D’Angelo spent over a decade teasing a follow up album to his 2000’s CD “Voodoo.”
First, a new album was due in 2007. Then 2009. Then 2010, notes Billboard. Then he started touring, for the first time in 10 years, in 2011 and into 2012, airing four solid new songs: “Ain’t That Easy,” “The Charade,” “In Another Life,” and “Sugar Daddy.”
Last week, D’Angelo’s manager, Kevin Liles of KWL Management and a longtime label and branding exec, told Billboard that the wait is almost over.
However, we’ve heard this talk before. ?uestlove – who performed some shows with D’Angelo last year as “Brothers in Arms ”- said in December 2011 that the crooner’s album was “pretty much 97 percent done,” and in January of 2013, he told Billboard that it was “99 percent done.”
D’Angelo turned up at Bonnaroo last weekend, playing covers. And last month, he also gave a 75-minute talk, moderated by veteran journalist Nelson George, at the Brooklyn Museum as part of the Red Bull Music Academy.
In March of 2013, Liles told Billboard, “We’re trying to finish the album. Right now we have 13 songs done, trying to think about the sequence of the album, mastering and mixing within the next two weeks, and release the thing. Ain’t no question it’s coming.”
Judging by that tectonic pace, the album actually should be just about approximately almost 100 percent done right about now. Here’s what Liles said:
“Here’s the thing: with D’Angelo it was a process. He didn’t perform for 10 years and he’s been working on an album for the past 12 years. I actually got him to go out and do 30 shows [in 2011-2012], and then we did some ‘Brothers in Arms’ shows. I said, ‘We have to get motivated around what people want to hear from you, and what does it mean to come back to that space?’ He very bluntly put it, ‘Kev, the studio and the stage: that’s my lifeblood. Now that I’ve touched it again, now that I see it again, I wanna be sure that the baby I’m about to have — the album — that I take it to the point where it’s all it can be.’
“There’ll be an album this year: there’s 14 records so far, we might have a couple of bonus records, but all the recording is basically done and we’re mixing and mastering now. Definitely, he’ll be back.
“We’ll probably start an international tour in October, we’ll come back [to the States]. We’re doing a James Brown tribute in August [at the Hollywood Bowl] and some one-off things. But the touring will probably start in October and 2015.”
Billboard: What’s the album like?
Liles: “To limit it to soul is not the case, because there is a rock influence. But at the same time, it’s very melodic and there’s an influence of all the things he loves: there’s James Brown, there’s Prince, and everything people grew up loving D’Angelo for, from ‘Brown Sugar’ to ‘Voodoo.’ It’s a mixture and an evolution of where he is right now. And you have to think that when you have the opportunity to work 10 years on an album, that album’s truly gonna be what you want it to be. Is it limited to the kind of sound that he did with the earlier records? No, it’s not.”
BB: Does it have a name yet?
KL: “There is a potential name, but I don’t wanna give you a potential name and then change it.”
BB: And it’s definitely coming in 2014?
KL: “Yep. Sooner than later!”
