Three of the most perfect albums ever recorded. D’Angelo’s voice and instrumentation are so precise, so delectable, ethereal. He could croon like Al Green, float like Marvin Gaye, scream like James Brown. His harmonies tower like columns. But then that Native Tongues influence keeps his beats contemporary, hip-hop, not just stuck in the past but still somehow looking to the future. His songs are time travelers, back to the future, blasts from another history. Even the other neo-soul greats, Badu, Hill, The Roots, even the alt hip-hop D’Angelo claimed as inspiration, none of them could replicate the ease of his grooves or the stratospheric height of the call and response between his vocals.

Debut albums are often honed and distilled versions of years of previous work, a collection of years of songs that represent the artist coming into their identity and really solidifying their sound. But they rarely show the confidence D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar displays, the comfort in extended jams by a solo musician, the willingness to luxuriate in a sound rather than deliver every great idea in three minutes or less. D’Angelo cited Prince as a direct influence on his choice to sing and record all the instrumentation himself – I would argue Prince wasn’t this comfortable drifting off of pop for more than a song or two until much later in his career, saving most of his extended jams for his most uptempo songs.

Brown Sugar had hits and acclaim, and then writer’s block hit until D’Angelo’s first son was born in 1998. Voodoo makes its home in the same sort of extended jams as Brown Sugar, but the lyrics are more explicit, more about black life, more about sex. When we did Maintained Madness’s original Songs of the Decades tournament, it was “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” that we picked to represent D’Angelo’s work, a song with releases that cusp Y2K with a video too hot for polite company. The soul music had been honed into a mission, representing a celebration of life and an argument for R&B outside pop music, unvarnished and clear-eyed, music for adults. 

Usually, I put the limit around “working artists” around ten years between works. But someone like D’Angelo is the rare champion who you never count out. His struggles with addiction, fame, and hypersexualization extended the development of Black Messiah to nearly fifteen years after Voodoo solidified him as one of the most essential musicians alive. Songs from Black Messiah have existed in different forms since 2002, and they started leaking as early as 2007. Questlove joked in December 2011 that the album had become the “black version of Smile,” for which the (incredible) The Smile Sessions archival collection had released a couple months earlier.

When D’Angelo released Black Messiah in December 2014, it was in direct response to the Eric Garner and Michael Brown rulings, moved forward from a spring 2015 date out of political urgency. When the lyrics are social critique, they focus more on systemic oppression and the way cycles of activism and protest are controlled for and diminished – songs like “1000 Deaths” and “Charade” are written from a wider lens than the personal struggle of something like Voodoo’s “The Line.” But, just as essentially, D’Angelo never stops celebrating life and music, never reduces worth solely to contribution. A song like “Sugah Daddy” or “Betray My Heart” is nourishment. And then, that conclusion, “Another Life,” is earth-shattering stuff, a whole universe of sounds in one last jam session.

It’s been a little over ten years since Black Messiah, and I’d say there’s been no better album since. Raphael Saadiq claimed D’Angelo was working on a fourth – I’m sure whatever does exist will be released, maybe completed by collaborators like Questlove and Q-Tip. Two of his three children are adults – he never married. His privacy was essential to his process, and I’m unsurprised he didn’t share his illness, but the sudden nature of this loss is a deep wound. I loved imagining him tooling around surprise club appearances, seeing friends with new ideas, an eternal tinkerer who’d share another masterpiece when it was ready to see. The way people describe Bowie, Lynch and Prince as people they imagined were eternal, D’Angelo is a man out of time – I cannot be grateful enough for his gifts.