2LP – 180g Vinyl Reissue

Voodoo is the second studio album by the late American musician D’Angelo, released on January 25, 2000, just a few weeks after the new year celebrations that marked the turn of the millennium. But the first great album of the new millennium was born in the 1990s, and its muggy grooves capture the sound of pre-millennial anxiety.

The album is the product of perfectionism, obsession, and paranoia. 1995s debut Brown Sugar had already strategically positioned D’Angelo, bornMichael Eugene Archer and Virginia-raised to a Pentecostal preacher father – as the next Hendrix-like deity in black music, after Prince and maybe Lenny Kravitz. But since its release, D’Angelo had become distracted by weed and weightlifting, he’d been shaken by the deaths of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., and debilitated by sophomore pressure.

In the interim, he’d fathered two children, switched managers, and jumped to a new record label. Though inspired by the birth of his children and trips back to Virginia, Voodoos roots are in 1960s, 70s, and 80s funk and soul; a nostalgic nod to the ideas and inventions of black music trailblazers powered by avant-garde hip-hop and jazz-influenced rhythms.

D’Angelos aim, he said, was to reclaim R&B. He wanted to be like Sly Stone, George Clinton, and Al Green. And most of all, he wanted to be like Jimi Hendrix. Where does a potently focused young man go to remake Electric Ladyland? New Yorks Electric Lady Studios, of course: in the same rooms in which Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Wonder reinvented music decades earlier, and on the same equipment too.

In an era in which soul musicians were obsessing over all things synthetic, D’Angelo was looking to the warm sounds of the past. Electric Ladys Studio C became D’Angelos brand new creative laboratory. The concept behind Voodoo was simple: put together a brilliant ensemble of R&B musicians bent on grooving together. Record them live, in real time, jamming face to face in an effort to capture their conviviality and chemistry.

Tracklist:

A1 Playa Playa
A2 Devil’s Pie
A3 Left & Right

B1 The Line
B2 Send It On
B3 Chicken Grease
B4 One Mo’ Gin

C1 The Root
C2 Spanish Joint
C3 Feel Like Makin’ Love

D1 Greatdayndamornin’ / Booty
D2 Untitled (How Does It Feel)
D3 Africa