Brown Sugar

Album ∙ R&B/Soul ∙ 1995

D'Angelo

D’Angelo is a kaleidoscope of towering musicians: the founding father of neo-soul, the black Messiah, a tabloid star. But way back when he released Brown Sugar, his 1995 debut, he was a 20-year-old kid who'd spent several years barricaded in his bedroom in his mom’s house in Virginia with the music that mattered most to him: Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Prince, A Tribe Called Quest. And then he came up with Brown Sugar, a crazy haze of sound that points in a dozen different directions but stays in tight orbit around him: a new voice, a genius, a fan, and a geek.

The album enlists a then-revolutionary hybrid of modern studio tech and defective analog cast-offs. And when the computer crashed in the tiny New Jersey studio where he was recording one day, D’Angelo killed 20 minutes by pounding out some vamped keyboard chords, coproducer Ali Shaheed Muhammad programmed a beat, and then they stared at each other in shock: The record's dazzling title tune had just come into being.

Though D’Angelo had seemingly plotted it all out for years in his bedroom, he was ready to wing it, too—he is a master student who is quick to experiment. He plays most of the instruments here, and did most of the songwriting, arranging, and producing. But what you hear most intensely is the singer. Auto-Tune wouldn’t be invented for another two years, and while the world waited it listened to Brown Sugar, a showcase for the unprotected human voice, cracking and in congress with itself in overdubbed layers and regularly flying free. The sound is meditative (“Jonz in My Bonz”), intense (“S**t, Damn, M**********r”), a quiet storm in his head (“Cruisin”). It resides with itself. On an album steeped in influences and layered with voices, in the end there is only D’Angelo.