There is a moment on “Playa Playa,” roughly ninety seconds in, where the groove locks so deep into itself that you stop whatever you were doing and just stand there in your own kitchen, holding a glass of water, waiting for it to release you. It doesn’t.
Voodoo took four years. D’Angelo went into Electric Lady in New York with Questlove sitting behind the kit, and what came out the other side wasn’t an album so much as a séance — Prince and Sly Stone and Marvin Gaye all in the room, none of them dominating, the whole thing breathing like something alive.
The Session
Questlove is the reason this record sounds the way it does. He and D’Angelo essentially moved into Electric Lady, logging marathon sessions that stretched into mornings, chasing a feel rather than a tempo. The drums were recorded to sit slightly behind the beat — intentionally, almost provocatively late — which gives Voodoo that liquid, underwater quality where nothing seems to land exactly where you expect it to, and yet nothing ever feels wrong.
Russell Elevado engineered the sessions, and his fingerprints are all over the warmth of this thing. He ran signals through vintage outboard gear, favored tape, and worked with D’Angelo to build a sound that felt genuinely anachronistic — not retro as a pose, but retro as a sincere belief system. The bass sits in your chest on a good system. Charlie Hunter played guitar on several tracks. Roy Hargrove brought his trumpet and flugelhorn. Pino Palladino, already a legend, showed up and made the low end even more elastic.
The personnel list reads like a fantasy session: Raphael Saadiq, Method Man, Redman, STS, Ahmir Thompson engineering alongside Elevado on certain sessions. This was a community making a record, not a pop star assembling features.
The Songs
“Left & Right” has no business being that funky. The way Method Man and Redman ride over that groove sounds effortless, which means it took forever. “The Line” is quieter, almost hymnal, D’Angelo’s voice stacked into a choir of himself, the arrangement so spare it feels dangerous.
“Spanish Joint” is, in my opinion, the most sophisticated piece of popular music released in the year 2000. Full stop. The chord movement, the percussion, the way his vocal sits against it — there’s a reason musicians talk about this record in a different register than they talk about most things.
And then there’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” which exists in its own category. One of those songs where the production decision — that much space, that little percussion, just voice and chords and a slowly unwinding arrangement — was either going to be the greatest instinct in recent R&B or a disaster. It was the former by a considerable margin.
Voodoo won the Grammy for Best R&B Album. D’Angelo didn’t make another record for fourteen years. Some albums close a door behind them.