In his music, Michael Eugene Archer — D’Angelo, who died on Tuesday at 51 — was supremely assured. He crooned with Olympian ease over unhurried grooves that were full of musicianly details: thick chords, cagey syncopations, call-and-response vocal harmonies. All the musicianship often came from D’Angelo himself, singing and playing and producing.
He could be a one-man studio band in the mold of Prince and Stevie Wonder, overdubbing nearly all the instruments. He had a silken falsetto to rival Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Curtis Mayfield and Al Green. He could also multitrack himself to simulate the collective yowl and cackle of Funkadelic or Sly & the Family Stone. He had voices to convey richly seductive physical pleasures, unwavering devotion and gritty political resistance.
His ear was omnivorous. Funk, gospel, jazz, rock, electronics, hip-hop and every generation of soul and R&B informed songs that crystallized the 1990s movement known as neo-soul. D’Angelo was one focal point in a constellation of musicians and occasional collaborators — Angie Stone, Erykah Badu, Raphael Saadiq, Questlove, J Dilla — who each strove to reconcile organic vintage soul and digital-forward hip-hop. Still, every one of his songs flaunted D’Angelo’s visionary individuality.
D’Angelo’s sonic choices constantly pushed against ease or convention. His mixes turned R&B inside-out; they sounded like deeply clandestine jam sessions, not parties or concerts. His arrangements courted polytonality as they stacked up abstruse chords and phantom vocal harmonies. D’Angelo also ramped up distortion with each of his albums, especially his last one, “Black Messiah,” which arrived 14 years after its predecessor, “Voodoo.”
D’Angelo’s prodigious gifts came with personal troubles: drinking, drugs, self-doubt, vast unfulfilled ambitions. Over a three-decade career, D’Angelo only released three studio albums and a handful of collaborations. That makes each of his completed songs more precious; we can only wonder about how much work he held back.