Brown Sugar
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: T...