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Amen! (D'Angelo's Back): The Outtakes
Exclusive extras from Amy Wallace's time with the R&B legend, profiled in the June 2012 issue of GQ
A friend forwarded the breaking news on the first day of December, 2011: after 12 years without a new record or a public performance, after countless false starts and rumored comebacks, D'Angelo was heading to Europe for a mini-tour. Immediately, I sent a pitch to my editors at GQ. Please, I said. Please let me go.
Growing up in southwest Ohio in the 1970s, I'd been steeped in the music that D'Angelo would later love: Marvin Gaye, Earth, Wind & Fire, Parliament, the Isley Brothers, Ohio Players—and, eventually, Prince. When I first heard D's music, I heard those inspirations loud and clear, but I also heard something else—something raw but analytical, sweet but sometimes angry. I was a fan. I wanted to know more about D—and to solve the mystery of where he'd been (and why he'd stayed away) for so long.
That was how I came to be standing outside a sound studio on 11th Avenue in Manhattan late on the night of January 23. D was due to board a plane to Stockholm the next day—this was the final state-side rehearsal—but I hadn't met him yet. The following scene is one of several that didn't make it into the lengthy profile of D'Angelo that appears in the June issue of GQ (when you travel with an artist for a week, from New York to Stockholm to Copenhagen to Paris, you collect a huge amount of material). But if there is one thing about D's fans, it is that their appetite for D-related news has no limit. After all, they've had to go hungry for more than a decade. Herewith, a few outtakes:
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Even through a closed door, D's voice commands attention. We gather, listening, in the lounge outside Montana Studios' fourth floor rehearsal space on 11th Avenue. Dominique Trenier and Kevin Liles, D's managers, are both here. So, too, is Alan Leeds, D's tour manager and resident wise man—he ran D's last tour in 2000 and previously worked with Prince and George Clinton and James Brown. On a TV monitor on the floor, footage of Brown making his signature moves flickers soundlessly—an assistant is burning DVDs of classic soul tracks for D and his band to watch on the tour bus. The plane for Stockholm leaves tomorrow; everyone's getting picked up at noon. At least, that's the plan.
There's a lull, and then a familiar chord progression. It's not one of D's songs, but David Bowie's "Space Oddity." "Ground control to Major Tom," D sings, low and slow, like a rock-and-roll dirge. It's not what anyone would expect from the man who wrote the seductive "Lady," but that's part of the point, and he's making it his. Then, the music stops, and D bursts through the door. Soft-eyed and soft-spoken, he exudes a sweet, almost vulnerable energy. He admits to being nervous. He hoped for six weeks of rehearsals before this tour. He's barely had three. Two of the musicians he wants with him have expired passports—they'll have to be replaced temporarily.
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On fame and its price:
In the dozen years since D'Angelo's last record, many artists have tapped into the transcendent themes that he so memorably explored. Several have gone so far as to proclaim themselves sanctified: Jay Z has long called himself "J H.O.V.A."; Nicki Minaj showed up at this year's Grammys with a faux Pope as her date. D'Angelo, by contrast, was always the uneasy, unwilling prophet.
Even his first album, Brown Sugar, had been audacious—with its references to "Chocolate Thai," has often been presumed to be an ode to the powers of good weed, while "Shit, Damn, Motherf*cker" was as dark and ominous as anything since Sly & the Family Stone's "There's a Riot Goin' On." But D's onstage persona was more muted—it simmered, but didn't burn. D'Angelo looks back on that time with some discomfort. A perfectionist, he wishes he'd had more of an active interplay with the audience. But it all took off so fast, he says. He was confused, he says, by his sudden notoriety, even as he, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu and others were credited with launching the "neo-soul" movement (a label he hates). "It counteracts the very fucking idea of what it was in the first place," he says. "It's black music thinking — it's black music manifested outside of the box. And when you label it neo soul, you're putting it right back in the box. How about you just call me soul music?"
That argument was just one of many D was having in his own head. "I tried to fight, I guess, what typically fame quote-unquote does to people," he says. "I didn't want to stop being, you know, the rambunctious mug that I was, because that's what made my music what it was. It happens to the best of them, you know: At some point in everyone's career, it was like the music lost its bite. I'm like, 'Well, how do you avoid that?'"
"You're some kid from wherever, you get signed, you come out with a record, and boom, you've got money and instant success and there's really no template to follow," he says, recalling how Gary Harris, the EMI exec who'd signed him, gave him a copy of Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, David Ritz's commanding biography. Hungry for guidance, D devoured it in two days. When B.B. King first met the 22-year-old D'Angelo, Vibe magazine reported in 2000, the bluesman remarked that D had an old soul. Says Harris today: "He's the oldest young man you'll ever meet."
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On Voodoo, D's second album:
Tales of the Voodoo recording sessions at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, built by Jimi Hendrix in 1970, have become lore. In addition to D'Angelo, Common and Erykah Badu were also recording there, and after awhile, they were all visiting each other's sessions, offering insights and sharing beats. The studio "was like a college dorm of music," Common recalls—a fertile crescent where new culture could grow.
Instead of writing songs beforehand, as he had on Brown Sugar, D'Angelo was mostly composing in the studio—an expensive way of working that D prefers because he feels it lets him capture a realer, rawer, more immediate sound.
Voodoo was nothing if not raw. Some of the lyrics were mumbled rather than sung, making them hard to hear. But there was something urgent about the music, something at once revelatory and messy, heavenly and earth-bound. In "The Root," he sang of heartbreak: "Left my mojo in my favorite suit...(Yes I did, yeah)/ She left a stain, left a dirty stain in my heart, I can't refute." It wasn't just the honesty of the lyrics that struck me when I first heard the song. It was the pain in his voice. D stood apart from much of hip-hop because his songs and his delivery served up no false braggadocio. He was willing to admit that carnal love had left him not just wounded, but wrecked. And probably would again.
Voodoo wasn't just about getting it on. Spin magazine would call "Devil's Pie," the album's centerpiece, "a sweaty, head-nodding sermon against the evil seduction of hip-hop materialism." But if you ask Angie Stone, the soul diva who was D's girlfriend and songwriting collaborator for a time, she says it was about something simpler: the spell fame casts upon the weak. "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," D'Angelo sings. "Drugs and thugs/ Women wine/Three or four/ At a time/ Watch them stand all in line/For a slice of the devil's pie." Presciently, D'Angelo goes on to chide himself: "Who am I to justify/ All the evil in our eye/ When I myself feel the high/From all that I despise/ Behind the jail or in the grave/I have to lay in this bed I made."
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On how the "fame cycle" of the music business set D'Angelo back:
The guitarist Charlie Hunter, who played on the Voodoo album, says he blames not the "Untitled" video as much as what he calls the broader "fame cycle" of the music business. "There's so much money behind it now that there's very little room for humanity, for specialness," he says. "Who was more human than Aretha Franklin back in the day? You know, a real person who had a real message and whose weight went up and down and who was dealing with stuff." Today, he laments, too much music—and too many popular artists—"are just stamped at the same place in China that they make really cheap plastic toys. If you're someone like D'Angelo—just a music nerd, you know—who's a thinking individual and has some introspection and likes to have real interactions with human beings that aren't based on whether someone better has come into the room, then it's really the wrong place for you to be."
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On Peter Edge, the former A & R man at J Records who is now the CEO of RCA Records, D'Angelo's label:
"He never gave up on me, man," D says. "And I love him for it."
Edge says it's a bet he had to make. "He can do his James Brown-influenced funk man thing. There are elements of Hendrix. And B.B. King. And obviously Prince. But he's never predictable. It's not like suddenly there's gonna be three other D'Angelos, and we're going to be like, 'Oh, well, we could have invested in these three guys.' He's worth investing in because there's nobody like him."
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On what it was like for D to perform in Stockholm in January, his first concert in more than a decade:
"It was scary," D will tell me later, reflecting on playing the guitar in public for the first time. "I would feel comfortable when I was by myself, but actually getting onstage and playing was a different thing. My friend Raphael Saadiq was like, 'Yo, man, you've just got to jump in. Start swimming. Just jump in the pool, you know?' It was good advice. I was nervous up until the point where we started playing and singing, and then it just felt—it felt cool."
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On Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's role in D's career:
D asked Questlove to help him come up with the playlist for the European tour, just as D had asked for his help on his upcoming album. Like anything D-related, that took a lot of time (Questlove calls D'Angelo's painstaking process "beautifully frustrating"). Since the Roots drummer has a day job now (he's the bandleader on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon), most of the work on the album has had to be done between the hours of 2:30 a.m. and 6 a.m. After one seven-week stretch of pre-dawn sessions and little sleep, an exhausted Questlove contracted coxsackie virus. He wouldn't hesitate, he says, to do it again.
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On D's upcoming third album:
Despite assurances that it's 97-percent done, D hasn't locked his third. Not yet. In Europe, he unveiled several songs he thinks will be on it. In addition to "Ain't That Easy" and the irresistible dance number, "Sugar Daddy," there is a song Questlove compares to Herbie Hancock called "The Charade." "Crawling through a systematic maze to demise," it begins, and D sings the line with a seething fury. When I catch a reference to "the deceiver," I can't help but think: this song—twisted, almost atonal, multi-layered—is about that forked-tongued devil, Fame.
D says I'm wrong. "It's about the disenfranchised," he says. "It's telling the powers that be, 'This is why we are justified in our stance.' There's another song on the album called 'A Thousand Deaths' that is the flip side of the coin. 'A Thousand Deaths' is just a fucking war cry. You know what I mean? The beheadings have commenced." It occurs to me that the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831, in which slaves rose up and killed more than 50 white people, the only sustained slave rebellion in the South's history, took place in D's home state of Virginia. "Ain't no justice/It's just us/Ash to ashes/Dust to dust," D sang so insistently on Voodoo. I am beginning to get what he means.
I ask someone who has a closely-guarded copy to let me hear "1000 Deaths." It is dark, dense and mysterious and makes the most of D's newfound prowess on the guitar. The lead vocal is so distorted—like the moans and groans of a Negro spiritual—that D could almost be speaking in tongues. The song is compelling, maybe even profound, but it is the opposite of catchy. That's just fine with D. He tells me art, not commerce, is his fuel.
http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/201206/dangelo-gq-june-2012-interview-outtakes#ixzz1vpEmWV5J _____________________
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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali
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