D’Angelo: 12 Essential Songs

D’Angelo’s sensuality was central to his work, even when the subject of his songs wasn’t technically a person. It was easy for casual listeners to miss that he’s actually romancing his weed on “Brown Sugar,” the title track from his equally authoritative debut LP. And he wanted it that way. “A lot of people are real busy tryin’ to get their point across,” he told Vibe in 1995. “Not letting the listener use their imagination. You should be able to lay back and close your eyes and come up with your own vision.” Afrobeats star Tiwa Savage recently told Rolling Stone she was a student of D’Angelo’s coy approach on “Brown Sugar”: “You just think it’s a sexy song about a girl or whatever, then you go back and it just makes you even love it even more and think of how genius that song is.” —Mankaprr Conteh

Raphael Saadiq had a chorus for “Lady” kicking around as early as the late Eighties, but his managers thought it was a dud. And that was where it stopped, until he crossed paths with D’Angelo a few years later. “When I met D I said, ‘I got this idea,’ and I started playing it and he just looked at me and said, ‘I like it,’” Saadiq told Essence’s Yes, Girl! podcast in 2019. “So we started writing the lyrics together.” The two R&B visionaries worked together to develop “Lady” into one of the centerpieces of D’s debut, a celebration of a special someone that unfolds at a leisurely pace. It turned out to be a Top 10 hit, the biggest of D’Angelo’s career. —Simon Vozick-Levinson

In the late Seventies, Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’” was one of the songs that summed up the quiet storm sound; in 2000, it became an adult-contemporary chart-topper when Gwyneth Paltrow and Huey Lewis covered it for the soundtrack of a long-forgotten comedy. In between, D’Angelo took it somewhere much finer. His falsetto was a divine instrument, elevating the song to a whole new level of smoothed-out pleasure over a luxurious arrangement of strings and sleigh bells. When he sings “Music was made for love,” you believe it. And by the end of the six-and-a-half-minute recording (the longest on his debut), this song was his for all time. —S.V.L.

Many people would be terrified to take on their idols, but for the soundtrack to 1997’s Scream 2, D’Angelo decided to have some fun with his favorite deep cut from the artist who seemed to inspire him most. He turned out a hard-edged, rock-inflected version of Prince’s “She’s Always in My Hair,” the bouncing single that originally appeared as a B-side for both “Paisley Park” and “Raspberry Beret.” He swaggers up and down each verse, adding an extra dose of grit to the pebble-smooth edges of his voice, griming up the track with just the right amount of pluck and sleaze . It’s a cool confidence that came from having Prince’s blessing, to a degree: In an interview with Ananda Lewis, he shared that he had told Prince the cover was coming when they jammed together for the first time at Tramps in New York. —Julyssa Lopez

“Nothing Even Matters” is the softest place to land on Lauryn Hill’s legendary debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. The iconic meeting of the voices that would go on to help define the 1990s’ earthy soul revival seems to have happened just as smoothly as the song sounds. “Collaborating with Lauryn was very cool,” D’Angelo told Rolling Stone in 2008. “She was warm and sweet. Originally, we were going to swap tunes for each other’s projects because I was working on Voodoo at the same time and my keyboardist James Poyser was also working with her. I went to her house in New Jersey, she played a lot of songs for me and gave me a rough copy to listen to. When Lauryn and I went into the studio together, I laid down my vocals in the course of an hour.” —M.C.

D’Angelo may have ended up with mixed feelings about the pelvis-teasing video for this single, but there’s no denying that the super-slinky “Untitled” is rivaled only by “Let’s Get It On” for the title of greatest bedroom jam ever. As with most of Voodoo, the formidable rhythm section of Pino Palladino and Questlove are so far behind the beat that the track practically time travels, while D’Angelo’s ever-cresting lead vocals and harmony stacks offer — in classic soul tradition — a libidinal take on gospel. The song casts such a distinct spell that it seems downright wrong to listen to it with the lights on. —Brian Hiatt

The most resonant social commentary doesn’t have to beat listeners over the head. Enter “Devil’s Pie,” a Voodoo single where D’Angelo portrays what Questlove has described as ”the money-hungry, jiggafied state of the world we’re in,” brilliantly using euphemisms for money (cream, cheese, dough) as metaphorical devices for the sinister side of life. D’Angelo starts the song as one of the bakery’s conflicted patrons, softly crooning, “Who am I to justify, all the evil in our eye/When I myself feel the high, from all that I despise?” He spends the rest of the track exploring humanity’s inherent hypocrisy and gluttony over one of the smoothest basslines you’ll ever hear. DJ Premier initially hooked the beat up for rapper Canibus, but he passed on it, leading to one of the most poignant, funky snapshots of Western excess we’ve ever seen. If it’s not the serpent’s apple, it’s the devil’s pie. —Andre Gee

When D’Angelo made Voodoo, he packed it with tons of soul, in a very real sense: The album overflows with bone-deep, intensely felt reflections on love, spirituality, and fatherhood. Perhaps no moment is as tenderhearted as “Send It On,” the first song written for the album, dedicated to his first son. He worked on it alongside Angie Stone, the child’s mother, dialing up an interpolation of Kool & the Gang’s “Sea of Tranquility” to its most emotive and adding layers on layers of air-light vocals that get more poignant by the second. The final result is  sweet as a lullaby, but with the clarity and foresight that makes it stand as everlasting words of wisdom from a dad. —J.L.

Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg are revered for unflinching depictions of violence and hedonism, but every so often, like on 2006’s “Imagine,” they slowed things down to second-guess the madness around them, with D’Angelo offering a silky chorus that fit the song’s pensive tone. It’s one of D’Angelo’s few rap features, and the gangsta-rap icons knew they had to come correct and go deeper with him on the track. Similar to Jadakiss’ “Why,” the two took a stream-of-consciousness approach, with Dre examining the power of hip-hop (“Imagine Russell still struggling/No Def Jam, just another nigga hustlin’”) and Snoop pondering, “Imagine if these niggas never saw a color/Would it be peaceful in them streets, would niggas kill each other?” Perhaps one day, we’ll have the answer to some of the guys’ queries, but regardless, we’re thankful to have “Imagine.” —A.G.

When D’Angelo re-emerged from his decade-plus studio hiatus with Black Messiah, he came with a new sound — heavier on rock guitars (many played by D himself) — and a renewed sense of purpose. He told Rolling Stone that he and cowriter Kendra Foster had been reading a lot of James Baldwin before penning this subtly insistent plea for justice and understanding: “All we wanted was a chance to talk/’Stead we only got outlined in chalk.” And while it resonated with listeners in the 2010s as a Black Lives Matter anthem, he said the song was rooted even further back. “It just shows how ongoing this shit is, because I wrote that even before the Trayvon Martin thing happened,” he said. “It’s crazy that we’re still in the streets protesting the same shit.” —S.V.L.

On “1000 Deaths,” D’Angelo ushers in a great rumble, trembling beneath a sample of Dr. Khalid Muhammad delivering a treatise on Black revolution. Black Messiah arrived in the wake of the death of Michael Brown at the hands of Ferguson police, and on this song, the ever-elusive artist is compelled from his own exile by a larger necessity. A flip on the old saying that a coward dies 1000 deaths, the song offers a thesis for his own return. After the public’s reaction to the music video for “Untitled (How Does it Feel?),” D’Angelo vanished from the public eye, only to return with a robust and unapologetic expression of creative and cultural resilience. —Jeff Ihaza

The sweet and gentle “Really Love” was one of the first songs D’Angelo wrote for Black Messiah, and eventually it became its first single. Above a lush string arrangement, guest Gina Figueroa speaks in Spanish, chastising a possessive lover. But as the slow-burner opens up, D’Angelo tells a different tale: He’s mesmerized by how deep his love is for his partner, intoxicated by their connection on every level. His soft falsetto declares “I’m in really love with you” on the chorus. D’Angelo wrote the song as early as 2007, when Questlove leaked some demo snippets to Australian radio. The single would go on to be nominated for Record of the Year at the 2016 Grammy Awards, and it took home Best R&B Song. – Brittany Spanos