Milestones: Brown Sugar by D’Angelo

Armed with a Marvin Gaye-like honeyed croon and the streetwise swagger of a rapper, the young D’Angelo channeled the spirit of 1970s soul through a 1990s lens.

Courtesy of Virgin Records America Inc.

In the mid-1990s, a 21-year-old Michael “D’Angelo” Archer unfolded from Richmond, Virginia, with an album that would recalibrate the course of R&B. Brown Sugar is a masterful blend of contemporary hip-hop attitude and vintage soul sensibilities. It’s an album soaked in organic warmth, the sound of a small club combo jamming deep into the night, yet it carries the streetwise swagger of modern rap. Classic in its gospel-tinged melodies and analog grooves, yet boldly current with looped beats and blunt lyrics. This perfect fusion didn’t happen by accident. It was the result of D’Angelo’s unique upbringing in the church, his immersion in hip-hop, and a deliberate effort to craft “real” music in an era dominated by digitized R&B. The outcome was a debut record that not only set a high bar for the artist’s own future work but also helped ignite a new movement in modern soul music.

Raised by the son of a Pentecostal preacher, D’Angelo absorbed the sounds of gospel early on and taught himself piano as a small child. By his teens, he was equally drawn to the secular “devil’s music” his family once forbade, devouring classic soul records and experimenting with hip-hop. In high school, he formed a band, Michael Archer and Precise, and honed his talents at local talent shows. The pivotal moment came at Harlem’s Apollo Theater: in 1991, the soft-spoken kid from Richmond wowed the notoriously tough Amateur Night audience. After an initial stumble, he returned to win first place multiple times, earning $500 and a burst of confidence. “When they said I won, I went off,” he recalled of that first victory; he rode the bus back to Virginia wide awake, already scheming his next moves. With his prize money, he bought a four-track recorder and got to work writing songs in his bedroom. In his own words, “I wanted to make an album.” This DIY mindset and determination to create something authentic would later infuse Brown Sugar with its singular vibe.

Invigorated by the Apollo wins, D’Angelo dropped out of school to pursue music full-time. He briefly joined a local rap group called I.D.U. (Intelligent, Deadly but Unique), reflecting his deep love of hip-hop’s gritty sound and rhythm. A trip to New York to seek a record deal for the group proved fateful, as the label executives passed on I.D.U., but D’Angelo’s individual talent struck them. In 1991, he signed a publishing deal, and two years later, after a legendary three-hour impromptu piano audition that left execs floored, he landed a recording contract with EMI Records. Industry veteran Gary Harris championed the young songwriter, and Kedar Massenburg, who would later coin the term “neo-soul,” came on as his manager. D’Angelo was now positioned to develop the album he’d been dreaming up. Rather than rush him into formulaic studio sessions, Harris encouraged the 19-year-old to woodshed back home in Richmond, writing and crafting demos at his own pace. The budding artist obliged, holing up in his mother’s house with that four-track recorder. “I didn’t want to overproduce the shit,” he said of those early demo sessions. “I wanted it to sound raw, not real polished. Soul music is not limited, because there’s so much blues and gospel in it. I tried to stay true to that.” In those solitary hours, D’Angelo wrote much of Brown Sugar’s material, laying the groundwork for an album that would feel at once raw and refined.

Even before his album dropped, he was making waves behind the scenes. In 1994, he earned his first major songwriting credit by co-writing and co-producing “U Will Know” for the R&B supergroup Black Men United. The track, featuring an all-star lineup of male vocalists (from Boyz II Men to Brian McKnight and a young Usher), appeared on the Jason’s Lyric soundtrack and became a hit. In the song’s music video, D’Angelo himself makes a cameo, fittingly as the choir director for the assembled singers. That same year, he contributed a song to an even more unexpected project: the Boys Choir of Harlem. D’Angelo wrote and produced “Overjoyed” (a Stevie Wonder cover) for the choir’s album The Sound of Hope, adding to the growing buzz around his talents. He also lent his touch to the group Vertical Hold, an R&B outfit that included the late singer Angie Stone, who was then both his musical mentor and romantic partner. D’Angelo added keyboards and vocals to “Pray” on Vertical Hold’s 1995 album, Head First, subtly intertwining his gospel-rooted style with their contemporary R&B sound. These early credits—writing for a supergroup of R&B stars, arranging music for a renowned choir, and collaborating with established artists—showcased D’Angelo’s versatility. By the time he officially entered the studio to record Brown Sugar in 1994, he was already a seasoned student of soul music, fluent in both its sacred and secular dialects.

When the album finally arrived in the summer of 1995, it was clear that D’Angelo had taken his time to get it right. He recorded the album over several months in New York studios, including Battery and RPM, as well as a Sacramento spot humorously dubbed “Pookie Lab.” The young auteur handled the lion’s share of production, instrumentation, and songwriting himself, blending vintage recording equipment with modern electronic tools. In practice, this meant D’Angelo might use an old Fender Rhodes keyboard or tube microphone to capture that warm, analog vibe, then loop a drum pattern on his Ensoniq sampler to give it hip-hop grit. “My music is left of mainstream, but not too abstract,” he said at the time, a nod to his goal of marrying accessibility with innovation. The finished songs indeed fused contemporary R&B and traditional soul, with elements of funk, jazz, and quiet-storm balladry swirling together. He mostly explored love and romance with earnestness, but he did so through a streetwise lens, using raw language or urban storytelling where an earlier generation might have kept things clean. This blend of the sacred and profane, the old-school and the new-school, gave Brown Sugar its distinct identity.

The album’s opening title track, “Brown Sugar,” set the template. Co-written and co-produced with A Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad, the song initially appears to be a sultry love ode, and many listeners interpreted it in that way. In reality, D’Angelo was cleverly crooning about his love for marijuana—“brown sugar” being a metaphor for the intoxicating lure of weed. With its lazy horns and smoky Rhodes chords, the track instantly evokes the atmosphere of a hazy jazz lounge, conjuring images of cigar smoke and low lights. Yet underneath that nostalgic veneer is a very modern groove: a looped hip-hop breakbeat and a thick bassline that make your head nod. D’Angelo’s vocal approach on “Brown Sugar” was groundbreaking for R&B at the time; he half-sings, half-raps the verses in a relaxed murmur, sliding in and out of falsetto while riding the beat’s pocket. That vocal rhythm, combined with the song’s programmed yet organic drum loop, showcased the influence of gritty rap producers like Marley Marl and the Bomb Squad on his soul music. “Brown Sugar” was blunt (in both senses) and smooth all at once: an old-school soul song structure laced with hip-hop attitude. It gradually caught fire on R&B radio, lulling listeners into its sedated groove before they even realized D’Angelo wasn’t actually singing about a woman at all. The sly subversion was intentional—he delivered a “lady-friendly” jam that doubled as an inside joke for those savvy to the slang. More importantly, it announced D’Angelo as an R&B auteur with one foot in the past and one firmly in the present.

The rest of Brown Sugar reinforces this balancing act. After the mellow opener, D’Angelo kicks up the tempo with “Alright,” perhaps the album’s most upbeat track. Co-produced by veteran engineer Bob Power, “Alright” pairs D’Angelo’s confident vows of devotion with a bright, optimistic funk groove. Its brisk drums even nod toward the breakbeat-driven energy of ‘90s club music, one can hear a slight drum-and-bass influence in the fast hi-hat ticks and snare patterns. Yet D’Angelo’s instrumentation keeps it soulful: elastic bass plucks, jazzy keyboards, and layered harmonies anchor the song in warm R&B tradition. “Alright” shows that while Brown Sugar isn’t a one-note retro affair, it can get contemporary and danceable without resorting to the synthetic, cookie-cutter formulas that dominated mid-‘90s R&B.

D’Angelo’s deep reverence for 1970s soul comes through vividly on slower cuts like “Jonz in My Bonz” and “Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine.” On “Jonz in My Bonz,” he channels the erotic spirituality of Marvin Gaye. Over quivering electric piano chords and measured kicks/snare hits, D’Angelo purrs the phrase “I got a jonz in my bonz,” a slangy, street twist on saying he has an ache in his soul. In fact, “Jonz in My Bonz” was co-written with Angie Stone, who had a hand in guiding D’Angelo’s early career. The song’s blend of hip, urban vernacular (“jonz” for craving, “bonz” for bones) with lush, jazzy instrumentation is a prime example of the nascent neo-soul formula. As Pleezy Brown noted, it “serves as a pillar of the neo-soul template, pairing street-wise terms and urban ideology with lush, jazz-inspired instrumentation.”

D’Angelo was effectively updating the classic soul ballad for a new generation: the seduction and heartfelt emotion were there, but so was a modern sensibility in the lyrics and groove. “Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine” likewise finds him in romantic crooner mode, fantasizing about love with a delicate, almost Stevie Wonder-esque touch. He actually wrote “Dreamin’ Eyes” years earlier as a teenager in Richmond, and its dreamy, lustrous vibe harkens back to that era of pure inspiration. The track’s arrangement—stacked vocal harmonies, silky rhythm guitar, and bubbling bass—is straight out of the Motown/Philly Soul playbook, and D’Angelo’s falsetto here owes much to Marvin Gaye’s influence. Listening to it, one might momentarily forget that this album came out in the ‘90s, until a subtle hip-hop sensibility reminds you with the relaxed swing of the drums or the conversational phrasing of the bridge.

Then there is “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker,” the song that most bluntly bridges the sacred and profane on Brown Sugar. Built on a slow-rolling, bluesy riff and organ swells that sound like they drifted out of a Southern church, the track initially feels like a quiet storm soul number, until you pay attention to the lyrics. In a raw, conversational tone, D’Angelo recounts discovering his wife in bed with his best friend and contemplates murderous revenge. “Why are you sleepin’ with my woman?” he asks, voice thick with hurt and rage, before tersely muttering the three-word title as an explosive expletive. As the scenario unfolds (“All I saw was you and her in the shower...”), the song’s genteel façade gives way to something darker as we’re pulled into the mind of a man on the verge of a crime of passion. It’s a startling thematic turn for an R&B album, yet D’Angelo executes it brilliantly. The genius of “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker” is how it fuses a blues narrative (infidelity and betrayal could be straight from a vintage B.B. King tune) with a gangsta edge (fantasizing about a pistol “and one of us got to die”), all delivered over a groove smooth enough to two-step to. Indeed, you can hear echoes of Al Green or Bobby Womack in the song’s DNA, but no soul singer of their era would have titled a track so explicitly. D’Angelo pushes the envelope, proving that the new soul could be just as gritty and “street” as the hip-hop that informed it, without losing musicality.

D’Angelo’s respect for R&B legends also led him to tackle a bold cover on this album: Smokey Robinson’s 1979 hit “Cruisin’.” Covering an icon like Smokey is always risky, but D’Angelo pulled it off in style. His version of “Cruisin’” honors the original’s mellow, romantic spirit; he keeps it a tender, slow jam perfect for a late-night drive, while also subtly updating it with his rhythmic weight and texture. The instrumentation is a touch more modern: the drums are a bit more pronounced and bass-heavy, while the electric piano is given a shimmering prominence. When he sings, D’Angelo’s tone is hushed and sensual, clearly paying homage to Smokey’s silky delivery. But he allows himself a bit of improvisational freedom in the ad-libs and extends the groove, effectively infusing the classic with his own vibe. Many felt his cover gave the original “a run for its money” by putting a fresh spin on one of Motown’s signature love songs. It’s telling that Brown Sugar’s only non-original track fits so seamlessly alongside D’Angelo’s compositions—“Cruisin’” with its nostalgic Motown melody and D’Angelo’s updated production becomes another vehicle for blending eras. In the context of the album, the song further roots Brown Sugar in soul’s rich lineage (a nod to Smokey) while demonstrating D’Angelo’s ability to bridge generations.

The making of “Lady” began four years before Brown Sugar reached store shelves. Raphael Saadiq wrote the chorus in a Connecticut hotel lobby, then found he couldn’t place the tune with anyone until a session at his Sacramento home studio, Pookie Lab, where D’Angelo walked in, heard the progression, and asked to finish it on the spot. They spent the next few days trading ideas, ordering food, and recording in an atmosphere Saadiq compared to “a pickup game with your boy.” D’Angelo insisted on singing every background part himself; when Saadiq returned, the lush vocal stack was already printed to tape, and both men knew they had something special. That garage session produced the track that would become D’Angelo’s first gold single and a gateway for new listeners to the album’s analog-soul world. The harmony feels deceptively simple, yet every chord change invites a fresh melodic twist: D’Angelo’s Fender Rhodes chords bloom around Saadiq’s guitar stabs, while a round, three-note bass riff locks the groove in place. Those details, combined with the tight drum shuffle and stacked harmonies, give the song a buoyant lift that bridges church chord voicings and hip-hop head-nod.

On paper, the lyric begins with a direct, almost bashful declaration—“You’re my lady, you’re my lady”—yet a closer read shows an undercurrent of doubt. The narrator spends as much time reassuring himself as he does praising his partner, a dynamic Peter Shapiro once described as “bohemian soul emphasizing insecurity.” That tension drives the call-and-response bridge, where the lead vocal hovers just behind the beat while the background stack answers in crisp unison, creating a push-pull that feels both intimate and slightly unsettled. Rather than resolving that unease with a triumphant modulation or ad-libbed climax, D’Angelo lets the groove ride out, trusting the listener to sit with desire and vulnerability in equal measure. There’s also a DJ Premier-remixed version of “Lady” featuring AZ, where Premier adds his signature boom-bap drums and scratches, and rapper AZ drops a suave verse. In Premier’s hands, “Lady” transforms from a sultry soul number into a head-nodding hip-hop soul jam, perfectly illustrating the era’s cross-pollination.

Deep cuts like “When We Get By” and the album’s closer “Higher” make the gospel influence in D’Angelo’s music even more explicit. Both songs could score a Sunday church service just as easily as a Saturday night jam session. “When We Get By” rides a gentle, mid-tempo groove with a buoyant bassline, but it’s the chord progressions and the rousing chorus vocals that give it a distinct gospel sway. There’s a sense of uplift and community in the refrain, almost like a congregation singing together. Small wonder that observers noted how “When We Get By” (along with “Higher”) brings to mind church processionals, with gospel-influenced instrumentation and layered choral harmonies. D’Angelo’s background in the Pentecostal church comes full circle in these moments, as he channels the devotional intensity and call-and-response feel of his religious upbringing into love songs that sound like hymns for the heart.

On “Higher,” the spiritual theme is even more overt. Over a slow-burning organ and a steady, sparse drum beat, D’Angelo testifies about love lifting him “higher.” By the song’s climax, his voice soars in multi-tracked choir mode, reaching for the rafters. Fittingly, he enlisted an old friend, his drummer, Ralph Rolle, who had played with him in earlier days, providing the steady, church-revival backbeat. The album begins with worldly pleasure (“Brown Sugar,” “Jonz in My Bonz”), descends into sin and pain (“Shit, Damn, Motherfucker”), and ascends with redemption and hope (“Higher”). Yet through it all, whether he’s singing about flesh or spirit, D’Angelo maintains a consistent sound and vibe—one that’s organically soulful, warmly analog, and unmistakably rooted in Black musical tradition, from blues to gospel to funk.

If Brown Sugar feels so cohesive, much credit goes to the album’s sonic architects: D’Angelo himself, of course, but also the engineers and producers who helped shape its radiant sound. The project’s engineering was principally handled by Bob Power and Russell Elevado, two figures revered for their work in hip-hop and soul. Bob Power was a seasoned studio hand known for A Tribe Called Quest’s classic albums, and D’Angelo specifically sought him out, admiring the earthy yet clean quality of those Tribe records. Power came on board and served as a kind of audio consigliere to the young artist. He recalls that D’Angelo’s home demos were “fucking amazing”—raw but full of cool, quirky magic that they wanted to preserve. “The challenge of working on Brown Sugar was figuring out how to make the material into a record without losing the cool shit,” Power later explained. In practice, Power co-produced several tracks (including “Alright,” “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker,” and “Dreamin’ Eyes”) and mixed roughly six or seven of the album’s songs.

His touch is evident in the record’s clarity and balance: the drums knock, the bass is rounded, and D’Angelo’s layered vocals are given ample warmth and space in the mix. Crucially, Bob Power understood D’Angelo’s vision of warmth with grit. He used analog techniques where possible to avoid a sterile sound. “I just helped him make a record the way I know how to make a quality record: warm, fat, and present,” Power said, rejecting the notion that the songs were simply “smoothed out.” Indeed, Brown Sugar doesn’t sound slick in the way many mid-’90s R&B albums do—it sounds alive. Power’s mixing ensured that even the rough textures in D’Angelo’s arrangements came across as polished but never plastic. For instance, the little distortions or “dusty” quality in certain tracks were part of the charm, and he left those intact when they served the groove. He also wasn’t above getting his hands dirty as a musician: Power contributed some guitar parts on “Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine” (replaying a keyboard line on guitar for extra bite) and added funky wah-wah guitar licks on “Alright” in the spirit of Motown session greats. His collaborative spirit and technical expertise gave Brown Sugar much of its luscious sonic character.

Midway through the album’s making, however, D’Angelo’s notorious perfectionism tested Bob Power’s patience. Studio sessions would be scheduled, and D, a night owl and free spirit, often drifted in hours late or not at all. What took a typical artist days might take D’Angelo weeks. “It took us six to eight months to complete six songs,” Power remembered, noting that D’Angelo was “habitually late” and often more comfortable working alone at his own pace. Eventually, after finishing the bulk of the album, Power bowed out of the project due to other commitments, essentially handing over the keys for the final stretch. At that point, another engineer, Russell Elevado, stepped in to finish mixing the remaining songs. Elevado would later become integral to D’Angelo’s team (especially on his next album, Voodoo), but on Brown Sugar, he was the new guy trying to match an established vibe.

According to Elevado, when he sat down to mix “Lady” and a couple of other tracks, he had some ideas to make the sound even rawer, adding a touch of distortion here or there to give a “rawer” feel. D’Angelo was intrigued but ultimately told him they couldn’t stray too far. “We have to match Bob Power’s sound. He’s already mixed seven of my songs,” D reminded him. In other words, Brown Sugar already had a sonic identity, warm, rich, perhaps a bit cleaner than D’Angelo’s original demos, and they needed to maintain continuity. Elevado respected this, and the finished album indeed sounds cohesive from the first track to the last. But that conversation between D’Angelo and Russell Elevado planted a seed that would bloom later. They began discussing the possibility of creating a record in the future that would fully embrace the rawness and “dirt” that Brown Sugar only hinted at.

The true triumph of Brown Sugar, however, isn’t just in its period flavor or its commercial accolades, but in how the album altered the trajectory of Black music. In an era when R&B was becoming increasingly digitized and influenced by hip-hop production, Brown Sugar struck a stunning balance. It proved that youthful, “street” sensibilities could coexist with the warmth of classic soul music in a commercially viable record. Alongside contemporaries like Tony! Toni! Toné! and Meshell Ndegeocello, who were also blending live instrumentation with modern grooves, D’Angelo spearheaded a return to real musicianship in R&B. As one EMI executive observed, D’Angelo’s sound was unconventional for mixing “Southern church music on top of jazzy hip-hop”—something that might have been dismissed as too “country” or old-fashioned by some, yet came off as progressive and fresh.

The success of Brown Sugar (eventually becoming a platinum-selling and Grammy-nominated album) gave record labels the confidence to invest in other artists with a similar aura. Almost immediately, a wave of albums from young, like-minded Black artists followed. Kedar Massenburg, having seen Brown Sugar hit with audiences hungry for depth, famously coined the term “neo-soul” to market this movement. In the next few years, Erykah Badu’s Baduizm, Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, and Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation all arrived, each deeply indebted to the path D’Angelo helped pave. The term “neo-soul” essentially signified R&B that looked back to move forward, exactly what Brown Sugar exemplified, though D’Angelo himself often rejected the label. “Once you put a name on something, you put it in a box,” he would say, insisting that he never called his music neo-soul: “When I came out, I said I make Black music.” To him, Brown Sugar was less about inventing a new genre and more about reclaiming the breadth of what R&B could be. It drew from the past (soul, blues, gospel) but wasn’t stuck there; it embraced the present (hip-hop, contemporary grooves) but wasn’t pandering to trends.

This philosophy resonated widely. As singer India.Arie later reflected, artists like her were “just young Black artists looking for wider musical parameters to express ourselves,” and Brown Sugar embodied that spirit of expansion. She praised the album’s blend of strong songwriting, singing, and production, calling it a classic that in some ways even outshone D’Angelo’s more experimental second album. Fellow soul revivalist Anthony Hamilton put it succinctly: “Brown Sugar is a great album that is very critical to the history of soul music. All these years after its initial release, it’s still an influence. After Brown Sugar, there was no turning back.” In launching D’Angelo’s career, the album also launched a broader cultural shift—suddenly it was cool again for R&B to have live horns, Fender Rhodes, deeply personal lyrics, and that slow-cooked feel. In many ways, the ripples are still felt in today’s music, whenever an R&B record opts for organic authenticity over computerized slickness.

For D’Angelo personally, Brown Sugar set a benchmark he was determined to exceed. The album’s triumph brought him fame, perhaps more than he was ready to handle, and it also brought the realization that he’d have to evolve or risk repeating himself. Rather than churn out a quick follow-up to capitalize on the buzz, D’Angelo took his time (nearly five years) to craft Voodoo, ensuring it would be a leap forward, not just a rehash. In interviews, he admitted that after Brown Sugar, he grappled with writer’s block and the pressure of sudden stardom. He saw lesser artists try to copy his style, and it only strengthened his resolve to push the music into uncharted territory rather than compete in the commercialization of what he’d started. This mindset in itself is a testament to how Brown Sugar set the bar: it was so accomplished that the only way to follow it was to break the mold it created. When Voodoo finally arrived, it reaped the rewards of that risk, but without Brown Sugar laying the foundation, Voodoo’s experimental genius might not have had an audience ready to receive it. D’Angelo’s debut had educated listeners to trust him, to trust the groove, even if it went against the grain of mainstream R&B.

Despite this, Brown Sugar remains an incredibly enjoyable listen from start to finish, devoid of filler, with its tracks flowing naturally from one vibe to the next. There’s a live-club intimacy to it, close your eyes and you can almost feel the band in the pocket, the clink of glasses in the background, yet it’s meticulously crafted and passionately sung. It’s easy to hear why many consider it one of the last great pure soul albums of the 20th century. By fusing the gritty beats and attitude of rap with the melody, musicianship, and heart of classic soul, D’Angelo created something enduring and era-defining. Brown Sugar opened the door for a new generation of soul artists to walk through, but even after all these years, few have strolled as confidently or as coolly as D did on this debut. The record set a standard for D’Angelo, for neo-soul, for modern R&B that still challenges artists to match its honesty and its groove. And as that fat bassline and smoky melody of the title track continue to seduce new listeners, it’s clear that Brown Sugar hasn’t aged a day. It remains the sweet spot where yesterday’s soul and tomorrow’s funk meet, mingle, and slow dance long into the night.

Masterpiece (★★★★★)