Dear D’Angelo Please Come Back – John Mayer

I was in the middle of writing the below when my WhatsApp music group ” Musicology” was going off.

I haven’t updated my site in a while, so having a moment to add a few more words was important. But friends are more important, so I pick up my phone and open WhatsApp. At first, I was overjoyed, thinking that D’Angelo was touring and making a 2nd stop here in Toronto. But upon reading it carefully, my heart dropped. “Soul Legend D’Angelo Passes Away After Private Battle With Pancreatic Cancer”.

UGH!?

2 sons and a daughter survive the singer. The mother of his first son was singer Angie Stone, who died tragically this year in a car accident.

So, as I now go to celebrate the life of an R&B Legend, here is the brief article I was writing.

The worst thing musically about anything past 2000 is just that music and thus many of us started to become fragmented about our music collection and listening.

The one thing I am finding out here in 2024 is that there were many things that I totally missed out on.

There are songs and albums that I’m just now discovering from some of by favourite artist. I usually find out about them either by reading a music article or by watching an unrelated YouTube clip.

This brings me to D’Angelo and John Mayer two artists that I have such respect for in their own right but to most would almost have nothing in common with each other

DEAR D’ANGELO,

My name is John Mayer. You might know me from that “Your Body Is a Wonderland” song, or perhaps our mutual friend, Roots drummer Questlove, mentioned me to you. I’m writing to ask you to put out a follow-up to one of the few records to change my life forever, Voodoo.

When Voodoo came out in 2000, I stood in line at Tower Records in Atlanta at midnight to get it. Turns out, it set the gold standard for modern “neo” soul music. It’s 2004, and I’m no less excited by it today than I was when I played it full blast in my mother’s Plymouth Voyager on the way to my bullshit job. I drive a nicer car now, but I still listen to Voodoo and wonder what my albums would sound like if I took a bite off your style and what R&B would be like if you came back.

In contrast to the present age of gunmetal-gray hip-hop, with perfectly aligned beats and blips, Voodoo throbs. It’s skin in the place of plastic. Questlove’s drums serve as an atomic clock, while Pino Palladino’s bass playing taunts the drums by showing the bar line just how late it can wake up and still arrive to work on time. I’m not even going to detail your impeccable vocal layering. You know what you did.

Yes, Voodoo isn’t laced with perfect pop hooks, but then again it’s so devoid of them that I never assumed you were worried about appeasing radio anyway. Its beauty is simplicity, a Japanese rock garden of hip-hop and R&B, and it’s because of the negative space that I can still listen to it. There’s nothing frivolous to get stuck in your head, so there’s nothing to want out.

If you haven’t recently committed any of yourself to tape, I’m begging you to put your suit and cape back on. Your contemporaries aren’t going to ask you to come back; they’re scared of having to be perched next to you. Only a lanky white boy like me can call you out of hiding. And if you need any help with those tunes, you know who to call. Questlove’s got my number.