugah Daddy” is easily one of the funkiest tracks that he’s ever released. The way the drums provide an ear grabbing groove, along with D’angelo’s piano playing being just as much in the forefront as his voice, makes for one of the best songs of his career.
The lyrics on this album are also more important than ever before in his career. As the album title Black Messiah suggests, the lyrics take a political turn and focus on the issues in the US, specifically racism. There’s none better than the chorus on the musically laid back, “The Charade”. The chorus gets straight to the point with him saying, “All we wanted was a chance to talk. ‘Stead we only got outlined in chalk. Feet have bled a million miles we’ve walked. Revealing at the end of the day, the charade.” If that wasn’t obvious enough, they all wore Black Lives Matter shirts when they performed it on SNL back in 2015.
D’angelo takes a multi instrumentalist approach once again with this album, where he plays everything from his signature piano and keyboards, to his newly mastered guitar, some funky bass playing, and quite a few more. For an artist to come back after a decade and a half away from releasing new music and release an almost perfect album of a different sound than what they got famous with, it’s a testament to how insanely talented and driven they are.
1. Voodoo (2000)
“It was just like, oh my God, this is everything I want an album to be. And it was unlike anything I’ve ever heard before.” Rick Rubin gushed on and on about his love for this album to Questlove on his podcast nearly 20 years after its release, as Questlove helped co-pilot the sessions with D’angelo.
The Voodoo sessions at Electric Lady Studios gave way to a legendary few years with this collective branded as the Soulquarians. Besides D’angelo and Questlove, some of the bigger Soulquarian names are Erykah Badu, The Roots, Common, Mos Def, J Dilla, and many more. They would all be in Electric Lady Studios at the same time working on their respective albums, many of which would be considered the best of their careers. They were known for off-kilter grooves with soulful instrumentals with a touch of hip hop influence. Other classic albums such as Mama’s Gun and Things Fall Apart also took place during these sessions.
On the surface, Voodoo sounds almost like an 80 minute groove session. The only composed song for the album is “Send It On”, and the rest are just melodies and grooves that came out of jam sessions and messing around. And the album can be experienced just on the surface level like that, but there’s so much more to Voodoo.
The deeper and deeper you dig and listen to the album, the more details and little things you can hear in the production. Things like the backwards guitar on “The Root”, or the fact that the guitar and bass sounds on “Spanish Joint” are being played simultaneously by the same person, makes this album special. He has the hits on the album as well, with the 7 minute ballad “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” and the hip hop influenced “Left & Right”.
D’angelo does still have songs where he’s playing almost the entire song, like “One Mo’Gin” and “The Line”, but the collaborators help this album greatly. Questlove was able to play the drum grooves perfectly and just helped overall with the sonics of the album. Pino Palladino has played with Elton John, John Mayer, The Who, Adele, Ed Sheeran, and many more, but his playing on this album is some of the best bass I’ve heard. Roy Hargrove played all the horns on the album that helped fill out these songs to their full potential. Voodoo is not an album that he could do without these legendary collaborators.
As great as many of the other neo soul albums are, this is the defining album of the genre. This album encompasses the soul, funk, and grooves that make up this subgenre of music. He brought together and made music with many of the other innovators and influential artists of the subgenre and music in general. It’s becoming one of the most adored albums in the past 20-30 years as well, with many critics calling it one of the top R&B/soul projects in that timeframe. This album is something unique, something special, something that’s a necessary listen for any soul, funk, or R&B fan.
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