D'Angelo - Voodoo

For two years D'Angelo essentially lived at Electric Lady Studios, the room Jimi Hendrix built, running sessions that ran all night with whoever happened to be around. The Soulquarians orbit formed there. Nobody worked to a click. Everything went straight to analog tape, live, with the band playing slightly behind the beat on purpose until the whole record developed a drunken, dragging pulse that no one had put on an R&B album before. Voodoo came out January 25, 2000, and R&B has been reckoning with it ever since.

The debts are worn openly. James Brown, the Meters, Sly Stone, Hendrix, Kool and the Gang, anyone who ever took a real risk with a groove. Questlove plays drums across most of it, Pino Palladino handles bass, Roy Hargrove writes and plays the horn arrangements, Charlie Hunter adds guitar, and Method Man and Redman turn up on "Left and Right." "Chicken Grease" and "Devil's Pie" hit hardest, "The Root" stretches out, and "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" became the song and the video that made D'Angelo famous in a way he spent the next decade recovering from.

It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, sold 320,000 copies in its first week, topped the Top R&B Albums chart, and stayed on the charts for thirty-three weeks. At the 2001 Grammys it won Best R&B Album, and "Untitled" won Best Male R&B Vocal Performance. It has appeared on essentially every credible list of the greatest albums of its era since.

This CD edition presents the full album. The record that redefined what soul music could sound like, and still the standard everything after it gets measured against.