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D'Angelo  

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D’Angelo (born 11 February 1974) - otherwise known as Michael Eugene Archer - is an American R&B and soul singer originating from Richmond, Virginia in the U.S.

From humble beginnings Michael Archer started playing piano when he was three, moved on to playing his Father’s Hammond organ when he was slightly older, to when he was 18 where he dropped out of school and moved to New York to develop his music and talents.

D’Angelo’s first substantial success was his co-writing and co-producing of the song “U Will Know” for the all-male R&B supergroup Black Men United, which featured heavy-weight artists Usher, R Kelly and Boyz II Men amongst others.

Michael Archer’s debut album entitled “Brown Sugar” released in June 1995 had a slow commercial start but eventually managed to sell 500,000 copies within five months. The release turned D’Angelo into a household R&B name whilst promoting the neo-soul movement of the 1990s with the likes of Maxwell and Erykah Badu. He even appeared as a guest vocalist on the track “Nothing Even Matters" on Lauryn Hill’s genre-defining album “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill”.

Five years later after a significant hiatus in his music career D’Angelo returned to release the album “Voodoo” in the year 2000. Known as D’Angelo’s finest work, the album is universally acclaimed for it’s sprawling, visionary approach seemingly so before its time yet inclusive of many of D’Angelo’s influences including Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. Commercially the album sold over 320,000 copies in its first week, debuted at number one in the US Billboard 200 Chart and has since sold over 1.7 million copies. A year later in 2001, along with his recording engineer Russel Elevado, D’Angelo won the Grammy Award for Best R&B Album.

In 2012 he announced a 11-date tour throughout Europe and performed his first American gig in over 11 years at The House of Blues Hollywood.

Live reviews

It’s 3 February 2012. D’Angelo walks out on to London’s Brixton Academy stage and within minutes it’s clear what all of the fuss is about. Those that missed out on the Voodoo World Tour are treated for the first time to a set that showcases D’Angelo’s talent as a bandleader and performer. Some ‘new’ music is thrown into the show, and everyone’s happy. No one knows for sure what the tour is in aide of, although there’s been talk of D’Angelo finally releasing a follow-up to ‘Voodoo’, tentatively titled ‘James River’.

‘James River’ never comes; instead the album’s been named ‘Black Messiah’ and it gets rush released at the tail end of 2014 by D’Angelo and the Vanguard. It follows a release to blogs of the CD quality version of ‘Suga Daddy’ - a song that went down well with the Brixton Academy crowd back in 2012. The album’s a gem. One that everyone hoped for, but not even the most diehard of fans would have expected. For an album recorded over 14 years, it’s unbelieveable that time hasn’t affected the quality or relevance of the collection of songs that made the final cut.

It’s against this backdrop that expectations for D’Angelo’s 2015 tour have been made. This is not like the Wu Tang Clan performing 36 Chambers at Rock the Bells, or Outkast reuniting at Coachella, where fans are treated to throwback sets from their idols. Little mention is made of the 2012 tour, which it could be argued fell more into this aforementioned category. In fact, 2012 is all but dismissed. D’Angelo and the Vanguard are now embarking on the ‘Second Coming Tour’.

Saturday’s show started perfectly. Hip-Hop and R&B shows are notorious for booking unknown acts to perform warm up sets to extremely unsympathetic crowds, with the headliner usually turning up half an hour after their set time and stoking the crowd’s restlessness even further. On Saturday, fans were instead treated to Voodoo sessions era J Dilla productions and a playing of Dilla’s masterpiece, ‘Donuts’ in full. No breaks, no hypeman rapping over the beats; just Donuts on a good soundsystem, played in the order it was intended (Note to self: Do not stop pestering the members of the Vanguard on Twitter until it is confirmed or denied that they had a part to play in this). This was followed by a 10 minute break for the stragglers to get into the venue, before D’Angelo and the Vanguard walked on to stage at 21:00. The next two hours were a whirlwind of perfect entertainment, with the Vanguard (led by the indomitable Chris ‘Daddy’ Dave and Pino Palladino) recreating their energy from the album recording sessions, and D’Angelo’s voice matching them for power and professionalism throughout. Album cuts never strayed far away from their studio arrangements, but the band were allowed to showcase their talents in accompanying funk bridges. The audience were invited to join in at every opportunity (used to full effect on ‘Brown Sugar’) and were held captive for the entire two hour set. D’Angelo led the Vanguard with assurance and swagger. Yes, the album and live show would not be the same without this collective of extremely talented musicians, but at no point could it be said that the band carried D’Angelo. His falsetto never faltered and he didn’t shy away from showing off his entire vocal range.

The show, and everything that it entailed, was encapsulated in its final song. Predictably, ‘Untitled (How does it feel)’ was chosen to see out the night. Chris Dave’s drum solo at the end of ‘Till it’s Done (Tutu)’ rolled into Jesse Johnson’s guitar lick to kick the final song off, which was heart wrenchingly sang out. As the crowd thought it was coming to a close, the band continued to repeat the refrain, but dropped off stage one-by-one, allowing each to individually receive the audience’s appreciation. We were left with D’Angelo at a piano, singing ‘How does it feel?’ to him, and him singing ‘It feels so good’ back. Saturday’s show felt more than good; it felt great. What fans had been praying for was teased in 2012, fuelled in 2014 and proven in 2015. D'Angelo is back from the dead. Black Messiah indeed.

Best Song: ‘Charade’

Minutes late for set time: 0

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Late night conversations about music were not uncommon when I lived in San Francisco. Sometimes these conversations would turn into arguments. Take a love of music, add a bottle of Jameson whiskey, a double shot of ego and ice. Shake well. Scrape all pragmatism off the top and overserve. Words were wasted as they merged with dead brain cells…going up in smoke before ever fulfilling their purpose. We would all speak over each other until the only people who could follow our conversations were those who weren’t a part of them. Most of the content was forgotten by the time the sun punished us for our sins. One of those conversations has always stuck with me though. I don’t remember the context, but one of my friends blurted out that D’Angelo was one of the best shows he’d ever seen. He then went on to say that the R&B singer (turned recluse) was once slated to be the next Prince. I believe my response was “that naked dude from that one video?” I know that sounds ignorant now, but I didn’t know anything about D’Angelo back then. I was listening to a lot of punk in ’95 and a lot of Radiohead in ’00. Brown Sugar and Voodoo didn’t even exist in my world. D’Angelo could have been one of the members of Jodeci for all I knew.

I know better now. When Black Messiah dropped from the sky like a dirty bomb in late 2014, reducing every premature year-end list to irrelevant words on blog, I did my homework. I learned about D’Angelo’s collapse under the pressure of his newfound fame. His sex symbol status was just too much for him to take back in 2000. The man who had literally exposed himself to the world, turned his back on that world in favor of darkness. Drugs and alcohol fueled his all-to-common fall from grace. But instead of becoming a media fixture of failure, D’Angelo disappeared almost completely. After many years went by, people stopped speculating on when the next album might come. D’Angelo seemed to be another ‘what could’ve been’ footnote in a century that was on the fast track to becoming ancient history. But like a superhero who only comes out of his super-secret hideout in times of need, D’Angelo decided he couldn’t stay quiet against the deafening rally cries of those who felt they were being unjustly treated by a police force with seemingly unlimited power to detain, abuse, beat…and even kill with impunity.

- See more at: http://ilistensoyoudonthaveto.com/2015/06/11/dangelo-and-the-vanguard-ogden-theatre-06-10-15/#sthash.OHy6jEjx.dpuf

kmartini’s profile image

D'Angelo is an example of neo soul music at its finest. Most people are familiar with him from when he hit the mainstream with "Brown Sugar," but he's been making music and performing since then and he is just as incredible now as he was then.

A D'Angelo concert will have him singing, playing the guitar, playing the piano, playing the trombone and there are backup singers, too! D'Angelo is a musician on every level and his concerts are truly an experience. He is an innovative artist and his concerts reflect just that.

He plays a lot of jazz festivals, but he definitely has a more youthful vibe compared to other jazz musicians. To put it in context, one of his most recent releases, as well as performances, have heavily involved the musician Questlove, who is the front man and the drummer for the band The Roots.

The way the audience gets into the performances definitely makes gives it a communal atmosphere, which I think elevates the music even more. D'Angelo was once written about in Q Magazine and they listed him as "one of the 50 Bands to See Before You Die." D'Angelo is a musical treasure and is someone every person should see at least once.

D'Angelo, Michael Eugene Archer is often referred to as the modern day king of funk due to the influence on his R & B sound being taken from a variety of different classic genres including soul, funk and jazz. A performer in every sense of the word, Archer knows how to work a crowd and from the moment he steps onstage he is in the zone to entertain.

It also helps that his own brand of neo-soul is of such a high quality that the audience cannot help but to get enthusiastic when seeing the man perform. Supported by a brilliant selection of live performers, D'Angelo performs a short set in terms of track numbers yet the way in which he has extended them all is a credit to his craftsmanship. 'Chickengrease' sounds refreshed and renewed with a new jazz influence.

Breakout single 'Brown Sugar' receives a huge reaction from the audience and the band clearly enjoys performing this classic piece of soulful R & B to an adoring crowd. This level of fun remains throughout the show and the audience leave feeling they have experienced a world-class musician.

sean-ward’s profile image

I travelled from London to see him in Birmingham. He did not disappoint.

He was amazing in B'ham from start to finish, so much so that I hired a car & drove to Manchester to see him again the next day :)

Absolute genius!!

He did most of the songs off new album 'BlackMessiah, they were extended versions and the musicality was epic.The Vanguard were flawless, His vocals were flawless.

Definitely a man in a league of his own and he should be well saluted.

He is one of the most under-rated artist of our generations, he deserves more accolades and more exposure. Those of us that appreciate his genius, will continue to support him.

I will look forward to his Second Coming.

Thankyou D'angelo, it was an honour!

Candygirl44’s profile image

Long awaited artist that I've always wanted to see. I felt like I'd been to church and I was redeemed. His aura, music and most importantly messages through the music spoke to me. Just gutted that I don't feel that the Manchester audience 'got' him. The reactions from the audience was a bit lack lustre and put a dampener on the event a little for me, because he was AMAZING. A true artist. The lady back up singer WOW, she was an angel. None stop dancing, stunning voice with wicked moves. D'angelo was in form and I have fulfilled one of my dreams of seeing one of my music idols perform live. Thank you D'angelo and the vanguard for bringing my faith back into real music and real performers.

siobhan-sewell’s profile image

It was worth waiting 15 years. D'angelo and Band needed a few songs, but then had the audience in their grip. Great band, great sound, great groove, great entertainment. And they played more than two hours (!), including a nice medley of old and new material in the first encore. Also, a lot of old songs got rearranged, so he presented some nice interpretations of material.

peter-post’s profile image

D'Angelo and his bands performance were legendary ! Such a great gig and the whole audience were on their feet for the whole show ! The new album tracks sounded way better live and he threw in some of the old classics too including a very Funk performance of Brown Sugar! Based on this gig I wouldn't hesitate to recommend seeing him live !

funksuperhero’s profile image

Great night out, great vibes from the crowd. D'Angelo is the new James Brown/Prince combined. Period. Go and see him. The encore smashed it. D'Angelo's band were tight in everything they played and the backing singers danced soo much it was infectious. Not a single person stayed seated the whole gig. I still have a huge smile on my face.

zappzack’s profile image

Oh man what a concert,I've always been a fan but this just blew me away. From the minute he walked out on stage with his troupe of funkerteers D'angelo had the whole crowd up on their feet for almost 3 hours.

It felt llike you were in the presence of one of the funk gods on a level with James Brown or Prince.

Wonderful night.thanks.

alan-uyanneh’s profile image

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  • New York (NYC) (10)
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  • D'Angelo and The Vanguard (21)
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D’Angelo Returned To The Stage For The First Time Since Verzuz At Netflix Is A Joke Festival

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D’Angelo is slowly but surely returning to the spotlight. The neo-soul crooner took the stage as a surprise guest during Dave Chappelle ’s set at the inaugural Netflix Is A Joke festival.

On Saturday (April 30) in front of a sold-out crowd at the Hollywood Bowl, the Brown Sugar singer performed a special electric guitar solo to Sly and The Family Stone’s 1973 tune, “Babies Makin’ Babies.” The last fans saw of him was his Verzuz performance held at the Apollo Theater , billed as D’Angelo And Friends . The special Vezuz event included appearances from H.E.R., Redman, Method Man, and Keyon Harrold.

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Back at the Hollywood Bowl, fellow guest performers were Raphael Saadiq , Questlove , Erykah Badu , Anderson .Paak (who performed under his moniker “DJ Pee Wee”), and Busta Rhymes .

D’Angelo doing Sly & The Family Stone’s “Babies Makin’ Babies” at Netflix Is A Joke. With @questlove @JesseJohnsonViP and @RaphaelSaadiq pic.twitter.com/n26YuVQxlA — Isaiah (@IJ_Rogers) May 1, 2022
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Swizz Beatz (@therealswizzz)

During the opening weekend of the festival, Pete Davidson also addressed his feud with Kanye West. The comedian compared the Will Smith/Chris Rock Oscars incident to West’s depiction of him in the visual for “Eazy.”

Davidson also spoke about Ye creating false rumors about him contracting AIDS, calling the DONDA rapper a “genius” for making him get a check-up. The 28-year-old also joked about West’s harassment of his estranged wife, Kim Kardashian, asking, “Am I the only one who secretly hopes Kanye will go full Mrs. Doubtfire?”

Following Dave Chappelle’s set at the Netflix Is A Joke festival, the comedian’s Chappelle’s Home Team series will continue to release standalone specials on the streaming platform.

Click here to read the full article.

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Where Has D’Angelo Been for the Past 14 Years, Anyway?

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T here are artists whose careers are plagued by album delays, and then there is D’Angelo.

The critically acclaimed R&B superstar — once dubbed “R&B Jesus” by prominent rock critic Robert Christgau — made his long-awaited return last night with Black Messiah , his first album since 2000’s Voodoo (and only his third studio album ever in his near-20 year career).

Despite the excitement and social media chatter around the surprisingly timely album , which dropped at midnight, one question still loomed: Where has D’Angelo been for the past 14 years, anyway? At Sunday night’s New York City listening session for the album, only one semblance of answer was provided: D’Angelo has been working on his guitar, and while it shows on Black Messiah , that’s hardly satisfying.

The truth is, there really isn’t a good answer. D’Angelo does work slowly, partially evident by the five-year gap between his debut, Brown Sugar , and Voodoo . The Roots’ drummer Questlove, who worked on a handful of album tracks, leaked one song, “Really Love” — now the album’s official first single — to an Australian radio station way back in 2007. Another album cut, “1000 Deaths,” first hit the Internet in some form in 2010, the same year engineer Russell Elevado, who worked on Black Messiah and Voodoo , announced they were going back into the studio to “to complete overdubs and do final mixing on a few songs.” These songs have been in the works for years, and after hearing the album, it almost makes sense: Black Messiah is a busy, dense album that’s obsessed with the intricate details, so it’s not hard to imagine D’Angelo studying every single guitar note and harmony, tweaking and re-recording it to his satisfaction (and to everyone else’s frustration). D’Angelo fans have been burned by false promises in the past, but while his collaborators spent the past few years making statements about the record being “97% done,” for example, they don’t appear to have been lying lying.

That said, there hasn’t been a complete D’Angelo drought since Voodoo . The singer collaborated with a handful for their records in mid-2000s, such as Raphael Saadiq (“Be Here,” 2005); Common and J Dilla (“So Far to Go,” 2006); Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre (“Imagine,” 2007); and Q-Tip (“Believe,” 2008). And he hasn’t entirely been holed up in a studio, either, embarking on a short European tour in 2012, at that point his first string of live shows (barring performances at church) in more than a 10 years.

Much of absence however, involves his personal struggles, which are extensively chronicled in a 2012 GQ feature about D’Angelo . In the piece, writer Amy Wallance explores how the attention D’Angelo attracted as a sex symbol for his steamy “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” music video “tortured” the singer. “‘Yo, man, I cannot wait until this fucking tour is over,'” Questlove remembers D’Angelo telling him after the Voodoo tour. “‘I’m going to go in the woods, drink some hooch, grow a beard, and get fat.’ … I was like, ‘You’re a funny guy.’ And then it started to happen. That’s how much he wanted to distance himself.”

A few deaths in his family rocked his personal life after the tour — “I just kind of sunk into this thing [after that],” he told GQ. He then spiraled into substance abuse: D’Angelo was arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated and possession of marijuana and cocaine in 2005. By the time he survived a near-fatal car accident in September of that year, he had already done two unsuccessful stints in rehab. But D’Angelo says his wake-up call occurred in 2006, following the death of rapper-producer J Dilla. He was shook by the loss, so he reached out to the man who first signed him, Gary Harris, to get in touch with Eric Clapton, who knew D’Angelo and told him he was welcome at the Crossroads treatment center in Antigua, if he could pay $40,000. According to Harris, the bill was footed by his former boss and one of the most powerful managers in the industry, Irving Azoff, who didn’t even know D’Angelo personally.

D’Angelo wouldn’t be totally clear from personal troubles after that — in 2010, he was arrested and charged with solicitation after offering a female undercover cop $40 for a sexual favor — but he was able to land a new record deal 18 months after his monthlong rehab stint at Crossroads. “But even then, in D’s world,” Wallace writes, “nothing happens quickly.”

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How Does It Feel? The Magic of D’Angelo’s ‘Voodoo’

Twenty years later, the virtuosic musician’s second album—highlighted by his stripped-down video for “Untitled”—stands out as a genre-bending, genre-shifting anomaly

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The camera starts on a black backdrop before shifting to the left, moving over the back of a head adorned with tight cornrows. It pans around, locking in on a face, on a set of closed eyes. They remain shut as an instrumental struts along in 3/4 time, the way an early Prince ballad would, until a falsetto kicks in. “Girl, it’s only you,” D’Angelo sings as he opens his eyes. The lens moves downward, landing on his lips. “Have it your way.” The camera pulls out, slowly, revealing first his shoulders, then his pecs, then his chiseled abs, and finally his full glistening frame. For the next three-plus minutes, we’re alone with D’Angelo as the lens trains on every inch of his upper body while the then-25-year-old singer belts his pleas through a flange effect. “You’ve already got me right where you want me, baby,” he closes the first verse. “I just want to be your man.”

At that moment, D’Angelo became the man of hundreds of thousands of suddenly ravenous fans, whether he liked it or not. For some, the “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)” video was their introduction to D’Angelo. For others, it was a reintroduction. He had risen to modest notoriety a few years earlier as a soul wunderkind in a long black leather trench coat, inspiring comparisons to the likes of Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson. But even the people who knew D’Angelo didn’t know this D’Angelo—one stripped of inhibitions and, seemingly, all of his clothes. (In actuality, he wore low-hanging pajama pants during the shoot.) “Untitled” was as intimate as any video that had graced MTV in the channel’s history; the song as seductive as any by the masters whom D’Angelo had studied so closely. It presented him in a new light—a sex god and soul icon wrapped into one.

But that image also threatened to overshadow the project it was designed to promote: Voodoo , the first great musical endeavor of the young millennium. Released on January 25, 2000, the album was born out of legendary jam sessions, a feverish worship of the classic works of black music, and D’Angelo’s ability to conjure magic out of both himself and his world-class collaborators. At times it became difficult for him to reconcile his devotion to his craft with his newfound status as a reluctant sex symbol. But through everything that happened in the album’s wake—his frustrations with his new fans, his sometimes-public struggles with his demons, his eventual triumphant reemergence after a 14-year hiatus— Voodoo has remained one of the pillars of soul music that’s transcended its era and defined its genre, nearly as much as one video almost came to define D’Angelo.

Born Michael Archer in 1974 in Virginia, D’Angelo grew up the son of a Pentecostal preacher in a household so devout his mother and aunts couldn’t wear makeup, skirts, or jewelry. He began learning the piano at age 3, picking up other instruments along the way and quickly establishing himself as the most talented musician in his family. Early on, he was told to stay away from secular music—or “devil’s music,” as his family called it, he told GQ in 2012 —but eventually his grandmother encouraged him to use his talents in whatever way he liked. That included a brief stint with a rap group named I.D.U. (Intelligent, Deadly, but Unique) and a couple of trips to the Apollo Theater’s amateur nights. When he was 16, he won one of the competitions singing Johnny Gill’s “Rub You the Right Way.”

D’Angelo burst into the mainstream consciousness with 1995’s Brown Sugar , an album he wrote and demoed in his Richmond bedroom before entering the studio with Bob Power, a legendary engineer known for working with A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Black Sheep. The album, which featured D’Angelo playing most of the instruments himself, wore its influences on its sleeve, invoking the Motown and Stax forefathers who paved the way for him—right down to a cover of Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’.” The album was well received, striking a chord at a time when the lines between hip-hop and R&B were becoming increasingly blurred. It eventually went platinum, earned D’Angelo four Grammy nominations, and helped spark the burgeoning genre of neo-soul, a term intended to market a rising group of R&B and hip-hop artists who incorporated aesthetics of classic soul and jazz. Brown Sugar wasn’t, however, typically heralded as groundbreaking: “He’s no trailblazer,” proclaimed a Rolling Stone review at the time . “Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, and Prince have all walked down the same musical paths where D’Angelo meanders.”

D’Angelo toured for two years following Brown Sugar , and afterward, he found himself stuck with writer’s block. He released a few more covers, including a version of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Your Precious Love” with Erykah Badu, but no new music came as he passed the time smoking weed and lifting weights, searching for inspiration. “The thing about writer’s block is that you want to write so fucking bad,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2000, “[but] the songs don’t come out that way. They come from life. So you’ve got to live to write.” Inspiration would soon come in a few forms. First was the birth of his oldest son, Michael Jr., whom he fathered with singer Angie Stone. Meanwhile, his music family also started to grow: D’Angelo began working more closely with musicians like Roots drummer Questlove, keyboardist James Poyser, trumpeter Roy Hargrove, and hip-hop beatsmith J Dilla. The group—which also included Badu and rappers Common and Q-Tip—called themselves the Soulquarians, playing off of the shared zodiac sign of several key members. The music they played was in some ways traditional, but in others thrilling, especially in an era dominated by Puff Daddy and Bad Boy Records.

“I was just doing stuff that I felt at that time, stuff that I liked,” Poyser says now. “It wasn’t like, ‘It has to do this like this.’ I was just like, ‘This is the kind of stuff that I feel.’ And it just so happened that it was on a wavelength that a lot of people were on at the same time.”

Beginning in 1998, D’Angelo started writing and recording in Greenwich Village’s Electric Lady, the studio bought and renovated by Jimi Hendrix shortly before he died in 1970 . A handful of classic albums had been recorded there in the intervening decades—including David Bowie’s Young Americans and Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book and Music of My Mind —but it had gone largely underused. D’Angelo and his cohorts took over the studio and its three recording rooms, walking in to find a main studio that still had its original mixing board and plenty of now-vintage instruments and equipment. It quickly became their home base. At one point, D’Angelo was recording in Studio A while Common was working on what would become Like Water for Chocolate in Studio B, as artists like Mos Def, Bilal, and Talib Kweli would take turns in the third room. Poyser, who produced and wrote on several of the classic albums credited to the Soulquarians and who now serves as the keyboard player for the Roots, recalled the collaborative environment vividly.

“It was just a community of people just there, creating, and everybody checking out everybody’s stuff, and like, ‘OK, I got to make this better,’” Poyser says. “Or, ‘That’s what they’re doing? I got to make this better.’”

If the gentle competition or Electric Lady’s analog instruments and psychedelic walls weren’t inspiration enough, there was always the music of the “Yodas,” as Quest, D’Angelo, and engineer Russell Elevado called them. Countless hours were spent listening to and studying the music and concerts of George Clinton, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Fela Kuti, Sly and the Family Stone, Hendrix. Questlove had also acquired a massive treasure trove of old Soul Train episodes for the group to pore over. Often, after a long evening of dissecting one classic or another, they’d start jamming just to “see what happens,” as Quest put it in 2013 . They’d play for a few hours until something interesting jumped out, and then they’d workshop that.

“The studio and the history in the studio played a part, ’cause we were there, listening to the history and seeing the history and feeling the history and turning that history into what [D’Angelo] wanted to do,” Poyser says.

When DJ Premier arrived at the studio, he found walls covered by pictures of the Isley Brothers and Prince, and a vibe where “everything organically just flowed.” D’Angelo and Premier spent four sessions recording what would become “Devil’s Pie.” During their downtime, conversations always came back to their music influences—and one big one in particular: Prince, whom D’Angelo and Quest basically worshipped. “It’s like talking to somebody [about] sports,” Premier said recently. “When you really know your sports, you can go deeper than just who you’re picking to win the game, or you like somebody just because of the color of their uniform. With Prince, we were going that deep on every level.”

But despite the massive debt owed to the masters who came before D’Angelo and Co., these sessions were producing something much different than the throwback affair that was Brown Sugar . The songs that would eventually come to make up Voodoo were conversant with the history of black music, not direct homages—you may be able to hear strains of Parliament on the Poyser-produced “Chicken Grease” or bits of Fela Kuti on the up-tempo “Spanish Joint,” but the influences were interwoven into the fabric of the music. “You hear it but you’re not being beat over the head,” says Faith Pennick, whose 33 ⅓ book about the album is slated to come out in March. “Marvin’s obvious, but it’s all rivers that flow into an ocean and that ocean is Voodoo .”

The word “voodoo” conjures a certain image. It has roots in the Haitian religion of Vodou, and the term for its practitioners translates into “servants of the spirits.” In the Western world, where it also refers to a set of beliefs and practices belonging to the African diaspora in Louisiana, the word can connote a sort of dark magic that can leave you spellbound. As the songs on D’Angelo’s sophomore album took shape, the title began to fit like a glove.

Voodoo , whose name is also an obvious homage to one of Hendrix’s most famous works , does away with the lush arrangements of Brown Sugar . None of the album’s 13 tracks clock in at shorter than 4:30, and more than half exceed the six-minute mark. Each song is anchored by a thick, driving bass line typically played by D’Angelo or Welsh musician Pino Palladino, but the sounds around the groove are easy to get lost in. The songs are raw, but still inviting; stripped down but living, vibrant things. They’re at once woozy and technically sharp, played with a looseness while never falling out of pocket.

Playing like that required some of the more classically trained musicians in the group to make adjustments. Questlove, in particular, had to change the way he approached his drumming. His band, the Roots, was an anomaly at the time: a hip-hop group comprising live musicians. As the backbone, he had to focus on playing with absolute precision—“as straight as 12 o’clock,” he said in a 2014 interview —so a Roots record would fit in among rap songs composed with samplers and drum machines. When Quest started working closely with D’Angelo, he was asked to stop drumming like a metronome and play with more feel, dragging behind the groove while maintaining the beat. “It was like being told to use the force in Star Wars ,” Questlove said in that interview. “Like, ‘Just trust me, just keep it in the pocket, be sloppy as hell, and it’s going to work.’”

D’Angelo, however, wasn’t the first person in the Soulquarians to deploy that drunken style on record. That distinction belongs to one of Voodoo ’s greatest inspirational rivers: J Dilla, the legendary hip-hop producer who died in 2006. Beatmakers have traditionally composed their tracks using a feature called “quantize,” which will correct imperfections in their playing; if they’re a millisecond off in triggering a hi-hat or snare, the quantize function snaps it in place, giving the beat a perfectly locked-in rhythm. Dilla had no use for it; he chopped samples and programmed drums with a priority on feel over machine-like accuracy and left the blemishes in when they sounded right. The result was something more organic than what most hip-hop fans were used to at that point—the just out-of-step drums that were infectious nonetheless, on Slum Village cuts like “CB4” or The Shining ’s “So Far to Go.” “It was almost like J Dilla was discovering different colors,” says longtime music journalist Jeff Weiss.

The hypnotic vibe extended beyond Voodoo ’s instrumentation. D’Angelo’s writing was more nuanced here than it was on Brown Sugar , which was built on tender love songs and a title track that was an obvious metaphor for smoking weed. On Voodoo , he broached more spiritual, deeper concerns. “The Line,” a hookless early-album cut that puts his falsetto on full display, grapples with his place in the music world, opening with lines alluding to the long hiatus between his first and second albums before diving into his internal struggle over the push and pull of the industry:

I’m gonna, I’m gonna hold, hold on Hold on to my pride, my pride I’m gonna stick, I’m gonna stick, I’m gonna stick I’m gonna stick to my guns, gonna stick to my guns I’m gonna put my finger on the trigger I’m gonna pull it and we gon’ see what the deal

He sang to his newborn on a song that also tackled honesty and faith in love (“Send It On”), while on other songs, he ruminated on past relationships (“One Mo’Gin” and “The Root,” the latter of which alluded to the spellbinding, voodoo-like effect lost loves can have on a person), piecing together an emotional mosaic that was shockingly mature for a 25-year-old. “D’Angelo writes lyrics in a way that to me is almost like good literature,” Pennick says. “He’s great with rhymes, he’s great with phrases, and he talks about things that matter to himself, and also I think would matter to his listeners. It’s not just ‘I’m just going to put words to these great beats.’”

Nowhere was that more apparent than on “Devil’s Pie,” the album’s centerpiece. Produced by DJ Premier, the song is unlike any other on Voodoo —its backdrop was a hard hip-hop beat, composed of a chopped Teddy Pendergrass bass line and pounding drums. Primo had originally offered the beat to Canibus, but the lyrically gifted MC turned it down in favor of something softer . His loss was a gain for D’Angelo, who invited the legendary Gang Starr producer to swing by the studio with the track: “I played it for him,” Premier remembers. “He immediately started screaming, ‘Whoa! I’m about to kill this shit! Yeah, I want this! I want this!’”

Over the course of the song’s five minutes and 21 seconds, D’Angelo deconstructed modern-day materialism while alluding to the prison-industrial complex and his religious upbringing and evoking a vibe he said was similar to a chain gang. The chorus laid it all bare: “Fuck the slice, we want the pie / Why ask why till we fry? / Watch us all stand in line / For a slice of the devil’s pie.” It all builds to a bridge of vocal samples scratched in by Premier, culminating in a line from Fat Joe’s “Success” that serves as the song’s thesis: “That’s how it be in this everlasting game.”

“There’s a darkness to it,” says music writer Oliver Wang, who’s covered hip-hop and soul music for more than two decades. “There’s a mood, and I mean, what is Voodoo as an album if not a dark mood? And ‘Devil’s Pie’ fits really, really well into it.”

On October 31, 1998, “Devil’s Pie” was released as the first single off of Voodoo , nearly 15 months before the album eventually came out. Despite its appearance in the Nas and DMX movie Belly , the song made little commercial impact, failing to crack the Billboard Hot 100. Perhaps part of the reason was the world it was released into: 1998 was the height of the Bad Boy era, when hip-hop and R&B had become synonymous, just not in the way D’Angelo had married them. Rap had always been somewhat about excess—Big Daddy Kane and Slick Rick aren’t the same without their gold chains—but the songs dominating the radio and MTV in ’98 often valued materialism and hedonism over all else. An artist like Mase best exemplifies the time: A few years earlier, he was a Harlem street rapper who went by “Murda Mase” and hung with Cam’ron and Big L. But under Puff Daddy’s tutelage, he became a mainstream darling, mumbling his words and cooing over saccharine beats on his singles. And while sampling had been a part of hip-hop since its inception, Bad Boy employed the practice liberally . Tracks like Mase’s Total-assisted “What You Want” swiped from Curtis Mayfield (a key D’Angelo influence) wholesale … and became the biggest hits of the year .

The music being created by D’Angelo and the Soulquarians stood in opposition to that. The collective’s work—which begins with the Roots’ Things Fall Apart and includes Common’s Like Water for Chocolate , Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides , and Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun —sounded fresh, like an oasis in a desert littered with shiny suits and Cristal bottles. Much of what they produced fit under the neo-soul umbrella, a label that not all of the artists agreed with but signaled that the music they were creating was on a different wavelength than what listeners had become accustomed to. “R&B of that era felt very derivative of whatever hip-hop hits are,” Wang says. “‘Let’s just take that same beat but then put singers over it.’ Whereas neo-soul felt like: This is artists making music that’s not derivative of hip-hop, even if it’s conversant with some of the traditions of hip-hop that returns to classic ’60s and ’70s soul and funk music.”

Voodoo ’s second single, “Left and Right,” which came out a year after “Devil’s Pie,” seemed to try to split the difference between the music environment it was competing in and the aesthetics the Soulquarians were going for. D’Angelo played all the instruments on the song; Q-Tip, the nasally frontman for A Tribe Called Quest, contributed a verse for the song, but he was replaced by a then-red-hot Method Man and Redman, who cackled their way through back-and-forth, occasionally misogynistic bars. (Sample Redman line: “I fuck brown sugar behind the fiber glass window.”)

Despite the rappers’ presence and a much lighter vibe than “Devil’s Pie,” however, “Left and Right” performed only slightly better on the charts, topping out at no. 70. With the singles disappointing and label and management issues looming, Virgin Records pushed Voodoo ’s planned release back.

But Voodoo ’s prospects changed when its third single—and the accompanying iconic video—came out a few weeks later. On the first day of the new millennium, “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)” was released into the world. If there were no video, the song would still be worth discussing: It’s sultry and immediate, packed with come-ons that could sound off-putting, but are undeniable coming from D’Angelo’s mouth. And while it’s clearly influenced by Prince, it never veers into imitation. It’s a beautiful, vulnerable song that starts softly and climaxes with vocal tracks stacked a mile high and an overdriven guitar line that seduces you and—before you know what’s happened—stops cold, snapping you back to reality.

But the song by itself didn’t redefine the singer—the heavy lifting was done by the video, directed by Paul Hunter and D’Angelo’s then-manager Dominique Trenier. The idea, as conceived by Trenier, was to make it appear like a personal, intimate encounter—a POV experience with a (presumably) naked D’Angelo. (And despite the sweat on his abdomen, the rumors of him getting a little, um, assistance on the set were completely untrue, he said at the time .) It was a total departure for the singer, a once-chubby introvert who grew up in the church, and he was more than a little reluctant to do it. But eventually, there he stood, in the center of the frame, donning nothing but a small, gold crucifix.

It was a jaw-dropping visual—Pennick remembers watching “Untitled” for the first time with her mouth agape, staring at the TV and saying, “What?” repeatedly. “We all watched that, and it was just like, ‘Holy fuck,’” she says.

“That was everything we ever wanted in our lives,” Pennick continues. “To have some good-looking, sensitive, attractive black man talking about how he was going to be what we desired. I mean, I’m going to give you everything that you desire? Where? Who are you? Can you come to my house today?”

The “Untitled” video received heavy airplay on both MTV and BET and helped push the single to no. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100. (Though not all viewers were enraptured by D’Angelo and his abs: A New York Times piece from the time noted that most men “turn away and scowl” when the video was on.) Voodoo arrived a few weeks later, selling 320,000 copies out the gate, topping the album charts, and receiving effusive praise . Some listeners, Pennick says, rejected the album upon its debut for being a totally different experience than the generally pleasant Brown Sugar . But after hearing it for the the first time—on a dubbed cassette no less—she knew the album was something special: “I went, ‘Holy shit, what is this? Things are about to change.’” Weiss, who was in college at the time, compares Voodoo to Outkast’s momentous third album, Aquemini , and remembers it being everywhere, as if it were “standard issue.”

“It was just sort of in the bloodstream, you know what I mean?” Weiss says. “You couldn’t escape it, I don’t think, on a level of cultural ubiquity.”

D’Angelo had created a groundbreaking no. 1 hit album while making few concessions to mainstream demands or retracing roads that had already been walked. The ensuing tour that kicked off a few months later should’ve been a total victory lap. But the reaction from fans—many of whom had been introduced to him as the naked sex deity promising to make all of their dreams come true—often made it feel like anything but. Women would throw their panties at him and call for him to strip before the first song had even wrapped. D’Angelo obliged at first, but quickly began to feel objectified. “He really doesn’t wanna do it,” Questlove told Rolling Stone in 2000 . “We do all this preparation to give a balanced show, and he goes out and gets treated like women get treated every day—like a piece of meat.” Eventually D’Angelo’s apprehension turned to outright anger: “He’d get angry and start breaking shit,” Questlove told Spin in 2008 . “The audience thinking, ‘Fuck your art, I wanna see your ass!’ made him angry.”

Over the next few years, reports of D’Angelo’s struggles grew. He retreated to his home in Virginia and fell out of touch with his family, as drinking and drug use increased. As the decade stretched on, there was little talk of new music, except for people wondering whether it would ever come. Eventually, D’Angelo found himself back in the news in 2005 after an arrest for drunk driving and marijuana and cocaine possession. That produced its own striking image—a mug shot of the once-muscular singer looking overweight and disheveled . A car accident in which he was ejected from the vehicle and another arrest followed, and soon, his friends and collaborators began making public pleas for his well-being. New music seemed to be the furthest thing from anybody’s mind. “When three years turned into five years and then five years turned into 10 years ... at that point, we were like, ‘Well, yeah, maybe it’s never going to happen,’” Wang says.

While there were many contributing factors—a breakup, deaths of people close to him, grappling with his religious roots—most people around D’Angelo said that the image created by the “Untitled” video came to overwhelm him. “If you’re not prepared for that, and also if you’re that sensitive of a person and you feel like your artistry is being overlooked and ignored, then yeah, you’re going to start to resent it,” Pennick says.

For DJ Premier, who had spent time bonding with D’Angelo over their respective drug use, it was sad, but understandable—part of the burden of being a virtuosic musician. “The mind of an artist—we’re different, man,” Premier says. “We go through so many phases of our life, and then on top of that we have to balance out our celebrity and our music that we put out to the people. Because that’s crazy energy that we have when we put our music out to people to see if they feel it.”

During the aughts, D’Angelo’s career arc started to resemble those of so many black musical geniuses who came before him. “Nina Simone, for example, Sly and the Family Stone or Sly Stone, to a lesser extent perhaps Michael Jackson,” Wang says. “We’ve seen this happen time and time again.” But just as it seemed D’Angelo would fade into history as a cautionary tale of fame and expectation, he rose again.

In December 2014, D’Angelo returned with his third studio album, Black Messiah , which was at once both long-awaited and seemingly out of nowhere. It was more rock-influenced than its predecessors—the multi-instrumentalist had used the intervening years to master the guitar—and it wasn’t born out of legendary jam sessions that people write books about, but it was excellent in its own right. “We had all basically made peace with the idea that the D’Angelo that we knew or D’Angelo we wanted to hear from—that’s just not going to happen,” Wang says. “And so Black Messiah was just the surprise and the gift in many ways.”

That lengthy delay only added to the allure of D’Angelo’s work. Because he wasn’t diluting his work with a new album every year or touring relentlessly, overexposing himself the way other legacy acts may have, D’Angelo’s return took on a near-mythic quality. “ Black Messiah is timeless, Brown Sugar is timeless,” Weiss says. “You could credibly make the arguments that D’Angelo has the best—whether you want to call it R&B or soul or even funk—album of the last three decades.”

Beyond the quality of the music on Black Messiah , D’Angelo appeared to be happy and healthy around the time of its release. He wasn’t the same person he was when he filmed “Untitled,” but he was a long way from the troubling mug shots and police reports. He had cleaned up and seemingly cast the shadow of the video and all it wrought aside. The hiatus between Black Messiah and whatever his fourth album will be has now stretched on longer than the one between Brown Sugar and Voodoo , but this break feels different than the previous ones. In 2018, D’Angelo—a noted video game enthusiast— contributed a song to Red Dead Redemption 2 .

“It grows on people,” Pennick says, reflecting once more on Voodoo . “It takes people a minute to really appreciate the tapestry that’s been sewn for them.” The album’s true sorcery lies in something greater than D’Angelo’s dark days or the long hiatuses or even that sweaty, sexed-up video. It’s become a tributary flowing into the inspirational ocean of classic black music that influenced him, from Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times to Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On to Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life —or even Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly , probably the most recent album in this lineage. D’Angelo took his influences, ran them through two years in Electric Lady while playing with some of the best musicians in the world, and spit out a raw, psychedelic soul masterpiece.

For many, D’Angelo’s name still evokes the glistening, muscular Adonis who asked us how it felt. But 20 years after the “Untitled” video first seduced us, the image has faded: D’Angelo is older, and we’ve developed a greater understanding for the toll that period took on him. We’ve also had two decades to sit with Voodoo , which remains as stunning today as it was upon its release. His long breaks from releasing music only deepened our appreciation for what he created on his sophomore album, and for most of us, he’s remembered how he also wanted to be: a musician with an undying devotion to his craft who was able to carve out his own place among the pioneers who preceded him.

“This was a supremely talented artist who made an absolutely great album that’s influenced a lot of musicians and vocalists to this day and will continue to do so,” Poyser says. “So many kids that I’ve met reference this album: ‘Let’s do some stuff with that Voodoo feel, that kind of vibe.’ It’s made its mark.”

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D’Angelo Announces U.S. Dates This Summer for His Second Coming Tour

D'Angelo? is hitting the road this summer for the U.S. leg of his Second Coming tour alongside his band The Vanguard. The long-dormant R&B singer is supporting his latest album Black Messiah with 14…

By Natalie Weiner

Natalie Weiner

D'Angelo

D’Angelo is hitting the road this summer for the U.S. leg of his Second Coming tour alongside his band The Vanguard. The long-dormant R&B singer is supporting his latest album Black Messiah with 14 live dates across the country, following a sold-out series of shows in Europe and New York City.

The Making of D’Angelo’s ‘Black Messiah’: A Q&A With Engineer Russell Elevado

The Vanguard features a number of musicians who are legendary in their own right, including Soulquarian stalwart bassist Pino Palladino and Mint Condition veteran Chris “Daddy” Dave. Tickets for the tour go on sale May 1 , though the Forest Hills Stadium tickets are available now.

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June 7     Oakland, CA            Fox Theater June 8     Los Angeles, CA     Club Nokia June 10   Denver, CO             Ogden Theater June 11   Kansas City, MO     Arvest Bank Theatre at the Midland June 13   Manchester, TN      Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival June 14   Atlanta, GA             Tabernacle June 16   Dallas, TX               The Bomb Factory June 17   Houston, TX            The Warehouse June 20   Norfolk, VA              NorVa June 21   Forest Hills, NY       Forest Hills Stadium June 23   Philadelphia, PA      The Keswick June 25   Washington, DC      The Fillmore June 27   Royal Oak, MI          Royal Oak Music Theatre June 28   Sayreville, NJ           Starland Ballroom

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The incantation of d’angelo’s ‘voodoo’.

D'Angelo's neo-soul classic turns 20 years old today.

By Naima Cochrane

Naima Cochrane

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The Incantation of D'Angelo's 'Voodoo'

“Envision this: a lone man in a haunted room surrounded by glowing instruments. What sounds are evoked from a room where Jimi once slept? What are the rewards of those who tend to their God-given talents as they would have the Creator tend to their spirits and daily lives? What happens when the artist becomes the conjur man?”

Twenty years ago, poet Saul Williams posed this question in the liner notes for D’Angelo’s sophomore offering, Voodoo : notes that served as a listener guide while exploring the long-awaited follow up to 1995’s Brown Sugar . Voodoo is considered by most as D’Angelo’s definitive work. (In fairness, he’s only graced us with three studio albums in his 25-year career.) Upon release, the LP was widely celebrated; it landed near the top of every major year-end list for 2000, and garnered the Grammy for Best R&B Album in 2001. In the years since, living up to its name, Voodoo has become something spiritual for many – a totem of musical greatness and genius. Okayplayer declared it “neo-soul’s most salient creation,” and no doubt this month there’ll be a flood of pieces examining the project’s importance in R&B music. Indeed, D’Angelo’s debut and sophomore albums each marked turning points in R&B. The Virginia native’s first outing came two years before the phrase “neo-soul” was coined. Add Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite (1996), Erykah Badu’s Baduizm (1997), and Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), and you have the four musical horsemen of neo-soul. Baduizm inspired executive Kedar Massenberg, who also oversaw Brown Sugar , to create a descriptor that came to define a subgenre. But when Brown Sugar first hit the streets, it simply felt like an extension of the jazz and classic soul influences found in the work of D’Angelo’s future collaborators from A Tribe Called Quest and The Roots.

Five years later, Voodoo bowed at the top of a new millennium, at a time when the R&B genre was evolving and fracturing in ways that R&B and soul purists are still lamenting today (Hi, it’s me. I’m lamenting). In 1999, TLC’s Fanmail and Destiny’s Child’s Writing’s on the Wall signaled the pop-leaning, bounce and tempo-driven, slickly-produced direction R&B was heading toward to maintain a presence on hip-hop dominated airwaves. Voodoo was a collective resistance, a labor of love from some of the finest artists of the era. A harkening back to musical foundations. Rolling Stone dubbed it “an ambitious record that seeks nothing less than to unstick black music from commercial considerations and leave it free to seek its muse.” Questlove wrote of the album effort shortly before release, “ It was a love for the dead state of black music, a love to show our idols how much they taught us. (T)his was the love movement. (A)nd this was the beginning .”

“We have come in the name of Jimi, Sly, Marvin, Stevie, all artists formerly known as spirits and all spirits formerly known as stars. We have come in the tradition of burning bushes, burning ghettos, burning splifs, and the ever-burning candles of our bedrooms and silent chambers. We have come bearing instruments and our voices: Falsetto and baritone, percussion and horns…We speak of darkness, not as ignorance, but as the unknown and the mysterious of the unseen.”   – Saul Williams

The Avengers -esque origin story of Voodoo is part of the album’s power and mythology. The project inspired the formation of the Soulquarians collective, a superhero music taskforce that began with D’Angelo, Questlove, J. Dilla and James Poyser (all Aquarians), taking over the long-dormant Electric Lady Studios – former studio home of Jimi Hendrix – to create something new and real. The crew expanded as Common and Erykah also camped out at Electric Lady to work on their upcoming projects, and other collaborators including Q-Tip and Raphael Saadiq fell through in regular rotation. Quest, D and camp went full music nerd, using the studio’s vintage equipment and keeping everything as organic and analog as possible to create a retro energy and sound. They studied old performances of Prince, Stevie Wonder and other Yodas –  their name for the masters – obsessively, channeling the spirits of their heroes. Voodoo was the start of a legacy.

Famed music critic Robert Christgau said Voodoo is “widely regarded as the greatest R&B album of the post-Prince era.” And it is…but are we puttin’ too much on it? I do believe D’s lack of visibility and minimal output since Voodoo adds a preciousness to the album (not unlike Miseducation , which might be discussed differently if there was more work to talk about).  But also, Voodoo is not an R&B album; it’s some unnamed sh*t (calling it neo-soul is reductive) that the Soulquarians pioneered and mastered. You can’t approach it casually; you’re not gonna just throw this joint on while cleaning the house. Quest additionally said of Voodoo in his (admittedly biased) review, “Music lovers come under 2 umbrellas. (N)umber one: those who use it for growth and spiritual fulfillment and number two: those who use it for mere background music. (T)he thing is, this record is too extreme to play the middle of the fence. (T)his record is the litmus test that will reveal the most for your personality.”

“Here is a peer that is focused wholly on his craft and has given himself the challenge of bettering himself. I mean really, D could have come out with any ol’ follow-up album after Brown Sugar dropped so that he could double his sales “While he’s still hot.” You know, an album that sounds just like Brown Sugar, uses all the same formulas, so that audiences don’t have to think….or grow, they just keep liking the same shit. He could even sample songs that you’re already familiar with so that you don’t have to go through the “hard work” of getting used to a new melody or bass line. Y’all don’t hear me.” – Saul Williams

Voodoo is without question a superior album to Brown Sugar , technically and sonically. It takes the formula D’Angelo created in his mama’s Virginia home, blending soul, funk and a dash of hip-hop, and elevates it. Late trumpeter Roy Hargrove added jazz’s controlled chaos. J. Dilla’s beat alchemy and Premier’s deft precision rendered the few samples used almost unrecognizable. Pino Palladino contributed his legendary bass lines. Rounded out with Tip and Ray Ray, plus Quest steering the ship as co-captain along with D’Angelo – it was a soul fantasy league. Yes, Voodoo is a stronger album, but I’d argue Brown Sugar is more focused (though some would say it’s just more formulaic). It’s definitely a more accessible work. The New York Times , examining how the Soulquarians brought Voodoo together, said the process was “vague, halting, nonlinear.” Voodoo is a long jam session – literally. They approached much of the completely original material through retro engineering: long jam sessions of hero material – Prince, Curtis, etc – would evolve into a new song. You can especially pick this up in “The Line,” which feels like it was maybe going to be an interlude and just kept going, and “Chicken Grease.”

The transitions between songs can be jarring, and the songs are so gritty and raw that some give a bootleg or demo feel – undoubtedly intentional, as Questlove and D’Angelo were studying bootlegs of their faves. Rolling Stone ’ s reviewer declared the album sounded “loose and unfinished” (but worth noting that it was No. 4 on their top albums of the year list later). The highest praise for a single universally went to “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” D’Angelo’s outstanding homage to his and Questlove’s most esteemed Yoda, Prince. It’s one of the more familiar-sounding tracks, along with “Send it On,” “Feel Like Making Love” and “Left and Right,” which feel the most like Brown Sugar follow-ups.

Those aside, Voodoo is to Brown Sugar what Kendrick’s To Pimp a Butterfly is to Good Kid m.A.A.d City in terms of expansion and departure from the sound fans originally fell in love with. Some embraced it, some couldn’t get all the way with it. I can testify firsthand that when D’Angelo brought that jam session energy to Essence Fest in 2012 to launch his first tour in over ten years, folks were less than thrilled that after waiting so long to see him on stage again, he was prioritizing the un-danceable, less melodic cuts like “Devil’s Pie” and “Chicken Grease” on the setlist, and then didn’t play the album versions of the hits so they could hit a two-step and sing along.

What Voodoo is , is grown. As hell. Not only is it not music for a casual fan, it’s not music for a casual love thing, either. Brown Sugar is adoration expressed publicly; let me tell folks how much I’m digging you. Brown Sugar is dating. You can let it rock at a kick back with a crew. Voodoo is intimate. It’s a relationship. You don’t play “How Does It Feel” or “Send it On” in a house full of people (and if you do, I have questions).

Which brings us to the gift and curse of Voodoo : D’Angelo becoming a sex symbol. The 20-year old, lip licking, possibly blunted D’Angelo was sexy in a dude-off-the-block way with his baggy jeans, Avirex coats, and timbs. But 25-year old D’Angelo took the baggy clothes off, and had cut abs, a v-line, and the bold audacity to showcase it, on the album cover and in the visual for the project’s third single…and nobody knew how to act. This is where Voodoo simultaneously goes left and becomes legend all at once. Also, why we can’t have nice things.

Twenty years ago, there were no blogs, no social media and no such thing as going viral. Music video channels still specialized in… music videos. And D’Angelo’s manager Dominique Trenier, and director Paul Hunter conceptualized a visual for “Untitled (How Does it Feel)” that The New York Times called “the most controversial video to air in years.” The clip, eventually referred to in conversation as simply “the video,” was a four and a half minute-long, single shot of D’Angelo wearing nothing but a gold chain and cornrows. And sweat. There were no shiny suits, no dancers, no fish-eye lenses. Just Michael Archer staring into our souls through the camera.

The success and notoriety of the video propelled Voodoo to a No. 1 debut on the Billboard Top 200. The plan was to break D’Angelo out of the R&B/neo-soul space to a broader audience, and it worked. Too well. By the time D launched the Voodoo tour in the Spring of 2000, the attention, grabbing, catcalling and screaming were overwhelming. As an artist, he’d put painstaking time and effort into creating the greatest piece of work possible; art that would impact hearts and minds. Spent grueling hours preparing a live show that would measure up to James Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic –  and fans were just yelling incessantly for him to take his shirt off. “It feels good, actually, when I do it,” D ‘Angelo told Rolling Stone near the beginning of the tour. “But I don’t want it to turn into a thing where that’s what it’s all about. I don’t want it to turn things away from the music and what we doin’ up there…I’m not no stripper. I’m up there doin’ somethin’ I strongly believe in.”

(Shout out to Anthony Hamilton’s background vocals coming through all loud and clear)

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened, and D grew so self-conscious and uncomfortable he eventually suspended the tour three weeks early, and retreated from the public eye. Over the next several years there were multiple arrests (with bloated mugshots looking kind of like Thor when he took his hammer and went home in Endgame ), at least one trip to rehab, and several tentative returns before he surprised the world with Black Messiah in December of 2014 – almost 15 years later.

“Untitled (How Does it Feel)” is still a highlight in Voodoo conversations, it still evokes immediate remarks about D’s body and sex (I’m guilty of this), and it’s still a sore spot for the artist. So much so that when he reemerged in the public eye in 2012, he and Paul Hunter insisted the video’s inspiration was D’Angelo’s grandmother’s cooking and the Holy Ghost. (Insert side-eye gif here.)

But this is the challenge of a great artist: put everything you have into the work, then give that work to the world, and by doing so relinquish control over what the world does with it. So is Voodoo the millennial answer to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme ? Is it the centerpiece of the neo-soul movement? Is it the Soulquarian stone? Is it just an outstanding groove? Is it just D’Angelo in leather pants and no shirt and you really don’t care about all that other stuff? The answer, according to our original Voodoo guide, Saul Williams, depends on us.

“D’Angelo has made his choices, carefully weaving them into his character, and has courageously stepped into the void bearing these sonic offerings to be delivered to the beckoning goddess of the new age. I do not wish to overly dissect this album. It’s true dissection occurs in how it seeps into your life shapes your moments. What you were doing when you realized he was saying this or that? How it played softly in the back ground when you first saw him or her. How you kept it on repeat on that special night. You’ll see. These songs are incantations” – Saul Williams

A Guide To Understanding D'Angelo's 'Black Messiah'

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D’Angelo Electrifies at Triumphant Second Coming Tour Opener

By Mosi Reeves

Mosi Reeves

When  D’Angelo last visited Oakland in the spring of 2000, he was steaming from the deafening acclaim given to Voodoo , and the impact of his glistening naked torso in the “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” Backed by a troupe that featured drummer Questlove and producer James Poyser, he thrilled a sold-out crowd at the Paramount Theater, but his burgeoning sex symbol status nearly overshadowed a masterful performance.

A little over 15 years later, D’Angelo returned to downtown Oakland’s Fox Theater for the first night of his U.S. tour in support of his lionized comeback album, Black Messiah . (Much of the audience arrived late after watching their hometown favorite Golden State Warriors lose a heartbreaker in Game 2 of the NBA Finals, and so they missed an opening set by promising Australian singer-songwriter Meg Mac.) This time, he didn’t strip off his shirt, instead opting for a series of modestly effective costume changes to complement his black T-shirt, pants and boots, like an assembly of hats, particularly a stylish white fedora, as well as a mud-and-lime colored trench coat and a white-ringed black shawl. His formerly glorious beefcake chest may have dissipated under time and age, but it wasn’t forgotten, if the frequently delighted squeals from women in the audience were any indication.

Backed by the 10-piece Vanguard, D’Angelo and his singers – P-Funk veteran Kendra Foster, Jermaine Holmes and Charles “Red” Middleton – took the stage with their arms raised in the air, paying homage to the icon “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” before launching into a feverish 12-minute rendition of “Ain’t That Easy.” The saxophonist and trumpeter piped wailed like the JBs’ Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley. (Frustratingly, but perhaps due to a first-show mistake, D’Angelo didn’t individually introduce the members of his band.) D’Angelo frequently alternated between strumming a guitar, vamping on a keyboard and strutting in the center of the stage while seemingly nodding directions to his musicians. During the intro to “Really Love,” Foster performed a dazzling interpretative ballet. Meanwhile, veteran bassist Pino Palladino added a bottom that pulsed underneath like a heartbeat.

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From James Brown to Prince, D’Angelo’s inspirations are still easy to spot. The heavy Prince influence isn’t as strong as in years past, but he still tends to scream at key moments just like the Purple One. During an extended rendition of “Back to the Future Pt. 1,” he and the band interspersed a melodies from Sly & the Family Stone’s “Sing a Simple Song” as they chanted “Gangsta funk! Gangsta boogie!”

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Released in 2000, ‘Voodoo’ still stands as a wildly innovative, forward-thinking, and challenging record.

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D'Angelo Voodoo

D’Angelo’s neo-soul masterpiece is remembered not only for the indelible mark it left on R&B but also the impossible story behind bringing the album into existence. Released on January 25, 2000, just one month into the new millennium, Voodoo would define the decade, setting the bar so high with its ingenuity and progressiveness that wouldn’t be met until D’Angelo returned 14 years later with Black Messiah .

Considered “post-modern” and “radical” at the time, Voodoo can’t lay claim to any one era. Produced in the 90s, and assembling sounds and ideas from 60s, 70s, and 80s funk and soul, it represented a coalescence of every great black innovator of the past – Jimi Hendrix, Curtis Mayfield, George Clinton, Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder , Al Green, and Prince – and produced something that was built to last.

Listen to Voodoo now .

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Once hailed as the next Marvin Gaye , D’Angelo become the harbinger of hip-hop soul with his first release Brown Sugar in 1995. At the ripe young age of 21, he was responsible for rethinking an entire genre and had laid the path for Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite (’96), Erykah Badu’s Baduizm (’97), The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (’98), and the neo-soul movement. But on the dawn of Y2K, contemporary R&B had morphed into a slick, club-friendly state. Voodoo emerged as a response to this, bringing back earthy 70s production powered by experimental, hip-hop-influenced rhythms.

After its release, Voodoo topped the Billboard albums chart just two weeks later, won two Grammy’s, achieved platinum status, and produced a hit that would turn D’Angelo into a pin-up for ages. The album made an arresting statement, not just musically but visually. With its cover and provocative video for “Untitled (How Does it Feel),” D’Angelo bared more than his soul. What perhaps meant to be a vulnerable statement looked more like an illicit invitation.

D'Angelo - Untitled (How Does It Feel) (Official Music Video)

D’Angelo’s perfectionism is well documented and with the fate of R&B foisted upon his shoulders, he was debilitated by the fear of the sophomore slump and determined not to make another Brown Sugar . During the five year interim between the two records, he’d switched managers, changed record labels, made brief cameos, and tinkered in the studio for years on end. Fans held out hope, with two promo singles, first the sample-driven “Devil’s Pie” in ’98 and “Left and Right” with features by Redman and Method Man a year later.

When it came time to record, D’Angelo took a page from his predecessors and set out to create a spontaneous, jazz-like approach to recording. Recruit the best R&B musicians around, give them free rein to jam, and capture the magic on tape. A method that harkened back to how funk records were made in the pre-Napster era. As D’Angelo told Ebony Magazine at the time, he wanted to “make strong, artistic Black music.”

As if trying to conjure up the ghost of Jimi Hendrix and all those that recorded there, D’Angelo decamped to Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village and brought his motley crew of fellow musicians to soak in soul and rock records and try to recreate some of the magic that had been made there. These studio sessions went on for years, but the result was an organic, in-studio sound that can only be pulled off by masters of their craft. The real players behind the curtain were Questlove (The Roots) on drums, Pino Palladino on bass (John Mayer Trio, The RH Factor), guitar veterans, Spanky Alford and Mike Campbell, fellow Roots member James Poyser on keys, and jazz prodigy Roy Hargrove on horns.

D'Angelo - Send It On

D’Angelo’s soul revivalist vision didn’t stop at just the studio setting. He didn’t want it to just feel like old soul, but to sound like it as well. It’s a shame his analogue obsession pre-dated the great vinyl renaissance, but we all get to reap the rewards now. Employing vintage gear and recording instrumental takes live, it seemed wasted on the mp3 era.

For an R&B album, Voodoo eschews common song structures and instead feels like an on-going conversation – a peek inside D’Angelo’s stream of consciousness. While its freeform, downtempo aesthetic alienates some, its intoxicating and jazz-like vibe surprises with each listen. With each track clocking in at six minutes or more, it wasn’t exactly radio-friendly. And its heavy use of back phrasing further puts you into a state of drugged euphoria. The album’s title takes on a literal meaning, it’s full of speaking in tongues, divine healing, and mystery.

The spoken word intros, outros, and bits of dialogue were a commonly used device at the time, (see any rap album and other neo-soulites (Lauryn Hill) that have only recently made a comeback on Solange’s A Seat At the Table. Amid these layered vocals, there is a heavy emphasis on guitars and horns on “Playa Playa” and especially “Chicken Grease” that puts the funk front and center. “The Line” meanwhile features more confessional lyrics, as he answers his critics “I’ve been gone, gone so long. Just wanna sing, sing my song, I know you’ve been hearin’, hearin’ a lot of things about me” in his breathy falsetto.

D'Angelo - Left & Right

Sampling takes on an important role throughout the album, a practice that had been honed over the past decade, but D’Angelo does so with care, whether it’s Kool & the Gang ‘s “Sea of Tranquility” on “Send it On” or the drums from Prince’s “I Wonder U” on “Africa.” Every track serves a purpose, there is no filler here. His cover of Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love” is turned into a breezy song of seduction, while the Latin jazz-infused “Spanish Joint” hints at the heat to come.

But none of these songs fully prepare you for the ultimate slow-burn ballad that is “Untitled (How Does it Feel).” Co-written by Raphael Saadiq, it shall go down in the annals of makeout music history and even cuts off in the middle, leaving you wanting more. Whether consciously or subconsciously inspired by the “Purple One,” it was ironic that Prince seemed to be inspired as well, releasing “Call My Name” just a few years later.

Given such a beguiling track, it needed an equally provocative video to accompany it. At a time when every R&B video was dripping in bling, D’Angelo’s Grecian torso actually felt stripped down rather than an erotic performance. The song was a blessing and a curse. The video turned him into a sex symbol overnight but it also led to him becoming a recluse over the years. Voodoo still stands as a wildly innovative, forward-thinking, and challenging record, who knew it would take 14 years for D’Angelo to top it? As Questlove put it: “How can I scream someone’s genius if they hardly have any work to show for it? Then again, the last work he did was so powerful that it’s lasted ten years.”

Voodoo can be bought here.

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D'Angelo Documentary Claims a New Album is in The Works

"he has big plans for the future, so you'll definitely be seeing more of him.".

This week, Carine Bijlsma 's D'Angelo documentary,  Devil's Pie , will begin screening at Tribeca Film Festival in NYC. But at last night's premiere, attendees walked away with a lens into both the past and a hopeful future.

LISTEN: D'Angelo Officially Releases Red Dead Redemption 2 Track "Unshaken"

According to Billboard , Bijlsma's documentary navigates the radio silence between Voodoo and  Black Messiah with great care, following the soul icon and his all-star ensemble as they mapped the globe in support of a comeback that was 14 years in the making. Though he wasn't in attendance for the premiere, Bijlsma spoke to the artist's current whereabouts and dispelled a bit of D'Angelo's lingering enigma in a post-screening Q&A session.

Bijlsma claimed to have been in touch with the "Brown Sugar" singer in the days leading up to the film's premiere, noting that he was in the studio working on new music during their last check-in. She also echoed the sentiments of her film's closer: a new D'Angelo album is in the works and we should be ready to heed the call.

READ: How D'Angelo Went From Testing Red Dead Redemption 2 to Being On Its Soundtrack

It's worth mentioning that as promising as that sounds, it's a familiar note for/from the singer. Within a few months of  Black Messiah 's late-2014 surprise release, the singer told Rolling Stone  that he'd already broke ground on the album's follow-through. And last year, when he abruptly canceled a string of European tour dates, the singer offered a similar explanation . Whatever the actual status may be, something's ever-so gradually taking shape in the D'Angelo camp. And if Black Messiah taught us anything, it'll be worth the wait.

Carine Bijlsma's Devil's Pie documentary has three screening's left this week. Jump over to Tribeca's landing page for ticketing information and hold tight for the next transmission.

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Amen! (D'Angelo's Back)

By Amy Wallace

Photography by Gregory Harris

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The massive weight gain didn't make Michael "D'Angelo" Archer see the darkness that was looming. Neither did the hermit-like isolation, the shattered friendships, the years wasted without a new record in sight, or even the car accident that nearly killed him. By the time he careened off a lonely stretch of road near Richmond, Virginia, in September 2005, hitting a fence and rolling his Hummer three times, he'd already failed two stints in rehab—including one where his counselor was Bob Forrest, the guy on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. Bob had been cool, D'Angelo says, but his message of sobriety didn't take. "I went in under a fake name so people wouldn't know who I was, right?" D'Angelo tells me, in his first sit-down interview in twelve years. "So, you know, Michael never got treatment. It was this other character that was in there. And the moment I left, I went straight to the fucking liquor store."

Which helps explain why, months later, high on cocaine and drunk off his ass, D'Angelo found himself ejected from his car on that balmy Virginia night, hurtling through the pitch-blackness, flying. When he hit the ground, he broke all the ribs on his left side—and dealt another blow to his foundering career. Once he'd been the heir apparent to the giants of soul: Marvin, Stevie, Prince. (The rock critic Robert Christgau was so transported by D'Angelo's live show that he called him R&B Jesus.) But shortly after the wreck, discussions ended with several top music ecutives, including Clive Davis at J Records, who'd been considering signing him to a $3 million contract. Then D'Angelo's manager told him he was done with him, too.

Still, D'Angelo couldn't feel the bottom, even though it was right beneath him. He shows me how close, reaching toward the floor with his well-muscled left arm, the one inked with 23:4, for the Twenty-third Psalm. It's early March, just a few weeks after he's finished a sixteen-day mini-tour of Europe—his first live performances (not counting church) in more than a decade. We're sitting on a black leather couch in a Manhattan recording studio on Forty-eighth Street off Broadway, a quiet sanctum despite its proximity to the circus of Times Square. Through a bank of windows is the room where he has recorded many songs for his (very) long-awaited third album. Dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, his hair in short tiny braids, D'Angelo looks good at 38—more solid than in his famously shirtless six-pack years, but clear-eyed and radiantly handsome. "I didn't really think I had a problem like that," he says, taking a hit off a Newport. "I felt like, you know, all I got to do is clean up and I'll be fine. Just get in the studio and I'll be fucking fine."

What finally made him see, he says, was the passing of J Dilla, the revered hip-hop producer, on February 10, 2006. They'd just talked on the phone, D'Angelo says, when suddenly, J Dilla was gone at 32 after a long battle with lupus. It was like a blinding light had been switched on. Why did so many black artists die so young? He'd been haunted by this thought for years. Marvin. Jimi. Biggie. "I felt like I was going to be next. I ain't bullshitting. I was scared then," he says, recalling how shame engulfed him, preventing him from attending the funeral. "I was so fucked-up, I couldn't go."

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Shame, guilt, repentance—D'Angelo knows them well. To say that he was raised religious doesn't begin to capture it. He's the son and the grandson of Pentecostal preachers. To D'Angelo, good and evil are not abstract concepts but tangible forces he reckons with every day. In his life and in his music, he has always felt the tension between the sacred and the profane, the darkness and the light.

"You know what they say about Lucifer, right, before he was cast out?" D'Angelo asks me now. "Every angel has their specialty, and his was praise. They say that he could play every instrument with one finger and that the music was just awesome. And he was exceptionally beautiful, Lucifer—as an angel, he was."

But after he descended into hell, Lucifer was fearsome, he tells me. "There's forces that are going on that I don't think a lot of motherfuckers that make music today are aware of," he says. "It's deep. I've felt it. I've felt other forces pulling at me." He stubs out his cigarette and leans toward me, taking my hand. "This is a very powerful medium that we are involved in," he says gravely. "I learned at an early age that what we were doing in the choir was just as important as the preacher. It was a ministry in itself. We could stir the pot, you know? The stage is our pulpit, and you can use all of that energy and that music and the lights and the colors and the sound. But you know, you've got to be careful."

In 1995, when D'Angelo—or D, as he's known to his friends—released his platinum--selling debut album, Brown Sugar, he looked, on first impression, like the rappers of the time, with his cornrows, baggy jeans, and Timberland boots. But when he played and sang he instantly stood apart, a self-taught prodigy in touch with the ultimate muse. His groove hearkened to something purer, and whether crooning or caterwauling, he performed with fervor, like he was channeling the masters. A musician's musician, he played his own instruments, arranged and wrote his own songs. He was only 21 years old.

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Many would rise to praise him—not just critics, but his peers. Common, who calls D "one of the most impactful artists of our day and age," remembers being in his car when "Lady" first came on the radio. "I was calling people and saying, 'Have you heard this?' " he says. George Clinton, the godfather of P-Funk, compares D's second album, Voodoo, to Gaye's groundbreaking What's Going On. And Eric Clapton's reaction to hearing Voodoo was captured on video. "I can't take much more," he says, reeling. "Is it all like this? My God!"

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But for many, it was skin, not just music, that helped D cross over from R&B maestro to mainstream sex object. In 2000 he released the smoldering video for "Untitled (How Does It Feel?)," an instant sensation that made fans everywhere, especially women, lose their lustful minds. It's easy to find on YouTube: 26-year-old D'Angelo, naked from the hip bones up, staring straight into the camera, licking his lips and writhing in ecstasy. The video propelled him to superstardom—but it claimed its pound of flesh. D struggled mightily with the way his body threatened to overshadow his music. Then he all but disappeared.

"Black stardom is rough, dude," Chris Rock tells me when I reach him to talk about D. "I always say Tom Hanks is an amazing actor and Denzel Washington is a god to his people. If you're a black ballerina, you represent the race, and you have responsibilities that go beyond your art. How dare you just be excellent?"

After Brown Sugar went platinum, Rock put D'Angelo on The Chris Rock Show. Later, when D was mixing Voodoo, Rock hung out some in the studio. No surprise, then, that the first thing out of Rock's mouth after "Hello" is a joyful "He's back!" But he adds a sobering downbeat: "D'Angelo. Chris Tucker. Dave Chappelle. Lauryn Hill. They all hang out on the same island. The island of What Do We Do with All This Talent? It frustrates me."

I tell Rock that Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, the drummer for the Roots and one of D's closest collaborators, has ticked off much the same list. Questlove has a theory about what happens to black genius—what he calls "a crazy psychological kind of stoppage that prevents them from following through. A sort of self-saboteur disorder." Rock says he understands.

For a black star, Rock says, "there's a lot of pressure just to be responsible for other people's lives—to be the E. F. Hutton of your crew. Everything you say is magnified. I mean, street smarts only help you on the streets. Or maybe occasionally they will help you in the boardroom, but boy, you wish you knew a little bit about accounting." There is pressure to be original but also pressure to be commercial, to make money, to succeed. Sometimes the two run at cross-purposes.

I ask Questlove what he thinks has held D back. He says it's not just the way "Untitled" turned D'Angelo into "the Naked Guy," though of course that didn't help. It's something bigger. "We noticed early that all of the geniuses we admired have had maybe a ten-year run before death or, you know, the Poconos," he says. "That renders D paralyzed. He said he fears the responsibility and the power that comes with it. But I think what he fears most is the isolation"—the kind that fame brings.

Questlove believes D's "eleven-year freeze" must end, not just for the artist's sake, but for the culture's. "I've told him: He is literally holding the oxygen supply that music lovers breathe," Questlove says. "At first, it was cute—'Oh, he's bashful.' But now he's, like, selfish. I'm like, 'Look, dude, we're starving.' When D starts singing, all is right with the world."

Michael Archer grew up not knowing Jesus' name. To some black Pentecostals, God is known as Yahweh and the son of God as Yahshua or Yahushua. "We would go to other churches and people would be saying 'Jesus,' " he recalls. "I was like, 'Who are they talking about?' " The piano, on the other hand, was something he understood innately. At 4, he taught himself to play Earth, Wind & Fire's "Boogie Wonderland."

When he was 5, his parents split, and the boys went to live with their father. "Mom was struggling," he says of his mother, then a legal secretary. Michael played the organ at his father's church and helped lead the choir. When he was 9, however, his dad "was battling his own demons," and the boys went to live with their mom for good. After that, "me and my father really didn't have much contact with each other."

In those years, Michael was drawn to his maternal grandfather's Refuge Assembly of Yahweh, up in the mountains outside Richmond. The region had been a hub of slave trading before the Civil War, with Richmond being a place where 300,000 Africans and their descendants were sold down the James River. Then and now, church was a place where loss could be mourned, pain salved. But what attracted Michael was the way fire and brimstone infused the music. In the temple, Michael saw his elder brother Rodney speak in tongues; he witnessed healings and exorcisms. At one Friday-night revival, he noticed a woman in a pew a few rows up. She was acting strange—tugging at her clothes, foaming at the mouth, ripping at the Bible. "She was possessed. E-vil," he says, breaking the word in two. "It was a long, hot, steamy night, and that demon disrupted it." He recalls his grandfather and the other ministers praying hard as the woman crawled on all fours, screamed, and ran outside to jump on the hoods of cars. "The demon was raising holy hell, and my grandfather came outside. He had big hands, and he didn't say a word. He just—" D'Angelo raises his palm to me—"and she falls out. That's it. End of story."

Already Michael was developing into the musical connoisseur that D'Angelo is today. His Uncle CC was a truck driver who moonlighted as a DJ, and he had a huge record collection. This was the beginning of what D now calls "going to school"—delving deep into jazz, soul, rock, and gospel history, from Mahalia Jackson to Band of Gypsys, from the Meters to Miles Davis to Donald Byrd, from Sam Cooke to Otis Redding, from Donny Hathaway to Curtis Mayfield to Sly Stone to Marvin Gaye. When Michael was 8, Gaye had just made a comeback with "Sexual Healing" and won two Grammys. "Everybody was talking about him," D'Angelo recalls. "Everybody." So just after Sunday sermon on April Fool's Day 1984, when Michael learned Gaye was dead at 44—shot by his own father—he was crushed.

That night, D'Angelo had the first of many dreams about Gaye. It was in black and white and took place at Hitsville U.S.A., Motown's Detroit headquarters. D was playing piano while a bunch of famous Motown stars milled about, waiting for Gaye. "When he finally showed up, he was young, very handsome, the thin Marvin. Clean-shaven. Very debonair," he told an interviewer back in 2000. "He came straight to me and shook my hand and looked me dead in the eyes, and he said, 'Very nice to meet you.' He grabbed my hand and wouldn't let go."

After that, whenever Gaye's music came on the radio, Michael felt a chill. The opening bars to "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" made him get up and leave the room. It was as if the power in Gaye's music had been linked, somehow, to his tragic end. "I would be petrified," he says—so petrified that his mother took him to a therapist. But the dreams of Gaye—himself a preacher's son—didn't go away until Michael turned 19. That was the year he changed his name to a moniker inspired by Michelangelo. That was also the year that his demo tape found its way into the hands of Gary Harris, then an A&R ecutive at EMI Music.

At their first meeting, D played a little Al Green on the piano and appeared to be just another "young kid with a lot of mystery." Earlier, Harris had seen a video taken at a talent show when D was 8. "He's playing the chords from 'Thriller,' and then he starts singing: It's close to midnight. Something evil's lurkin' in the dark. He was killing it," Harris recalls. "We used to call it 'getting the spirit' in church. He's the rarest of breeds: a genuine live attraction."

The church warned D'Angelo against secular music. "I got that speech so many times," he says. " 'Don't go do the devil's music,' blah blah blah." But his grandmother encouraged him to use his gifts as he saw fit. Not long after Harris signed him, D dreamed his last Marvin dream, this one in color. "I was following him as a grown man," he tells me. "He was a bit heavier, and he had the beard. He was naked, and all I could see was his back and that cap he used to wear all the time. And he got into this whirlpool Jacuzzi with his wife and his daughter and his little son, and that's when he turns around and looks at me. And he goes, 'I know you're wondering why you keep dreaming about me.' And I woke up."

Angie Stone, the soul diva who sang backup vocals on Brown Sugar, says that from the moment she met D, "I knew a superstar was on the rise." But "there was an innocence there that if we weren't careful was going to get trashed," adds Stone, who became romantically involved with D during that period and remains fiercely protective of him. "It's not a little bit of God in him. It's a lot of God in him. Sometimes when you have that much power, Satan works tenfold to break you."

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D'Angelo in his prime at the 2000 MTV Movie Awards.

As D'Angelo caught fire in the mid-'90s, the star-making machinery worked overtime to mold him into a bankable headliner. Stone remembers an event in Manhattan in September 1996 that was billed as Giorgio Armani's tribute to D'Angelo. Stone—thirteen years older than D—was three months pregnant with their son. They headed to the event together in a limo, but as they neared the venue where D was going to perform, it suddenly pulled over. "He was asked to get into another car, where he would be escorted by Vivica Fox," Stone says, her voice breaking slightly. The lissome Fox had just appeared with Will Smith in the blockbuster Independence Day. "It was a Hollywood moment. They wanted a trophy girl. I had to walk in behind them to flashing cameras. It started the wheels turning of what was yet to come."

The A-list was circling now, wanting a taste of D's authentic flavor. When Madonna turned 39, she asked him to sing "Happy Birthday" at her party. One press report had her sitting on his lap and French-kissing him. In fact, two sources say that ultimately D rebuffed her advances at another gathering not long after. At that event, the sources say, Madonna walked over and told a woman sitting next to D, "I think you're in my seat." The woman got up. Madonna sat down and told him, "I'd like to know what you're thinking." To which D replied, "I'm thinking you're rude."

But the lure of fame was constant, the temptations everywhere. While his label hoped for a quick follow-up album, D retreated, citing writer's block. He would later say that the birth of his first child, Michael Jr., got him back on track, but Voodoo—partially written with Stone—would be a full five years in the making. D fathered a daughter, now 12, with another woman, and has a third child, now almost 2.

Three weeks after its January 2000 debut, Voodoo hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts. Some early reviews were tepid (only later would Rolling Stone list it among its 500 best albums of all time), but it sold more than a million units in five weeks (and 700,000 since). The record would eventually win two Grammys, for best R&B album and best male R&B vocal performance for "Untitled." But as D began to fall apart, the video would be the only thing many fans remembered. "The video was the line of demarcation," says Harris. "It sent him spinning out of control."

Paul Hunter, the director hired to make the video, says his work was misunderstood: "Most people think the 'Untitled' video was about sex, but my direction was completely opposite of that. It was about his grandmother's cooking."

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Five years later, he was arrested for driving while intoxicated in Richmond, Virginia.

I've stopped by Hunter's office in Culver City, California, to hear how D'Angelo came to be filmed bare-chested (but for a gold cross on a chain around his neck), wearing only a pair of precariously low-slung pajama bottoms, looking like a wolf circling a bitch in heat. Illuminated from every angle, he spins very slowly as the camera fetishizes his every ripple and drop of sweat. I've imagined a lot of things that inspired the song's rousing lyrics (Love to make you wet / In between your thighs cause / I love when it comes inside of you), but collard greens weren't among them. Hunter is quick to explain that he, like D, was raised in the Pentecostal church.

"When I used to sing in the choir," Hunter says, "after the rehearsal, you go in to eat. I remembered seeing the preacher looking at a lady's skirt one week and then, the next Sunday, talking about how fornication is wrong." Such mid messages about the pleasures of the flesh were intertwined with the pleasures of the palate—part of the same sensual stew. "So I was like, 'Think of your grandmother's greens, how it smelled in the kitchen. What did the yams and fried chicken taste like? That's what I want you to express.' "

The video was the brainchild of co-director Dominique Trenier, D's manager, whose goal—some still see it as a stroke of genius—was to turn his client into a sex god. D'Angelo had been working hard with his trainer and was cut down to muscle and bone. Never in his life had D been this taut and virile, and Trenier seized the opportunity to create a true crossover artist without losing his loyal base. Initially, Hunter says, to capture the heat they were hoping for, "we were going to build sort of a box for a girl to come and mess with him. We all said, 'Well, how can we push it?' "

But when the shoot began at a New York City soundstage, the fluffer turned out to be unnecessary. D's memory was all he needed to bring it home. The video may have looked like foreplay, but it was actually about family, Hunter insists—about intimacy. Later, when I tell D'Angelo this, he says, "It's so true: We talked about the Holy Ghost and the church before that take. The veil is the nudity and the sexuality. But what they're really getting is the spirit."

The shoot took six hours, and it changed D's life. Trenier got his wish: Thanks to D'Angelo's luscious physicality, albums started flying off the shelves. But the trouble began right away, at the start of the Voodoo tour in L.A. "It was a week of warm-up gigs at House of Blues just to kick off the tour, draw some attention, break in the band," says Alan Leeds, D's tour manager then and now. "And from the beginning, it's 'Take it off!' "

Questlove, the tour's bandleader, was alarmed. "We thought, okay, we're going to build the perfect art machine, and people are going to love and appreciate it," he says. "And then by mid-tour it just became, what can we do to stop the 'Take it off' stuff?"

D'Angelo felt tortured, Questlove says, by the pressure to give the audience what it wanted. Worried that he didn't look as cut as he did in the video, he'd delay shows to do stomach crunches. He'd often give in, peeling off his shirt, but he resented being reduced to that. Wasn't he an artist? Couldn't the audience hear the power of his music and value him for that? He would explode, Questlove recalls, and throw things. Sometimes he'd have to be coad not to cancel shows altogether.

When I ask D about this, he downplays his suffering. Watching him pull hard on another Newport, I realize that he finds it far easier to confess his addictions than his insecurities about his corporeal self. Self-destructing with a coke spoon—while ill-advised—has a badass edge. Fretting over what Questlove has called "some Kate Moss shit" seems anything but manly. If given the chance, he tells me, he would absolutely shoot the video again. But he does admit to feeling angry during the Voodoo tour.

"One time I got mad when a female threw money at me onstage, and that made me feel fucked-up, and I threw the money back at her," he says. "I was like, 'I'm not a stripper.' " He was beginning to sense a darkness beckoning. He recalls a particular moment onstage at the North Sea Jazz festival in 2000. The band was in the middle of "Devil's Pie," his song about the spell fame casts upon the weak—Who am I to justify / All the evil in our eye / When I myself feel the high / From all that I despise—when he felt an ominous presence in the crowd. "That night I felt something that was like, whoa," he tells me. E-vil.

On the last day of the eight-month tour, Questlove says D'Angelo told him, "Yo, man, I cannot wait until this fucking tour is over. I'm going to go in the woods, drink some hooch, grow a beard, and get fat." Questlove thought he was joking. "I was like, 'You're a funny guy.' And then it started to happen. That's how much he wanted to distance himself."

While the tour was a success, both critically and commercially, it left D broken. "When I got back home, yeah, it wasn't that easy to just be," he says. "I think that's the thing that got me in a lot of trouble: me trying to just be Michael, the regular old me from back in the day, and me fighting that whole sex-symbol thing. You know: 'Hey, I ain't D'Angelo today. I'm just plain old Mike, and I just want to hang out with my boys and do what we used to do.' But, damn, those days are fucking gone."

Upon his return to Richmond after the Voodoo tour, D stepped into what he calls "an avalanche of shit." First he lost a few people who were close to him, including his Uncle CC, whose record collection had been the bedrock of D's musical education, and his beloved grandmother. After that, "I just kind of sunk into this thing."

It's not that D wasn't working, exactly. "I was in the studio," he says. "But I was also partying a lot. A little too much." He liked cocaine, he says, "because I could be a bit of an antisocial. It made me really open up and talk." But the problem with doing coke, he says, is "you can drink like a fish and it don't bother you. It was good in the beginning, but it got out of hand." For the first time, he says, "people started to go, 'Yo, man, you've got to get it together.' "

Excutives at his then label, Virgin, were exasperated. Momentum is money in the music business, and D was squandering his. Sometime in the mid-2000s, Virgin and D'Angelo parted ways. Then D had a falling out with Questlove, who'd played a track off the album-in-progress on an Australian radio station—a cardinal sin in D's eyes. Things had begun to unravel. In January 2005 a bloated, bleary-eyed D'Angelo was arrested in Richmond and charged with possession of cocaine and marijuana and driving while intoxicated. Trenier, horrified by the mug shot that appeared in press accounts, drove from New York City to Richmond to pick D up—then drove him to California so D wouldn't have to be seen in public in an airport. Soon, D was in rehab at the Pasadena Recovery Center. But he wasn't listening.

The near fatal Hummer accident came in mid-September of that year, after D had received a three-year suspended sentence on the cocaine charge. Still, he didn't think he'd bottomed out. Only five or six months later, after J Dilla's passing, would D finally reach out to Gary Harris, the man who'd first signed him. D told Harris he wanted to talk to Clapton, with whom he'd performed a few times. Harris tracked down a number. "I was like, 'Yo, I need some help,' " D recalls telling Clapton, who founded the Crossroads treatment center in Antigua. D would be welcome there, Clapton said, but it would cost $40,000. Harris called a former boss of his: Irving Azoff, the famed personal manager, who didn't know D but knew his work. Harris says Azoff agreed to cut a check.

Getting D to Antigua was an odyssey in itself. First off, he had neither a driver's license nor a passport—a challenge when trying to board an international flight. Second, while he'd begged for this intervention, his commitment to it wad and waned. When Harris first arrived at D's Richmond mini-mansion on a Sunday in late April 2006, the kitchen was littered with empty alcohol bottles, and D was a mess. "What should have taken a day took four days," Harris says, recounting their journey from Richmond to Charlotte to Puerto Rico, where "it took me two days to get him out of the hotel." Even once D was admitted to Crossroads, Harris says, "he was calling everybody he knew to get a ticket out." At his first two rehab centers, D had been able to evade and outsmart the counselors. At Crossroads, he was forced to deal. "It was like sobriety boot camp," he says. "They are up in your shit."

After his month in Antigua, it still took eighteen months for D to ink a new deal, this one with J Records (which would become RCA) in late 2007. But even then, in D's world, nothing happens quickly.

Everyone around him knows about D-time, a pace so slow that it could test even the most patient saint. Over the next few years, there were creative stops and starts. There were also setbacks. On March 6, 2010, D was arrested and charged with solicitation after offering a female undercover police officer $40 for a blow job in Manhattan's West Village. He reportedly had $12,000 in cash in his Range Rover. Asked to explain, he says, "It was just me making a stupid decision, a wrong turn, on the wrong night." He adds, "I'm not the role-model motherfucker. Look at all the shit that I've been in."

Questlove and D were back in touch now, but the drummer admits he kept D'Angelo at arm's length. For a while it seemed they'd only talk after someone died. Michael Jackson's passing had them on the phone in 2009. Then, in 2011, just hours after Questlove missed a call from Amy Winehouse on Skype, she, too, exited the stage. "D's the first person I called," Questlove recalls. "And I was just honest, like, 'Look, man, I'm sorry. I know you're thinking I'm avoiding you like the plague.' I just said plain and simple, 'Man, there was a period in which it seemed like you were hell-bent on following the footsteps of our idols, and the one thing you have yet to follow them in was death.' " He told D that if he'd gotten that news, it would have destroyed him. "That was probably the most emotional man-to-man talk that D and I had ever had."

Such honesty was only possible, Questlove says, because D'Angelo was finally getting his act together. He'd kicked his bad habits—well, most of them. "Any person who's dealt with substance abuse, it's an ongoing thing," D tells me. "That's the mantra—one day at a time—right? So you're going to have good days and bad days, but for the most part, I have a grip on it." He feels the forces of good are on his side now. "I don't know why it didn't happen sooner. It's just the way Yahweh ordained it."

His newfound discipline is evident in the way he has thrown himself into studying a new instrument, practicing for five and six hours a day. "The one benefit of this eleven-year sabbatical was he used 10,000 Gladwellian hours to master the guitar," says Questlove, who compares D to Frank Zappa. "He can play the shit out of it, and I don't mean no Lil Wayne shit."

Alan Leeds, the tour manager, senses a conscious decision on D's part to push beyond the beefcake. "I wonder if that isn't partially a way to take the attention away from that Chippendales shit, because when you're standing up playing guitar, there's a little less attention to what you're wearing and whether it's on or off and having to choreograph your moves," says Leeds, who's previously worked with James Brown and Prince. "It prevents you from having to calculate that shit."

Still, D is back in the gym, and it's not just vanity that's tugging at him. He knows physical presence is key to any live performance. And though he's still finer than fine, with swagger to spare, he's no longer the chiseled Adonis from the "Untitled" video. Eating little more than fish and green apples, D's been working to trim down his five-foot-seven frame, which just a few months ago had topped 300 pounds. In January, on the eve of his European tour, his managers told me he still had another twenty-five pounds to go. Which is why when I boarded the plane for Sweden, I wasn't surprised to see D's personal trainer—Mark Jenkins, the same one who got him into underwear-model shape twelve years ago—a few rows up.

When you haven't been onstage in more than a decade, a lot of things go through your mind. For D, it boils down to a question: Is this really happening? Backstage in Stockholm, before he steps into the light, the rumble of his fans tells him the answer is yes. Fittingly, this venue is an old Pentecostal church. Packed into pews, where red leather-bound hymnals are stacked neatly for Sunday worship, the audience of 2,000 is excited to the point of near levitation. No one was sure D would show tonight, and in fact he almost didn't. He missed two flights before his managers finally delivered him to Newark airport. "He Got on the Plane. Praise Jesus," Tina Farris, his assistant tour manager, would blog later. "The knot in my stomach is slowly unraveling."

When he finally takes the stage ("In a minute!" he teases the audience from the wings. "In a minute!"), he sports a black leather trench coat that hits his black pants mid-thigh and a big-brimmed black hat. He calls this look Chocolate Rock. His hair is arranged in two-strand twists, and silver crosses hang on chains that bump against his chest. Also around his neck is the strap of his black custom Minarik Diablo guitar, named for its devilish horns.

He steps into the spotlight, the guitar slung low, his face aglow. If you could somehow access the voltage in the air, you could turn on all the lights in Scandinavia. First, the strains of an old song, "Playa Playa," cut through the din. Then a Roberta Flack cover—"Feel Like Makin' Love"—and then, seamlessly, a bluesy new tune, "Ain't That Easy," whose lyrics acknowledge, I've been away so long. The crowd catches the double meaning and roars as D peels off his jacket, revealing a black undershirt and sculpted arms. He glides through a mix of the old ("Chicken Grease," "Sh t, Damn, Motherf cker," a cover of Parliament's "I've Been Watching You") and the new (the infectious "Sugah Daddy," and "The Charade," a battle cry that D says "is telling the powers that be, 'This is why we are justified in our stance' "). Is he rusty? A little. But his presence grows with each song.

At one point, he grabs the hem of his wife-beater with both hands and tugs it up—one, two!—in time with the song. The brief reveal of his midsection is a flashback to the trying days of 2000, but it's 2012 now, and the shirt stays on. When the band rips into its encore, "Brown Sugar," it feels like D has rounded third base and is about to slide to safety. "Good God!" D yelps, kicking the mike stand away, then catching it with his foot before it flies into the audience. "Give my testimony!" he shouts, blowing kisses from the stage.

The show is a triumph, and soon Twitter and Facebook are on fire. He's really back—no longer a specter. D's band—he can't decide on the name, but he's considering the Spades—radiates happiness and exhaustion as they load onto the tour buses, nicknamed the Amistad I and II after the slave ship. The next night he fills a 1,600-capacity club in Copenhagen, and afterward the buses leave on D-time—a full twelve hours behind schedule. By the time they arrive at the hotel in Paris on Sunday, January 29, sound check for that night's show is just three hours away. Still, despite having traveled 760 miles across Denmark, Germany, Belgium, and France, D and his trainer head directly to the tiny hotel gym. Coincidentally I'm there, too. I ask if D wants privacy. He does. As I head for the door, he steps wordlessly onto the treadmill, a weary man with many miles still to go.

But that night, at the tour's first 5,000-seat arena, Le Zénith, D'Angelo is revived. Toward the end of the show, after a medley featuring snippets of the melodious, bumping "Jonz in My Bonz" and the gospel-fueled "Higher," he hits a single percussive note on the piano that reverberates and fades away. Then he hits it again, and all of us in this cavernous hall begin to scream. It's the beginning of "Untitled," which he didn't perform in Stockholm or Copenhagen—which he hasn't played in public, not once, in a dozen years. After a few bars, D stops abruptly and stands up. The crowd cheers as he leans on one end of the piano, his chin in his hands, catching his breath. What happens next is the most soulful, palpable connection I've ever felt between an artist and an audience. As D sits back down and starts to play again, the audience spontaneously begins to sing. How does it feel?—four words coming from thousands of throats, urging him on. He responds gratefully, "Sing it again, sing it again." And they do, loudly, prettily, right on tempo: How does it feel? "Oh, baby, long time," he sings, "that this has been on my mind." People are crying, swaying, raising up their hands. I'm one of them. It's impossible not to be overcome as this sexy anthem, this source of so much pain, is transformed before us into a crucible of love. "Thank you so much," he says, his fingers fluttering on the keys as he brings it home. Then he stands up, kisses both his hands, and opens his arms to the crowd. The blue lights go dark.

I'm reminded of something Angie Stone says about D. "D'Angelo is always going to be D'Angelo," she tells me. "You can't take too much away from the gift itself. I'm sure there's still some fear there, because it's been a long time out of the spotlight. And when all the spotlight he'd got lately has been negative, there's a rebirth of some kind that needs to take place." God willing, we've all just witnessed it.

Upon D'Angelo's return to New York City in mid-February, his friends and colleagues began to worry a little. D-time speeds up for no man. Russell Elevado, D's longtime engineer, told MTV Hive that D wanted to finish his album "as soon as possible, but once he gets into the studio he gets into his own zone.... Altogether there's over fifty songs that he's cut since we started. I think he wants to put twelve songs on the album."

Questlove tells me the same thing. "To get five songs out of him, we had to throw away at least twelve that I would give my left arm for," he says. "I don't mind that, because I literally feel he is the last pure African-American artist left." Still, as weeks pass, Questlove admits, "My first fear was him not doing this at all. Now my new fear is, okay, the tour is over. Now what?"

For nearly a month, D mostly holes up in his apartment on the Upper West Side. Jenkins comes by regularly to sweat D in his private gym. He fasts for a few days, and the weight is coming off, but it seems D is headed back into his pre-tour cave. Only music persuades him to go out. Late in February, after he and D go to see Bjrk together, Questlove addresses a tweet to the Icelandic artist, saying, "amazing job last night. even d'angelo was mind blown & he leaves the house for NOBODY."

So when will he release his new album? D can't say for sure. His managers and his label are pushing hard for September, before the Grammy deadline. But nobody's banking on it. Sounding like a man who's all too familiar with D-time, Tom Corson, RCA's president and COO, says simply, "This year would be nice." In mid-April, D and his band are back in the studio, this time in Los Angeles, supposedly adding the final touches. But everything hinges on D letting the music go.

"I'm driven by the masters that came before me that I admire—the Yodas," D tells me, using the term he and Questlove have coined for their heroes. He tells me of a music teacher who told him that when classical composers like Beethoven made music, "people didn't understand it, and it got bad reviews," D says, recalling how his teacher said Beethoven responded: "He's like, 'I don't make music for you. I make music for the ages.' "

That's all well and good, Chris Rock says—as long as D actually releases his music. "You've got to earn it, man," he tells me, adding that the only reason fans aren't disappointed by Jeff Buckley, the celebrated singer-songwriter who recorded just one album, is that he drowned. "Body of work, babe. It's all body of work at the end of the day. I mean, the only way D's going to be a great artist with the output he has now is if he dies."

I can't help but think about J Dilla, whose death was the pivot, D says, on which his comeback began to turn. Dilla was the ultimate underground artist—prolific beyond compare, a legend in the hip-hop world. When he died, he'd made so much music with so many people—from De La Soul to Busta Rhymes to A Tribe Called Quest—that his legacy was secure. For all of D'Angelo's otherworldly talent, for all the passions he distills and reflects when he's in front of an audience, for all his perceived connections to Beethoven and Michelangelo and Marvin, and yes, to Jesus himself, the same cannot yet be said for him. Can Dilla, the overachiever, spur the underachiever to reach his true potential?

Back in the Times Square recording studio, I tell D I want to read to him something from a fan who posted recently on Prince.org, a site frequented by devotees of all things funky. The fan is worried by reports that D is trimming down, he writes, because of the havoc the "Untitled" video wrought: "While it's cool that dude is getting in better shape, I hope he's not trying to get back to the way other people picture him or want him to be. Dude just needs to get his head straight."

I look up from the page. "Is your head straight?" I ask.

"Straight," D'Angelo says, his eyes locked on mine. "Yes, my head is straight." Just because you're black, he adds, doesn't mean you have to look or sound a certain way, "or, you know, act ignorant or what have you, whatever the fucking gatekeepers have us doing because they think that that's the formula to make money. And a lot of motherfuckers, they just fall right into line." D has a term for artists like this: "minstrelsy." If he's learned nothing, he's learned this: He's no minstrel.

I ask him about Internet reports that the new album is called James River, after the Virginia waterway whose swampy banks provided hidden refuge for escaped slaves. No, that's no longer the title, D says, but he doesn't say what is. I let slip that I've heard about another new song he's written called "Back." I just want to go back, baby / Back to the way it was, it goes. And then: I know you're wondering where I've been / Wondering 'bout the shape I'm in / I hope it ain't my abdomen.

I tell him I'm impressed that he's addressing his body directly, using wry lyrics to confront and reclaim this difficult chapter of his life. He murmurs a thank you, but he looks a little unsettled. "Wow," he says, when I ask if the song will appear on the album. "I don't know if that's going to make it."

Later, when I reach Janis Gaye, Marvin's second wife—and a longtime D'Angelo fan—I tell her about the dreams D had of Marvin, and she isn't surprised. Her own children dreamed of Marvin on the night he was killed, and D is just a few years older. "Marvin is a protector, and I'm sure there was something in Marvin's spirit that saw something in D'Angelo's spirit," Janis says. I tell her about Rock's stern admonition that D needs to step it up, and she agrees. She even has a suggestion: "He should go to Marvin's Room, the studio that Marvin built," she says of the famed studio on Sunset Boulevard where Gaye recorded many of his hits. "Go in and take his fifty songs. Not to sound kooky or out there, but Marvin will help him to choose."

Amy Wallace is a GQ correspondent.

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What Happened to Beverly D’Angelo? Where the ‘National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation’ Star Is Now

Golden Globe nominee Beverly D'Angelo became a familiar face around Christmastime thanks to her role as Ellen Griswold in 1989’s National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation . She appeared in multiple films throughout the franchise before undergoing a huge change in her personal life in 2001. Keep scrolling to find out what happened to the holiday film maven. 

What Happened to Beverly D’Angelo?

The Ohio native, born in 1951, made her acting debut in the 1976 television series Captains and the Kings . Even before sharing the screen with Chevy Chase in several films, Beverly earned critical acclaim for her portrayal of Patsy Cline in 1980’s Coal Miner’s Daughter . The multitalented performer first made her mark as the Griswold family matriarch in the 1983 comedy National Lampoon’s Vacation .   

Though she lit up the screen playing Ellen, Beverly didn’t initially think it was a role meant for her. "I was so sure that I wasn't the right person," she told People in December 2022, adding, "I really didn't know what my direction was going to be.” 

Still, she decided to go for it with some encouragement from her agent and her husband at the time, Don Lorenzo Salviati . The former couple were married from 1981 to 1995. She explained in an interview with People that they had a mutual understanding that they were allowed to have other partners during their marriage. When Beverly met Al Pacino and grew feelings for him, she made the revelation to her then-husband over the phone.   

"I said, 'I'm in love.' He goes, 'Oh, Beverly, who is it this time?' And I said, 'Well, it's an actor.' He went, 'An actor? No, no, not an actor.' And I said, 'I really love him and we're talking about having kids and he thinks it's crazy that I'm married and now I'm thinking it is too," she explained. 

Once the Emmy nominee told Lorenzo that Al was the man she wanted to be with, they had an amicable divorce. Beverly began dating The Godfather actor in 1997. 

How Many Children Does Beverly D’Angelo Have?

Starting a family was on Beverly and Al’s minds from the very start of their relationship and was often a topic of conversation. 

“I had a fantasy that when you have kids, you do it in a family setting,” Beverly revealed in a July 2017 interview with Closer . “After we’d known each other for three months, [Al] looked me in the eyes and said, ‘I want you to be the mother of my children.’ That’s all I had to hear.”

The couple got their wish when they found out the Law & Order alum was pregnant with twins. She gave birth to kids Anton and Olivia with Al in 2001.   

“I got pregnant at 48, delivered six weeks after I was 49 and by 51, I was looking at a landscape as a single parent,” she said. 

While the Hollywood duo decided to end their relationship in 2003, they’ve both put their differences aside for the sake of their kids.   

“The key thing is creating a new history and moving on from whatever dissolved that relationship to the new one of coparenting,” the Hair actress admitted. 

Where Is Beverly D’Angelo Now?

After becoming a mom, Beverly returned to work, starring as Barbara Miller in Entourage for 25 episodes from 2005 to 2011. She has also appeared in other popular television series like Mom , Cougar Town and Insatiable . In 2022, Beverly returned to her roots, starring as Gertrude Lightstone in Violent Night , a Christmas action-comedy film.   

While Violent Night ’s storyline is drastically different from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation , she assured fans that the underlying messages of the films are the same. 

"The fans of Christmas Vacation — and really all of those Vacation movies — are so loyal," she told Entertainment Weekly in December 2022. "There's something about the way that the Griswolds have seeped into our national culture, and I'd love the Lightstones to be in there too. Here's the thing about Christmas Vacation and Violent Night . [I] don't want to give spoilers, but the bottom line is, love conquers all."

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NCAA.com | March 24, 2024

2024 march madness: men's ncaa tournament schedule, dates.

does d'angelo still tour

Here is the schedule for March Madness 2024, which started with the Selection Sunday on March 17. The NCAA tournament games continue with the second round on Saturday, March 23:

  • Selection Sunday: 6 p.m. ET Sunday, March 17 on CBS
  • First Four: March 19-20
  • First round: March 21-22
  • Second round: March 23-24 
  • Sweet 16: March 28-29 
  • Elite Eight: March 30-31 
  • Final Four: Saturday, April 6 at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.
  • NCAA championship game: Monday, April 8 at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.

You can get a printable 2024 NCAA bracket here .

Here is the game-by-game schedule for the 2024 men's tournament, including TV networks. Click or tap on each game to be taken to the live streams.

2024 NCAA tournament schedule, scores, highlights

Sunday, March 24 (Round of 32)

  • (2) Marquette vs. (10) Colorado | 12:10 p.m. | CBS
  • (1) Purdue vs. (8) Utah State | 2:40 p.m. | CBS
  • (4) Duke vs. (12) James Madison | 5:15 p.m. | CBS
  • (3) Baylor vs. (6) Clemson | 6:10 p.m. | TNT
  • (4) Alabama vs. (12) Grand Canyon | 7:10 p.m. | TBS
  • (1) UConn vs. (9) Northwestern | 7:45 p.m. | truTV
  • (1) Houston vs. (9) Texas A&M | 8:40 p.m. | TNT
  • (5) San Diego State vs. (13) Yale | 9:40 p.m. | TBS

Thursday, March 28 (Sweet 16)

  • (2) Iowa State vs. (3) Illinois | TBD | TBD
  • (1) North Carolina vs. TBD | TBD | TBD
  • (2) Arizona vs. TBD | TBD | TBD
  • TBD vs. TBD

Friday, March 29 (Sweet 16)

  • (2) Tennessee vs. (3) Creighton | TBD |TBD
  • (5) Gonzaga vs. TBD | TBD |TBD
  • (11) NC State vs. TBD | TBD | TBD

Saturday, March 30 (Elite Eight)

Sunday, March 31 (Elite Eight)

Saturday, April 6 (Final Four)

Monday, April 8 (National championship game)

  • TBD vs. TBD | 9:20 p.m.

Tuesday, March 19 (First Four in Dayton, Ohio)

  • (16) Wagner 71 , (16) Howard 68
  • (10) Colorado State 67 , (10) Virginia 42

Wednesday, March 20 (First Four in Dayton, Ohio)

  • (16) Grambling 88 , (16) Montana State 81
  • (10) Colorado 60 , (10) Boise State 53

Thursday, March 21 (Round of 64)

  • (9) Michigan State 66 , (8) Mississippi State 51
  • (11) Duquesne 71 , (6) BYU 67
  • (3) Creighton 77 , (14) Akron 60
  • (2) Arizona 85 , (15) Long Beach State 65
  • (1) North Carolina 90 , (16) Wagner 61
  • (3) Illinois 85 , (14) Morehead State 69
  • (11) Oregon 87 , (6) South Carolina 73
  • (7) Dayton 63 , (10) Nevada 60
  • (7) Texas 56 , (10) Colorado State 44
  • (14) Oakland 80 , (3) Kentucky 76
  • (5) Gonzaga 86 , (12) McNeese 65
  • (2) Iowa State 82 , (15) South Dakota State 65
  • (2) Tennessee 83 ,   (15) Saint Peter's 49
  • (7) Washington State 66 , (10) Drake 61
  • ( 11) NC State 80 , (6) Texas Tech 67
  • (4) Kansas 93 , (13) Samford 89

Friday, March 22 (Round of 64)

  • (3) Baylor 92 ,   (14) Colgate 67
  • (9) Northwestern 77 , (8) Florida Atlantic 65  (OT)
  • (5) San Diego State 69 , (12) UAB 65
  • (2) Marquette 87 ,   (15) Western Kentucky 69
  • (1) UConn 91 , (16) Stetson 52
  • (6) Clemson 77 , (11) New Mexico 56
  • (10) Colorado 102 , (7) Florida 100   
  • (13) Yale 78 , (4) Auburn 76 
  • (9) Texas A&M 98 , (8) Nebraska 83
  • (4) Duke 64 , (13) Vermont 47
  • (1) Purdue 78 , (16) Grambling 50
  • (4) Alabama 109 , (13) College of Charleston 96
  • (1) Houston 86 , (16) Longwood 46
  • (12) James Madison 72 , (5) Wisconsin 61
  • (8) Utah State 88 , (9) TCU 72 
  • (12) Grand Canyon 77 , (5) Saint Mary's 66

Saturday, March 23 (Round of 32)

  • (2) Arizona 78,  (7) Dayton 68
  • (5) Gonzaga 89 , (4) Kansas 68
  • (1) North Carolina 85 , (9) Michigan State 69
  • (2) Iowa State 67 , (7) Washington State 56
  • (11) NC State 79 , (14) Oakland 73
  • (2) Tennessee 62 , (7) Texas 58
  • (3) Illinois 89 , (11) Duquesne 63 
  • (3) Creighton 86 , (11) Oregon 73 (2OT)

2024 March Madness Bracket

These are the sites for the men's tournament in 2024:

March Madness: Future sites, dates

Here are the future sites for the NCAA Division I men's basketball Final Four:

does d'angelo still tour

  • Tracking 2024 March Madness men's records by conference

does d'angelo still tour

  • 2024 NIT bracket: Schedule, TV channels for the men’s tournament

does d'angelo still tour

  • Latest bracket, schedule and scores for 2024 NCAA men's tournament

March Madness

  • 🗓️ 2024 March Madness schedule, dates
  • 👀 Everything to know about March Madness
  • ❓ How the field of 68 is picked
  • 📓 College basketball dictionary: 51 terms defined

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Greatest buzzer beaters in March Madness history

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Relive Laettner's historic performance against Kentucky

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The deepest game-winning buzzer beaters in March Madness history

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College basketball's NET rankings, explained

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What March Madness looked like the year you were born

Di men's basketball news.

  • 2024 March Madness: Men's NCAA tournament schedule, dates
  • The fine margins of March Madness' thrilling opening round
  • TNT Sports and CBS Sports Announce Tip Times and Matchups for Second Round Games on Sunday, March 24
  • A complete history of HBCU men's basketball in the NCAA tournament’s round of 64
  • Gohlke puts Oakland on the map as Kentucky's March woes continue
  • CBS Sports and TNT Sports Announce Tip Times and Matchups for Second Round Games on Saturday, March 23
  • A complete history of HBCU men's basketball in the NCAA tournament’s First Four and play-in games

Follow NCAA March Madness

D’Angelico rolls out stripped-down Excel Tour Collection semi-hollows, featuring PAF-voiced Supro pickups

The new stable of workhorse semi-acoustics intends to nail the needs of the touring musician

D'Angelico Excel Tour Collection

D’Angelico may be famed for its big and boxy jazz guitars, but its new Excel Tour Collection – featuring a stripped-back aesthetic and custom Supro pickups – looks like it will have far wider appeal. 

The new Korean-built models include the single-cut Excel SS Tour, the Excel DC Tour and Excel Mini DC Tour, which have widths of 16”, 15” and 14”, respectively. However, the headline feature across all three models are the new Supro Bolt Bucker pickups. These have been developed especially for the Tour Collection in collaboration with the guitar-maker, following Supro’s acquisition by D’Angelico’s parent company, Bond Audio , back in 2020.

“Supro Bolt Bucker pickups were designed to offer the tone of the most sought-after vintage ‘PAF’ pickups from the late 1950s,” says Bond Audio’s Dave Koltai. 

“Scatter-wound, just like the originals, Supro Bolt Buckers utilize 42-gauge enamel wire along with a mixture of Alnico II (neck) and Alnico V (bridge) magnets to provide the perfect balance of warmth and clarity with unrivaled articulation and note bloom.”

A marked step away from the spangly threads of its usual builds, the Tour Collection sees D’Angelico becoming far more restrained in its aesthetic choices, but it’s nonetheless very appealing – with a sharp, vintage look. 

They may have gloss finishes, but elsewhere it’s all business, with laminate maple bodies, satin nickel hardware and Grover tuners. Some concessions have been made to style, with the 12” radius ebony fingerboards offering a little functional flair with their mini-diamond inlays; and an undersized Throwback Scroll-style headstock (which reportedly helps to offer excellent balance). 

Electronics, meanwhile, include a “50s-style” two-knob control setup of volume and tone, with a three-way pickup selector switch. 

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It’s a proposition that keeps it simple but seems to have cut very few corners in the process. At $1,499, they’re certainly priced to shift to pros and busy amateurs alike – we look forward to seeing whether it’s enough to tempt a broader range of players over to D’Angelico.

All three models in the tour collection carry list prices of $1,499 and are available in a choice of Slate Blue, Solid Wine or Solid Black finishes. 

Head to D’Angelico for more information.

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Matt Parker

Matt is a staff writer for GuitarWorld.com. Before that he spent 10 years as a freelance music journalist, interviewing artists for the likes of Total Guitar, Guitarist, Guitar World, MusicRadar, NME.com, DJ Mag and Electronic Sound. In 2020, he launched  CreativeMoney.co.uk , which aims to share the ideas that make creative lifestyles more sustainable. He plays guitar, but should not be allowed near your delay pedals.

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March Madness expert picks: Our bracket predictions for 2024 NCAA men's tournament

Editor's note: Follow all of the men's March Madness action, scores and highlights here with USA TODAY Sports' live coverage.

The experts have dissected the men's NCAA Tournament bracket , providing sleepers, Final Four matchups and upset predictions. Your chances of filling out a perfect bracket are miniscule , but maybe you need a few tips to win your office pool. We've got you covered with a look at how to pick an upset and a look historically at how the seeds have performed in the NCAA Tournament.

Still need help? Here's a closer look at each region: East , West , South , Midwest

Three of our five USA TODAY experts have UConn as their picks to win the national title on April 8. Here are our expert picks:

WOMEN'S PICKS: Our bracket predictions for 2024 NCAA women's tournament

FOLLOW THE MADNESS: NCAA basketball bracket, scores, schedules, teams and more.

Jordan Mendoza

Full bracket

  • Final Four : UConn, Arizona, Houston, Creighton
  • Final : UConn vs. Houston
  • National champion : UConn

Paul Myerberg

  • Final Four: Iowa State, North Carolina, Houston, Creighton
  • Final: Iowa State vs. Houston
  • National champion: Houston

Erick Smith

  • Final Four: Iowa State, Baylor, Houston, Purdue
  • Final : Iowa State vs. Purdue
  • National champion: Iowa State

Eddie Timanus

  • Final Four : UConn, North Carolina, Houston, Purdue
  • Final: UConn vs. Purdue
  • National champion: UConn
  • Final Four: UConn, Saint Mary's, Houston, Creighton
  • Final: UConn vs. Houston

D'Angelo Russell's journey from Lakers trade chip to clutch time hero: 'I'm ready for it. I studied for this test'

D'Angelo Russell drives toward the bucket and drops in a floater to give the Lakers the lead with 5.9 seconds left vs. the Bucks. (0:26)

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  • Covered the Lakers and NBA for ESPNLosAngeles.com from 2009-14, the Cavaliers from 2014-18 for ESPN.com and the NBA for NBA.com from 2005-09. Follow on X

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HOURS AFTER A midseason trade sent him to Los Angeles, D'Angelo Russell picked up the phone. It was Feb. 9, 2023, and on the other end was Lakers president of basketball operations and general manager Rob Pelinka, calling to welcome the 28-year-old guard back to the franchise that drafted him second overall in 2015.

Russell heard Pelinka say how vital his contributions would be in L.A.'s late-season push after the Lakers acquired the former All-Star in a deadline deal with the Minnesota Timberwolves . How he'd be relied upon to play point alongside his childhood hero, LeBron James , whom the Lakers were able to sign in 2018 thanks in part to the cap-clearing trade that ended Russell's first stint with the team.

But Russell, who was going from the eighth-place Wolves to the 13th-place Lakers, didn't share the same optimism as his new GM.

"I told him we weren't s---," Russell told ESPN. "[But] the team complemented one another ... and we started winning."

L.A. jumped to seventh in the Western Conference over the final two months of 2022-23. The run catapulted the Lakers to the conference finals and Russell came up huge in consequential moments.

There was his 31-point performance on 12-for-17 shooting in Game 6 of the first round to close out the Memphis Grizzlies . "I remember Dillon Brooks going from trying to harass Bron, to actually trying to guard me," Russell said. He followed it up with 21 points in Game 3 of the second round to go up 2-1 on the Golden State Warriors and 19 in Game 6 to close them out.

But Russell, who had started every game he played for L.A. after his trade, had his playing time slashed as he shot just 8-for-27 through the first three games of the conference finals. Then, Russell was demoted to a bench role for Game 4 as the eventual champion Denver Nuggets finished the sweep.

Suddenly, the normally verbose playmaker didn't feel like he had much of a say. Lakers coach Darvin Ham limited Russell's role while leaning more heavily on veteran guard Dennis Schroder for the series.

Russell knew Ham and Schroder's history went back nearly a decade to their time together with the Atlanta Hawks , where Ham was an assistant coach. Russell, meanwhile, had been around Ham for two months. (Schroder signed a two-year deal with the Toronto Raptors in the offseason and was traded to the Brooklyn Nets last month.)

"His relationship with Darvin is the reason I couldn't have a relationship with Darvin," Russell said.

"When I was struggling, I would've been able to come to the coach and say, 'Bro, this is what we should do. Like, I can help you.' Instead, there was no dialogue. ... I just accepted it.

"And we got swept and I'm here and he's not. And I like our chances."

It wasn't long ago that Russell, his role limited yet again earlier this season, was an assumed trade chip for Pelinka ahead of last month's deadline. Now, six weeks before the postseason, Russell has vaulted to third on the team in minutes per game and fourth in games played, all while averaging a career-high 42% on 3-pointers as one of the league's elite catch-and-shoot threats. (Russell is 11 3s behind the franchise record for a season, a mark set nearly 30 years ago by Nick Van Exel.)

Just 10 months after Russell was, in his words, "the scapegoat" in that Denver series, he's emerged as a major X factor in the Lakers' 12-5 run since Feb. 1 heading into Wednesday's road meeting with the Sacramento Kings ( 10 p.m. ET, ESPN ).

But perhaps most importantly, Russell has gained the trust of Pelinka, Ham and L.A.'s stars.

"I think he has the ability to do whatever the team needs, especially offensively," James told ESPN of Russell's impact on L.A.'s playoff push. "That's what's special about him. He can adapt to whatever the game calls for.

"But when D-Lo is at his best, he's in attack mode."

AFTER BEING BENCHED against Denver in the playoffs, Russell wasn't thrilled about returning to the Lakers in free agency. He said as much in his offseason exit meeting with Pelinka and Ham.

"They were like, 'We're going to do whatever to try to keep you here,'" Russell said. "And I was like, 'Are y'all going to let me rock out, though?'"

Schroder came to an agreement with Toronto on the first day of free agency. The following morning, Russell re-upped with L.A. on a two-year, $37 million deal -- with a player option on the second season.

The Lakers preferred a deal with no player option, sources told ESPN, but Russell's side pushed for one, allowing for the scenario where he plays well, ups his value and hits free agency again this summer.

"That was our idea," Russell said, referring to the stipulation he and his agent, Austin Brown of CAA, added to the deal.

Granting an opt-out meant that the contract would, by rule of the collective bargaining agreement, become eligible for a one-year Bird restriction that would allow him to veto any trade. Waiving that no-trade clause was the compromise; if both sides needed a change, Russell wouldn't block it.

"Because, I mean, I'm a point guard for the Lakers. All there has to be is another point guard ... that wants to be here," Russell said. "And that's something that the Lakers are capable of doing. Not every organization is."

Russell began the season in the starting lineup, helping L.A. to the inaugural in-season tournament title in early December, but he struggled overall that month, averaging just 10.2 points on 41% shooting (32.7% from 3). He was benched just before the new year. "When I took him out of the [starting] lineup, we tried to lean into the defensive side of things," Ham said.

Russell began the new year on the injured list. He suffered a bruised tailbone on Dec. 30 after he took a charge against his old team, the Timberwolves. It was a flash of the defensive commitment that Ham hoped to see out of him more often.

While he was sidelined, Russell studied his team and looked for ways he could be more effective. He turned to the film room, a place where James said Russell has been "locked in on what we want to do."

A film session in early January, following a 110-96 loss to the short-handed Miami Heat , led to Ham and Russell clashing. The coach wanted to see better effort and execution; the player wanted to see sharper schemes. Ham was headstrong in his instructions, illustrating through the film where his team would "half-ass it through possessions," he said.

Russell dismissed the lack of execution, focusing rather on an alternative approach he believed would be better for the team.

"There's times we agree to agree, agree to disagree or come to an understanding," Ham said of his relationship with Russell, acknowledging his responsibility to improve their discourse after last season's finish.

"But it's not so much the dialogue as it is the access to have it. And I can't stress that enough. I can go to him and let him know how I feel and meet him halfway, or tell him I need him to come more over to my way, or [it can be] him telling me how I need to trust him more and come more over to his way. And it's a workable relationship."

Russell invites the back-and-forth. "We played tennis with that," he said. "I hit the ball back, he hit it to me. ... That's the season. That's what you use 82 games to develop, and we developed it."

Russell relishes discussing strategy. He recalled a game when he played for the Nets, during which he and then-Nets coach Kenny Atkinson tried to match wits with Hall of Famer Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs .

"I was like, 'Kenny, let's go zone. Let's go zone,'" Russell recalled of his conversation with Atkinson. "He was like, 'Pop knows we're going to go zone.' We came out, Pop drew up a play for the zone. But we were in man.

"Because Kenny knew that he knew that we knew. ... It was cool to see."

He applied that same spirit of gamesmanship when, during a practice earlier this season, he had the team follow his lead in disguising a page from the Lakers offensive playbook.

"He was like, 'Yo, we're running this play and we're going to call it these things, but it's all the same play," Lakers All-Star big man Anthony Davis told ESPN, adding he sometimes texts his point guard late at night to discuss playcalls.

"And it was clever. ... We might have had eight different calls, but it was the same exact play."

Russell said he honed his tactical approach from a former teammate: Warriors forward Draymond Green .

"When I got around Draymond, I seen him in the film room, like really talking and really creating controversy. Really challenging [teammates] and really doing that on purpose," Russell said. "And I saw how we grew. We weren't even a good team, but we grew because of that dialogue in the film room.

"Then I get here and nobody talks but Bron. I was like, 'What the f---?' And then I just started being vocal, and that became where my IQ is exposed now."

And with the Lakers playing the second night of a back-to-back on Jan. 13 against the Utah Jazz and James sitting out to rest, Ham turned to Russell. Despite the loss, Russell responded with 39 points on 15-for-26 shooting. He finished January averaging 22.7 points on 48.8% from the floor (45.9% from 3) and regained his starting spot.

Russell recognized that sharing his opinions often comes with greater accountability on the court, a leadership role he has welcomed this season.

"I'm ready for it," Russell said. "I studied for this test."

IN THE WEEKS leading up to the trade deadline, Russell's name was attached to nearly every potential scenario involving the Lakers.

He was linked to the Chicago Bulls in Zach LaVine talks, league sources told ESPN. His name surfaced when there was reported interest in Raptors forward Bruce Brown and Brooklyn wings Royce O'Neale and Dorian Finney-Smith , sources said.

Russell's salary number alone, as much as his attractiveness as a trade piece, made his name a barrier for entry for many of the deals the Lakers explored.

The various iterations of a deal involving Russell for Hawks guard Dejounte Murray were such an open secret that when L.A. played inside State Farm Arena on Jan. 30, Hawks fans heckled, "We don't want you!" toward Russell when he was at the free throw line.

Without any certainty about his future and no say in the decisions of the front office, Russell channeled his energy into something he could control: his individual performance.

He said he thought back on wisdom imparted to him by Kobe Bryant when Russell, as a rookie in 2015-16, teamed up with the Lakers legend in his 20th and final season.

"'Create new headlines,'" Russell said of the advice that Bryant passed on about navigating the narratives that can come with being a Laker. "And that stuck with me. ... Don't care about that. You can't do nothing. How did you grow from it? That's how I approach s---."

He started putting in extra time at the practice facility, meeting Lakers head video coordinator Micah Fraction at the gym during odd hours and off days.

"When I'm straddling the line of 'I can be traded,' ain't nobody saying, 'Hey bro, don't worry about that trade s---,'" Russell said. "I'm getting ate up in the media and ain't nobody saying nothing? Cool. I'm on my own. I'm on my own s---. I ain't tripping, I'm built for that.

"My approach: Care less, do better. And that's what was."

With the franchise looking for moves to maximize James' win-now championship window in his 21st season, Pelinka would have been dishonest to promise Russell untouchable status in talks -- especially without his no-trade clause.

Instead, Pelinka continued the conversation he established with the nine-year veteran just after the team's LeBron-led minicamp in late September, stressing the importance of maintaining a stable outlook as he takes his next step as a professional.

"He was just [saying], 'It's kind of like an emotional roller coaster,'" Russell said of Pelinka's preseason message. "'This league is going to eat you up. ... So just find a way to stay even-keeled -- not too high, not too low -- and when you get the opportunity, showcase it. Let your game kind of speak for itself.'"

Since returning to the starting lineup on Jan. 13, Russell has averaged 22.5 points on 48/46/85 shooting splits, along with 6.4 assists. For the season, L.A. is 11-3 when Russell scores at least 25 points.

The Lakers are 5-4 in games without James this season, thanks in large part to Russell's 21.7 points and 10.7 assists per game when L.A. has been without the league's all-time scorer. (A LeBron-led team hasn't had a winning record in games without him since the 2012-13 Heat.)

"It takes a strong individual, especially when you're hearing everything that goes around," James said of Russell. "You're hearing the trade talks, you're hearing this and that and whatever the case may be and 'Is D-Lo the right fit?' or whatever. One thing is, he just don't waver.

"We never gave up on him either. Even when he went to the bench, we just still wanted to instill confidence in him because we knew we were going to need him. We need his ability -- his uncanny ability -- to rack up points in a bundle very fast."

RUSSELL GREW UP idolizing James. So much so that Russell admitted earlier this month that he cried the first time he saw James play live when he was a kid. His father took him and his older brother, Antonio "Tone" Russell, from Louisville to Indianapolis to see James' Cleveland Cavaliers play the Indiana Pacers .

"When I was a kid and I'd shoot those jump shots, I'd say, 'Jordan! Kobe!'" Tone Russell told ESPN. "He was coming through dunking socks on a hanger basketball goal in the room, like, 'I'm Bron!'"

When Russell made it to the pros, he tracked down James' contact info and reached out just before his lone All-Star season in 2018-19.

"I was like, 'Bro, how do you become more consistent of a player?'" Russell said. "He said, 'I read. I sleep. I eat. My routine is on point.' I still got the text. And honestly, he was the reason I developed a routine."

Last week, with James out because of a chronic left ankle issue and the Lakers hosting a Milwaukee Bucks team on a 6-1 run since the All-Star break, Pelinka found Russell in the players tunnel before tip-off.

"LeBron's out, Milwaukee's tough," Russell told ESPN, paraphrasing Pelinka's directive. "I could use a 40-ball out of you."

D'Angelo Russell heats up in the fourth quarter as he knocks down 3-pointers on three straight possessions.

Russell went off , scoring 21 in the fourth quarter to finish with a season-high 44 points. He tied a career-high with nine 3-pointers, dished out nine assists and capped his night with a go-ahead floater over Bucks star Damian Lillard with 5.9 seconds remaining.

Russell's clutch performances haven't been limited to Friday's crucial win, and the Lakers have needed them all as they battle for seeding down the stretch: His 14 straight points in under two minutes in a win against the New Orleans Pelicans . His "catch high, shoot high" corner 3 during a 21-point fourth-quarter comeback against the LA Clippers . His three straight 3s in 66 seconds in a win over Oklahoma City, the last of which came after a hot-potato moment with LeBron, who urged his point guard to let it fly from long range over Thunder wing Jalen Williams .

The moment that gives Russell the most satisfaction, however, is his double-overtime, pull-up 3 in a win against Golden State on Jan. 27. Russell had turned the ball over twice in the second extra session when, trailing by two in the final minute and leading the break with two Warriors in front of him and James trailing just behind him, he fired from 3 with more than 20 seconds on the shot clock and nailed it.

D'Angelo Russell flushes 3-pointer to put the Lakers ahead 142-141.

"I think the icing on the cake for that wasn't the shot, wasn't the game, wasn't any of that," Russell said. "It was all my people texting me, like, 'Bro, that shot is an explanation for who you are. ... All the bulls--- that went up into it: turnovers, the game on the line, LeBron wanting the shot and trailing. You shoot it, you don't care.'"

Austin Reaves , who has become Russell's closest confidant on the team, said that being on the court in crucial moments such as the finish against Golden State has been Russell's goal ever since the conference finals disappointment against Denver.

"He just came into the season with a mindset of, 'I'm not going to be put in that situation again,'" Reaves told ESPN. "[We've] talked about ... 'If you go handle your business, you're plenty good enough to be on the court every single game regardless of what's going on.'"

As improbable as it might sound that Russell is leading the charge for L.A., it was just as improbable that he would even be on the team at this point. So, he figures, why not enjoy it?

"I really have fun out here. For real," Russell said. "And respectfully, my approach is 'All these people came to see AD, LeBron ... but I'm stealing the show.'"

ESPN Stats & Information contributed to this report.

Google researchers unveil ‘VLOGGER’, an AI that can bring still photos to life

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Google researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence system that can generate lifelike videos of people speaking, gesturing and moving — from just a single still photo. The technology, called VLOGGER, relies on advanced machine learning models to synthesize startlingly realistic footage, opening up a range of potential applications while also raising concerns around deepfakes and misinformation.

Described in a research paper titled “ VLOGGER: Multimodal Diffusion for Embodied Avatar Synthesis ,” the AI model can take a photo of a person and an audio clip as input, and then output a video that matches the audio, showing the person speaking the words and making corresponding facial expressions, head movements and hand gestures. The videos are not perfect, with some artifacts, but represent a significant leap in the ability to animate still images.

A breakthrough in synthesizing talking heads

The researchers, led by Enric Corona at Google Research, leveraged a type of machine learning model called diffusion models to achieve the novel result. Diffusion models have recently shown remarkable performance at generating highly realistic images from text descriptions. By extending them into the video domain and training on a vast new dataset, the team was able to create an AI system that can bring photos to life in a highly convincing way.

“In contrast to previous work, our method does not require training for each person, does not rely on face detection and cropping, generates the complete image (not just the face or the lips), and considers a broad spectrum of scenarios (e.g. visible torso or diverse subject identities) that are critical to correctly synthesize humans who communicate,” the authors wrote.

The AI Impact Tour – Atlanta

A key enabler was the curation of a huge new dataset called MENTOR containing over 800,000 diverse identities and 2,200 hours of video — an order of magnitude larger than what was previously available. This allowed VLOGGER to learn to generate videos of people with varied ethnicities, ages, clothing, poses and surroundings without bias.

Potential applications and societal implications 

The technology opens up a range of compelling use cases. The paper demonstrates VLOGGER’s ability to automatically dub videos into other languages by simply swapping out the audio track, to seamlessly edit and fill in missing frames in a video, and to create full videos of a person from a single photo.

One could imagine actors being able to license detailed 3D models of themselves that could be used to generate new performances. The technology could also be used to create photorealistic avatars for virtual reality and gaming. And it might enable the creation of AI-powered virtual assistants and chatbots that are more engaging and expressive.

Google sees VLOGGER as a step toward “embodied conversational agents” that can engage with humans naturally through speech, gestures and eye contact. “VLOGGER can be used as a stand-alone solution for presentations, education, narration, low-bandwidth online communication, and as an interface for text-only human-computer interaction,” the authors wrote.

However, the technology also has the potential for misuse, for example in creating deepfakes — synthetic media in which a person in a video is replaced with someone else’s likeness. As these AI-generated videos become more realistic and easier to create, it could exacerbate the challenges around misinformation and digital fakery.

A new frontier in AI research

While impressive, VLOGGER still has limitations. The generated videos are relatively short and have a static background. The individuals don’t move around a 3D environment. And their mannerisms and speech patterns, while realistic, are not yet indistinguishable from those of real humans.

Nonetheless, VLOGGER represents a significant step forward. “We evaluate VLOGGER on three different benchmarks and show that the proposed model surpasses other state-of-the-art methods in image quality, identity preservation and temporal consistency,” the authors reported.

With further advances, this type of AI-generated media is likely to become ubiquitous. We may soon live in a world where it is hard to tell whether the person speaking to us in a video is real or generated by a computer program. 

VLOGGER provides an early glimpse of that future. It is a powerful demonstration of the rapid progress being made in artificial intelligence and a sign of the increasing challenges we will face in distinguishing between what is real and what is fake.

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    After a six-hour rain delay Thursday at the Miami Open presented by Itau, tournament officials have begun calling players to court at 5 p.m. to begin the day's action.. Andrey Rublev is among the ATP Tour stars beginning to play at the ATP Masters 1000 event. The fifth seed is facing Tomas Machac.All doubles matches for the day have been cancelled. The Stadium Court schedule on Friday features ...

  30. Google researchers unveil 'VLOGGER', an AI that can bring still photos

    Google researchers have developed 'VLOGGER', an AI system that generates realistic talking head videos from a single image, using advanced diffusion models, enabling new applications while raising ...