October 18, 2025

by Sheldon Pearce

This week, NPR Music editor Sheldon Pearce remembers the elusive and celebrated soul musician D’Angelo, who died this week at the age of 51.

Paul Natkin/WireImage/Getty Images

It is tempting to think of D’Angelo in messianic terms, in part because he always felt so removed from the rest of us. All three of his albums are classics, treasures that feel like epochs unto themselves, and they are uplifting because they operate on a higher plane; to be attuned to them is to try to meet them where they are. But as those who have studied his work will attest, D’Angelo didn’t make music to sanctify himself, even if it did grant him soul sainthood in the end. His music was a gathering space: common ground for disciples of a very particular kind of spirit worship, whom he served as a shaman of R&B sorcery. This week, in tribute to the late singer, Solange's Saint Heron website reposted a package celebrating Voodoo's 15th anniversary, which included this particularly discerning quote from Solange herself: “Voodoo is the church in which we all come to worship the religion of soul music. It is the word. It is the temple. It is the law for all lovers of true rhythm and blues.” She knew, as many did, the extent to which listening to that album came to feel more than anything like a spiritual practice.

When news broke earlier this week that D'Angelo had died, I had the unenviable task of trying to sum up the singer's wondrous, tortured career. Afterwards, I finally had a chance to wade around in his discography; I turned first not to Voodoo, or to Black Messiah, which is not a resurrection so much as a baptism by fire. I didn't listen to Brown Sugar, which conjured spine-tingling R&B so sensual the fourth wall began to crack under the pressure. Instead, I was compelled to put on Live At The Jazz Cafe, London, a recording of a 1995 show that was only unearthed in its entirety — in typical D’Angelo fashion — nearly 20 years after it happened. The live album is the purest invocation of D’Angelo’s uncanny voodoo.

Live At the Jazz Cafe, London feels illuminating, if not instructional. At the time of the show, the musician born Michael Eugene Arthur was just 21, Brown Sugar was only a couple of months old and he hadn’t even released a single in the U.K. Accompanied by singer and then-partner Angie Stone, D’Angelo and his band covered Mandrill, the Ohio Players, Smokey Robinson, Al Green and Earth, Wind & Fire. You could think of it as a little syllabus for the 201 class of his funk education (though a full degree program would likely include a dissertation on James Brown, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, The Neville Brothers and, of course, Prince), but what’s far more fascinating is the connective tissue between those songs and his, and the ways that juxtaposition demonstrates the features that make his music is so singular by comparison. His songs are more uninhibited — Questlove referred to the quality as “beautifully, blatantly disrespectful” to long-standing directives for song structure — and are hyperaware of all the rules just to know how to break them in the right ways. You can hear this quality in the distance between the arrangements of The Ohio Players’ “Sweet Sticky Thing,” with its locked-in rhythm and hoppin’ bass line, and Brown Sugar’s “Jonz In My Bones,” which is so fluid in its interplay of warbling Rhodes and skittering drums. The show is like witnessing the precise instant D’Angelo’s past and future collide, all the things his predecessors ingrained in him unspooling into the things only he could be.

But Live At the Jazz Cafe, London is also enlightening for a less quantifiable reason: Because when he was on stage he was not hiding, and in performance he was most actively engaged with his chosen practice as a means for astral projection. The records are magic, but only in his gigs did he ever seem truly free — not on a pedestal but at the very heart of a collective. Intimacy was so crucial to his music; in both the tightness of the playing and the looseness of the grooves, that closeness is made manifest. The way he squeezes “Lady” out to nine minutes, doing call and response with his backup singers, letting the bass walk, it feels like being psychically linked to a looser interpretation of the song that existed in the secret rooms of his mind. In communion with his band, he was able to open the doors and let us in.

D’Angelo alludes to this directly in the 2019 documentary Devil’s Pie: D’Angelo: “On that stage, you get such a high,” he said. “And then you leave the stage, you go back, and it’s just you.” He spoke about a bifurcation that happened between “Michael” and “D’Angelo” when he crossed the threshold, and the surreality the experience entailed. It was the primary internal conflict of his career, and the video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” complicated that even further, where he would go into the crowd with a tank top and return to the stage without one because so many fans were trying to rip it off him. But the bald, brilliant honesty of his performances, bearing his axe or caressing the keys in a full sweat, was more humanizing than deifying. That's especially evident in the Live at the Jazz Cafe, London set, which took place before the toxicity tainted his process. Maybe that’s why the closing thought of the Solange passage feels the most poignant. “Whatever D’Angelo’s journey back to South Carolina and Virginia encompassed, somehow became my journey too,” she said. “It delivered me. It spoke for me. It made me feel right around the corner from my ancestors. It helped me understand the woman I wanted to become.”

Deliverance: That’s the transference taking place watching those shows, not simply for viewers but the artist too. It radiated off him in the throes of the act. He was tapping into something sacred, in turn a conduit to the spirits of others. The pastor’s son was always thinking about the soul in soul music, the relationship between Black spirituality and the emotional energy resonating off even its most secular forms. In one backstage scene captured for Devil’s Pie: D’Angelo, during a devotional hallway performance of “I Made A Step” by The Mighty Clouds of Joy amidst his The Second Coming tour (it ended up being his last), it becomes clear that D’Angelo’s music wasn’t so much the temple or the word but the spirit itself. During one show, before hurtling into a truly titanic rendition of “The Charade,” he dedicated the set to Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, all victims of police killings. “All we wanted was a chance to talk / ‘Stead we only got outlined in chalk,” he sings, as if he is merely the medium channeling them. Watch his performance of the song on Saturday Night Live. When he takes his hood down, lets loose that whiplashing note, and then launches into the outro, the soul is a communicable thing.

During D’Angelo’s Verzuz livestream on Instagram in 2021, which chose to set aside the competitive showcase format for something more singular (befitting an artist without equal), the singer took the rare opportunity to treat his distinguished catalog as a place of play. There’s a moment where he segues between “Lady” and “Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine” with a piano cover of Ahmad Jamal’s “I Love Music” as DJ Scratch works in bits of the Nas song that samples it, “The World Is Yours.” Just as they pull off the transition and Scratch cuts to the second Brown Sugar song, their eyes briefly meet, and a wry little grin flashes across D’Angelo’s face. It’s a knowing glance, of the execution aligning with the idea — of the spirit traveling from immaterial force to tangible one across the rhythmic plane. I think of it as an illustration of performing as an act of deliverance for one of the most conscientious artists ever, his perfectionism only ever momentarily sated by the little flow-state moments where the music living in him came out exactly as he imagined. So much of his career was spent trying to harness that rare, raw electric energy. That he bottled it even three times feels like a tremendous miracle.

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Question of the week

D’Angelo’s catalog of studio recordings numbers just three unimpeachable albums. How does he stack up against other artists with a three-album career? Nick Drake? Nirvana? And what do you make of the length of that career — nearly 20 years between his first album and the third?

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