"Thank You, D": Andy Bull Reflects on the Life and Legacy of D’Angelo

Yesterday, D’Angelo, acclaimed and reclusive R&B innovator, died at 51. Musician, songwriter and lifelong student of soul, Andy Bull reflects on the artist who changed his life — an artist who redefined his understanding of rhythm, spirit, and self.

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With his recordings and live performances, D’Angelo showed us that incredible things are possible in this lifetime, and that we can, with care, find spiritual connections and purpose with the tools we have, and moreover, the relationships we cultivate with others.

In the days when Napster burns circulated in school yards, I was handed a CDR of low resolution MP3s and the words “soul stuff” scrawled on the label in marker.

On that disc, mixed between other things, were three songs by D’Angelo - his cover of Roberta Flack’s 'Feel Like Making Love' and 'Untitled (How Does It Feel)' from the newly released album Voodoo, and 'Me And Those Dreamin’ Eyes Of Mine' from Brown Sugar.

I listened, and then I listened again, and a few times more, and the feeling steadily came over me that I had been handed something of great significance. 

I purchased Voodoo the following weekend, and from then on it lived in my discman, which fit snugly into my school uniform’s pocket. I listened constantly, all the way through, often going to sleep with it in my ears. 

I was changed forever by it. This is what many people will tell you, too, about their own experience.

It rewrote all my teenage assumptions about what music could be, what it could sound like, and what it could be for, and it opened the door to so many other artists - listening to D’Angelo had me in turn investigating Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Curtis Mayfield, Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway, James Brown, Al Green, Nina Simone, Otis Redding. It became necessary to understand the history. 

Then, to find other contemporaries in time - Erykah Badu, Bilal, The Roots, Common, J Dilla, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Angie Stone, Raphael Saadiq, Maxwell, Dwele, Amp Fiddler, Cody Chestnut, Musiq Soulchild, Anthony Hamilton, eventually. 

Even household names A Tribe Called Quest and Lauryn Hill, and by extension Fugees, required revisiting in light of their links to this new discovery. D’Angelo was the nexus to a relationship with all these things for me, a causeway to a more proactive engagement with them, opening a portal between sonic worlds, and to art that lived across entire decades. 

As a result, my inner world was filled with these new presences, because D’Angelo made me want to know the antecedents and feel the history of this music that was, to my near disbelief, being made by a real person, a real live one, one who could sing like that, play like that - a real flesh and blood person making actual god-level music at the same time that I was also alive.

Even Jeff Buckley, another artist I loved who seared with barely containable powers, had already died too soon, and could only be known posthumously. But D’Angelo was here, mysterious yes, but real. 

In a time of bitey, maximalist rap rock and nu-metal ruling the school yard that I ate my lunch in - a place that could be neither geographically nor metaphorically further from the Southside of Richmond, Virginia, where D’Angelo was raised - those few of us who found D’Angelo found something that felt channeled, something spiritual, a full body, full heart experience. 

I don’t mean to cast aspersions on those other kinds of musics, but they just weren’t for me, they felt unwelcoming to my nervous system, they tasted metallic somehow, and what I needed in my adolescence was gratitude, calmness and cohesion. 

Physically and mentally, so much felt in flux, and I tumbled in fits and spurts through those high school years that felt unending and full little hazards.

D’Angelo’s music lifted me out of the pit of self focus and instead gave me something else to focus on—its rhythm and harmony gave me my own felt sense of rhythm and harmony on a somatic level, a feeling of coherence

The definition of R’n’B seemed pointless. Urban (I was told by a teacher who was moonlighting as a music manager for the then burgeoning jazz-prodigy Rai Thistlethwayte) was a term they gave this music in North America.

But RnB, Urban - which, the teacher also explained, was a euphemism - even Nu-Soul: these all seemed so prosaic as terms. There was no need to categorise it according to some sales chart or other. The album was untethered by any silly thing. 

Soon, D’Angelo’s earlier Brown Sugar album made its way into rotation on my discman: a debut album made, as I understand, largely alone, at home, on just a few pieces of equipment. Although it lacked the live recorded details and delicate nuances of Voodoo: the floating horns of Roy Hargrove, Pino Palladino’s beautiful bass, Charlie Hunter’s otherworldly guitar playing, and Questlove’s genre-spawning drumming (see the sleeve for full credits, obviously) it still displayed the blossoming of D’Angelo’s seemingly preternatural virtuosity as a singer and keyboardist. 

When I say virtuosity, I mean fluidity and nuance—not grandiosity. The sounds moved deeply, rather than brashly or vainly. There wasn’t the show-off vocal runs for no reason, not the sleaze and glitz that was all around in that era of peak major label, television driven show-business. Even in romantic songs like ‘Lady’, D’Angelo wasn’t posturing in performative vulnerability or sensitivity as a pick up ploy: there is tenderness to it. It feels a long way from, say, Usher’s funny but creepy, heavy-breathed confessional voice overs on Confessions (2004).

There’s no need for me to carry on. People have written at length. If Voodoo or Brown Sugar are the kinds of records that mean something to a person like you, then my description of them, no matter how I reach, will only fall short.

The thing to do, of course, is to read Questlove’s recollection of the Voodoo sessions, and on D’Angelo in general, including the touring of Voodoo and the making of Black Messiah. 

After leaving school, my Voodoo CD was transferred from my discman to my car stereo, where it stayed for the next 12 years or so, until the Subaru went in for scrap. Intermittently Voodoo was taken out to let another CD in, but it was always replaced. In fact, I bought two more copies of Voodoo just to make sure I had one for the boombox and one for the discman. 

Within a year of finishing school I started my own live music career playing at clubs in Sydney’s Kings Cross, regularly playing venues like Ruby Rabbit and Candy’s Apartment. Candy’s was a legendary basement venue with lots of dark corners, sequestered below the ground floor venues blasting House. In the sticky floored stratum below, my band was informed by the world of D’Angelo, and the Akashic Records of music he connected to. 

We even endeavoured to cover various moments of his live set from a bootlegged VHS copy of Live in Stockholm (which is now widely available on streaming services). 

Funny to think I had the nerve to try that, considering now that I had to think twice about whether I even felt worthy of writing a piece like this. 

Throughout those years of our lives, D’Angelo became a bonding point, the source of mutual awe and connection, facilitating discussions and friendships for those of us who knew. Years went by and we still kept poring over the records, finding new details and shaking our heads in disbelief.

A couple years later I found myself at Electric Lady studios in NYC, where Voodoo had been made. I even chatted with the gentlemanly Russell Elevado, who recorded and mixed Voodoo and Black Messiah, right there at the recording console. Hallowed hallways. Apparently Voodoo had taken months to make in there. Months of improvisational band sessions on reel to reel tape. 

Online you will find the footage of Eric Clapton at the console, listening to rough mixes, turning around in awe and saying “are they all like this? I don’t think I can take much more”. It’s a really charming moment. 

It was of course many years until the next studio album would appear. All the while we worried that something might have happened to D’Angelo. An online news report came of a car accident. But it was hard to find details.

Right now, we have cultural milieu that obsesses over cult of personality, that wants  all the details immediately- and the metrics first and foremost. Online chatter fawns over artists in terms of their business acumen, making that a main point of conversation often even before consideration of music. 

In a quick content media economy that puts primacy of value on speed and volume and enervation, on an artists marketing, or more generously put, an artists skill at “steering their career”, it’s deeply refreshing to talk about music for other reasons, and to interface with music more than through parasocial relationships that feel somehow exploitative of both artists and their audience.

I don’t think I even knew that D’Angelo had once been married to Angie Stone, or that he had children. I didn’t know about the pressure he felt, the objectification and alienation he felt within the industry.  I didn’t know if he was working on new music. He maintained a mystery and what I now consider to be a respectful, generous distance. I just hoped that he was doing well, and that maybe one day he would “return”.

Infamously, in 2007, Questlove leaked an unfinished version of 'Really Love' during a live interview on Australia’s own Triple J Radio. Can you imagine! The moment was bootlegged and spread over the internet, causing a fuss. I think Questlove was just desperate to share something so good.

Other than that, I never heard D’Angelo played on radio of any kind in Australia, except on those occasions when I myself was invited by some station to compile “top 5 songs ever” types of guest presenter segments. Three separate times, on different stations, I tried playing ‘Untitled...’ as part of such a list, and each time I did, the DJ would fade it out prematurely, mid way through the track when it starts to simmer softly, cutting it off before the final climax starts to build. They obviously didn’t know the track. Maybe other artists have similar stories.

Then, at last on 2014, Black Messiah was released, all of a sudden. I said to a musician friend that I thought it was a masterpiece. He said “time will tell”. In my opinion, time has told. It’s a masterpiece. 

Recorded over years, it spans slightly different territory than Voodoo, although they share a common root. If you can, then along with Questlove’s reflections, try to find interviews with Russell Elevado, the aforementioned recording engineer, who maintained the tapes and sessions over all those years. He tells the story beautifully. I think of the relief he must have felt to get that phone call: “send the final mixes over to Dave Collins for mastering please”. 

I hope they all had one heck of a listening party, with the musicians getting together again, hearing all those parts they had laid down on tape maybe even a decade before hand. 

Again, I am reminded that genius and serendipity moves in concert with the rhythms of life, the high tides and the low, and the muses who speak to people like D’Angelo won’t be domesticated or treated like farm stock. 

This is an antithetical thought to the going MO of our times. We have a disposable product economy, one that wants quick ROI and isn’t really enamoured by the prospect of developing things over seasons, and outside of market trends.

Contemporary music, which can sometimes come to feel like so many volleys at attention-grabbing and persuasion, comes and goes like activewear pop up stores on high street. Work like D’Angelo’s has more in common with the Segrada Familia. Almost, almost impossible, but really there: a staggering reminder of the rewards of caring about things deeply. This goes not just for music, but for places and people too. 

For me, D’Angelo’s music is like a beautiful house where many wonderful moments have been shared with people I love. That’s a very special thing.

I am heartbroken to hear of D’Angelo’s passing. My thoughts are with his family, his children. His eldest child also lost his mother, Angie Stone, earlier this year in tragic circumstances. It is terribly sad. 

The man himself seemed kind, and authentic, as well being as a force of nature. His music helps us to feel kinder, more present, more fully embodied, as well as inspired and electrified. 

I don’t begrudge him for his perfectionism, nor for having the authenticity to step away from the public clamour and live privately and sometimes through difficult years, and I can only admire the integrity he had in his approach to his craft, and the respect he had for the process of creation.

We didn’t need to see into his private life on social media (which he didn’t use), and we didn’t need 37 versions of his albums; the ones he and his friends gave us (along with a smattering of some electrifying live recordings and breathtaking performance footage) are just right, and they remain as vital, as dynamic, as prescient and moving now as the day we received them. Thank you, D, for all of it.

In an interview, I saw D’Angelo say that he hoped to carry the torch of the artists who inspired him, and he did, and in his hands it burned as brightly as it ever has in history, inspiring at the same time a great many other artists to try and do the same, in their own ways. 

Rest in peace, and power, Michael Eugene Archer.