D'Angelo swaps pipe for mic

Back when myself and Beat King were dropping knowledge and science at various nightspots, our sets usually included the only R&B cat out there at the time with any street cred: the supremely talented D'Angelo. This was around the time he dropped that Brown Sugar album, which blew a lot of people away because it was all produced, mixed, composed, arranged, engineered, pressed and whatever else by D'Angelo himself.

Then the man's second album kept getting "pushed back", which is pretty much code for "smoking too much weed". Except it must have been a mountain of the stuff given that Voodoo only came out 6 years later. The album was pretty good, even if - apart from the DJ Premier beat - every track sounded the same. And since then...nothing. Apart from this arrest on some Whitney & Bobby type drama.

And now, it appears D'Angelo is back with a new track, ahead of a new album. You can't say he doesn't know the value of pacing himself. Still, the good folk at okayplayer.com aren't completely convinced. 1995-era heads tend to view D'Angelo as a kind of cross between Prince and the prophet Moses. So John Legend better be ready.