The D’Angelo Song I’m Listening To Again and Again

“I'm not surprised to find that angels compete for the chance to lay down at your feet”

More from Hung Up this week: A chat about the newest Love Is Blind drop, and a Taylor Swift album ranking…

D’Angelo performs “Devil’s Pie” at the 2000 MTV Movie Awards. (Photo: Ken Hively/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

I’m sure I wasn’t allowed to listen to “Voodoo” as a child, but I was allowed to look at the cover. D’Angelo, stunning, vulnerable and inscrutable; his second album’s title on the edge, white text on a block of red, a font I still have trouble making out. I remember passing that album a hundred times, looking through Auntie’s CD collection next to the stereo downstairs. (I was looking for Whitney Houston, probably, or Mariah Carey.) I remember it in my mom’s car! For that reason, he could feel both inherited and still like my own discovery: I found D’Angelo again on my own when I was a freshman in college, and two years later “Black Messiah” came out in 2014. I read a GQ story with a three-word headline so giddy that it had me in a trance: “Amen! (D’Angelo’s Back).” Listening to D’Angelo made me feel adult, and sexy, and part of a grand music tradition: Prince, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Teddy Pendergrass.

“Black Messiah” is outstandingly, audaciously flawless. Has a body of work, or a musician, ever delivered on a title so completely? D’Angelo’s voice drifts and twists through blues, through soul, through jazz, through funk, through rock. It doesn’t remake his earlier albums “Brown Sugar” and “Voodoo,” but builds on them: “Stay with me, that’s all you gotta do,” he asks on the album-opener “Ain’t That Easy.” On “1000 Deaths,” a sermon blasts on top of a jam session. It sounds like an answer to the abyss of conflicting loyalties on “Devil’s Pie.” God, he says, “musta didna heard my prayer / I receive everything that it means / And wield it victoriously.” An album highlight is “Really Love,” which gently declares a devotion that feels as complete as it is natural. Sometimes I listen to this song, and it doesn’t even sound recorded; it’s so intimate that it sounds overheard.