D’Angelo: The Last Soul Man

On a late October evening, an unrecognizable number appeared on the phone. “Hello, Keith… it’s Dyana… Dyana Williams,” said the woman with the warm voice. “I’m calling on behalf of Michael’s family.” This was no cursory catch-up. The request from the legendary radio host, community activist, television personality, and co-creator of Black Music Month was about as heavy as it could get. I was being tasked with writing the obituary for Michael Eugene Archer, the soul-funk visionary known to millions as D’Angelo. 

The irony of it all was surreal. Dyana was most aware of my Captain Ahab/Moby Dick connection to the complex singer-songwriter-instrumentalist who stripped down the shimmery gloss of ’90s R&B in his own revivalist image with his landmark 1995 LP debut Brown Sugar. Other classic releases followed: 2000’s unabashedly sexy, funked-up Voodoo and 2014’s politically charged Black Messiah. Before I had even reached out to Williams to secure an interview with the elusive D’Angelo over a decade ago, I had been on his trail since late 2007.

The story, originally set to be published by VIBE in 2008, was essentially done. All that remained were words from the man himself. That, however, would prove to be futile. Back then, D’Angelo wasn’t just simply fighting for his career. He was fighting for his life. His very public battles with substance abuse and alcohol led to a string of arrests from 2005 to 2010. 

When I attempted to resurrect the piece in 2013, I was told by his publicist, “He’s still on a no-interviews stance.” You think Beyoncé is press shy? D’Angelo hadn’t done a sit-down with a journalist in over a decade.  

“I went in under a fake name so people wouldn’t know who I was, right?” D’Angelo recalled to GQ Magazine in 2014 about one of his rehab stints in his first interview in 12 years. “So, you know, Michael never got treatment. It was this other character that was in there. And the moment I left, I went straight to the fucking liquor store.”

Yet D’Angelo made it out the other side. His 2014 return to the music charts and accompanying The Second Coming Tour was hailed as a bold, from-the-ashes statement. Since his buzzy arrival, D’Angelo had been anointed rhythm and blues’ golden child, destined to sit at the same table with the likes of soul giants Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, and Al Green. But Black Messiah found the gifted singer and keyboardist taking on a new title: funk-rock infused guitar hero. 

“All we wanted was a chance to talk/’Stead we only got outlined in chalk/Feet have bled a million miles we’ve walked…” D’Angelo declared on “The Charade,” a blistering track inspired by the 2014 Black Lives Matter summer protests that ignited around the globe. D’Angelo was back—better, cooler, Blacker, more brilliant and defiant than ever. 

Which is why his October 14 death at the age of 51, following a private battle with pancreatic cancer, blindsided the world. It just wasn’t right — not for a maddening talent who, through bouts with writer’s block, scrutiny over his finely sculpted, sex symbol image, and battles with substance abuse, proved to be more than a soul survivor. D’Angelo was the last soul man standing.   

Now he was gone. Still, there was a beautiful finality to it all. At D’Angelo’s November 1^st homegoing ceremony at St. Paul’s Baptist Church in Henrico, Virginia, his funeral was as emotionally heartfelt as it was grounded like the VA Naïve Son himself. 

Indeed, it was fitting that D’Angelo’s “Celebration of Life” would draw such an eclectic group of family, friends,  music industry heavyweights, celebrities, around-the-way neighborhood supporters, high school cohorts, local business leaders, politicians, and church folk.

D’Angelo’s brothers, Luther Archer Jr., and Rodney Archer, recalled the early genius of their baby bro, who could pick up a song on the piano at five years old. The singer’s oldest son, Michael Archer II, 27, daughter Imani Archer, and youngest son, Morocco Archer, gave moving testimonies of their father, a music nerd who enjoyed playing video games for hours on end (D’Angelo laughably refused to end his competitive sessions with Michael Jr. until he won). D’s beloved cousin Leslie Cox read his obit. 

Before he had even reached platinum, Grammy-winning acclaim, D’Angelo was known as a local child prodigy at his dad Luther Archer Sr.’s Pentecostal house of worship, the New Hope Assembly of Yahweh, where he played the organ. It was older brother Luther, himself a songwriter, who introduced him to the music of P-Funk, Fishbone, and Prince. 

Soon D’Angelo garnered a reputation as a talent-show legend throughout Richmond, a budding R&B vocalist and songwriter who was just as impressive as a standout producer for the Virginia Hip-hop group I.D.U. He moved to New York and scored a recording deal. The folks back home were proud of the kid. 

But not even in his wildest dreams could he have ever imagined Stevie Wonder delivering a moving tribute at his funeral, performing “If It’s Magic,” alongside harpist Brandee Younger, a soulful rendition of “The Lord’s Prayer,” and “As.” Famed film director Spike Lee and Hip-hop stalwarts Common and Black Thought could be seen bopping their heads to the Songs In The Key of Life favorite. 

Members of D’Angelo’s acclaimed backing bands, the Soultronics and the Vanguard, provided music (yes, that was John Mayer on guitar amongst the all-star collective). Dave Chappelle, H.E.R., Jon Batiste, DJ Premier, and D’Angelo’s dear friend and longtime collaborator, Roots frontman Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, were also among the more conspicuous mourners.

But this was still a farewell to a local church boy. Bishop Ralland V. Robinson Sr. — who officiated D’Angelo’s funeral and gave a rousing eulogy — remarked that while the city standout left Richmond for stardom, “He didn’t leave God.” Famed Pastor Jamal Bryant delivered a heartfelt video message to his friend, praising him for his unwavering devotion to the Lord. 

Celebrated gospel singer Kim Burrell, who joked that she was happy that D’Angelo included the uplifting spiritual “Higher” on the otherwise sensual Brown Sugar, moved well-wishers to tears with her powerful take of Richard Smallwood’s “Total Praise.”

It all came flooding back. The myriad of emails, calls, and on-again/off-again interviews. The time in early 2013 when a rep set up a meeting with D’Angelo at a Greenwich Village dive bar. He looked happy, healthy, and focused. “I really dug the tapes,” D warmly noted, alluding to the vintage Sly and the Family Stone, Prince, Jimi Hendrix, and Jackson 5 video performances I sent him as an ice breaker or desperate bribe, depending on how you looked at it. “I got your requests. I’ve just been working, man. I want y’all to hear what I’ve been up to.”

“Thank you,” said Questlove — wearing a long all-black ensemble and matching hat, resembling a wise Yoruba priest — as he gave me a hearty embrace at the funeral. 

Flash forward to December 4^th. The Oscar-winning documentary director and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon bandleader is doing a deep dive on grief. Throughout much of his 54 years, Questlove had never been much of a crier. But following the death of D’Angelo, the water works came fast and furious; five days in a row, to be exact. When he opened his deejay set at comedian Hannibal Buress’ Brooklyn club with a song from his departed brother-in-spirit, he lost it. 

Since his buzzy arrival, D’Angelo had been anointed rhythm and blues’ golden child, destined to sit at the same table with the likes of soul giants Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, and Al Green.

“I just picked the needle up and stopped the song and 300 people [were] looking at me in that Brooklyn crowd,” he told VIBE after the funeral. “It wasn’t a nervous breakdown. I let four minutes [pass]… I couldn’t stop. I felt more guilt that I cried more over [D’Angelo] than when my own father died. I was like, ‘I shouldn’t be crying this much!’ I didn’t cry like this when Prince died. I didn’t cry like this when J Dilla died. This is the most cathartic healing that I’ve ever experienced in my life.” 

It was a sobering admission for sure. Now I’m thinking back to our talk back in 2008 when Questlove wasn’t even sure if D’Angelo would ever come back to the world. And there’s more. 

What you are about to read is the life and times of Michael Archer, nearly 20 years in the making. Some of the people interviewed here, such as D’Angelo’s former manager Dominique Trenier and Gary Harris, the respected A&R man credited with signing D’Angelo to EMI Records in 1993, as well others essential to D’Angelo’s rise and the success of the neo soul movement — most notably the late singer Angie Stone, the mother of D’s son Michael Archer II, who died in a tragic March 1^st car accident just months before D’Angelo’s passing — are no longer with us.

“Your patience is a blessing,” D’Angelo told me during our all-too-brief moment together. Truer words have never been spoken     

—

IT’S MAY 18, 2008. Questlove could not keep still. On a bustling spring evening at Richmond, Virginia’s Landmark Theater, a convergence of doubt and anticipation hovered over the prodigious Afro-ed head of the Roots drummer and producer. Hours before Philadelphia’s hardest working band in Hip-hop took to the stage in support of adventurous soul rebel Erykah Badu for her lauded Vortex Tour, brother Quest was wondering if HE would even show up? After all, it had been more than three years since he last saw his friend and musical kindred spirit D’Angelo.

The pair’s relationship had been strained for some time. It was a mutual acquaintance who had given Questlove the intriguing news: “I just finished talking to D,” said Alan Leeds, trusted industry vet and D’Angelo’s former touring manager. “All is safe… he looks the best I’ve seen him in years… call him up.’” 

For Thompson, the timing could not have been more poetic. Richmond was D’Angelo’s home turf — a laidback southern town that helped shape the future R&B superstar. There were a myriad of things running through his mind. 

“I texted D and said, ‘I trust that you’ll be in attendance tonight, no?’” Questlove laughed from a hotel room in Boca Raton, Florida, at the absurd line of questioning that channeled the spirit of an all-too-serious high school teacher grilling a student. “Come on, man. Everybody wants to see you,” Questlove continued. And he’s like, ‘Who’s everybody?’ Half of Erykah’s staff used to be Dangelo staff, so I was like, ‘Big Mike’s here and he wanna see you and Erykah [together].’”  

“Alright, man, I’ll come,” D’Angelo answered back. 

Everyone wanted a piece of the kid. Guys wanted to smoke a blunt with him. Musicians wanted to jam with him. Women wanted to take him home.

According to family members, he was touched by God as a baby. Young Michael could play the piano by the age of three. The product of a deeply fundamentalist Pentecostal household ruled by his mother Mariann Smith and no-nonsense father Bishop Luther Archer Sr. — that included older, protective, musically inclined brothers Luther and Rodney Archer — further displayed his self-taught prowess on the Hammond organ at his dad’s church. 

It should be noted that it was Massenburg who first coined the musical phrase “neo soul,” a back-to-basics, jazzy R&B sound, and signed the equally influential Badu to his start-up imprint Kedar Entertainment in 1996. D’Angelo, however, wasn’t a fan of the descriptor. 

“I don’t want to disassociate, and I respect it for what it is,” D said of the neo soul tag years later in 2014 at the Brooklyn Museum as part of the Red Bull Music Academy lecture series with author Nelson George, “but any time you put a name on something, you put it in a box.” 

Categories be damned, Massenburg knew D’Angelo was something special. One of the songs on his demo, the sexy, taut, and swinging “Brown Sugar,” which would launch D’Angelo’s career into the stratosphere, was a revelation.  

“I had never heard anything like it,” Massenburg beamed of the decadent album title track that coyly substituted weed as the feminine object of D’Angelo’s sexual obsession. “Everybody was saying D’s music was not just R&B, but jazzy. Yet, I knew it had a Hip-hop element with soul and organic instrumentation… very traditional, but new. That was D’Angelo.”

“He’s always been inside his head a lot, he’s quite aloof,” Badu candidly dissected of the artist she had called a dear friend since opening up for him at a 1996 Dallas show. “Everybody was coming in the dressing room with different excuses and reasons just to get a glimpse of the emperor’s new clothes (laughs).” 

“But D’Angelo keeps things to himself, and he can be a double agent at times where you don’t know everything he’s thinking,” continued Badu. “And yet that kind of voice he has is very anointed, and you know that there is something else there, no matter what he says. He seems to be genetically encoded with something that touches people in a way. He doesn’t always have to be a model human being; I don’t think any of us are.”

When I asked Questlove his views on D’Angelo’s personal struggles, he veered off to a more somber tone. 

“There’s a calmness about him…” he noted. “D’s my best friend. But it got to the point where his circle had to have a support group for themselves. After the car accident, I knew that I was not going to be there for him anymore.”

—

That kind of voice he has is very anointed, and you know that there is something else there, no matter what he says. He seems to be genetically encoded with something that touches people in a way.

Erykah Badu

“D’Angelo said that he had Irving Azoff and Londell McMillan,” industry veterans who helped guide the careers of The Eagles, Steely Dan, and Van Halen (Azoff), and Prince and Spike Lee (McMillan), who were involved at that point. “But he wasn’t happy with their representation. He didn’t think people understood him.” 

That’s because the musical path D’Angelo was headed on was light-years away from bawdy lover-boy balladry. The early material being workshopped that would eventually become Black Messiah was more Band of Gypsys-meets-Parliament-Funkadelic than R. Kelly.   

Such boundless ambition was nothing new for D’Angelo. Jocelyn Cooper remembers her first encounter with a 17-year-old Michael Archer in the fall of ’92 during a Manhattan showcase inside her Warner Chappell Music Publishing office.  

“He was humble… super sweet,” remembered the co-founder of the advertising company Multiply Creative, which also handled marketing and artwork for D’Angelo’s Black Messiah album. “Then he sat down at the piano and started playing Miles Davis.”

This was the Hip-hop-soul era. Kids were not randomly playing acoustic instruments, effortlessly hitting complex jazz chord progressions. The scene was largely dominated by beat makers. Cooper was gobsmacked. 

“I never met anyone that was so young who had such an amazing gift and repertoire,” she continued. “I had been in the studio with Stevie, and I’ve seen [his genius]. I’ve been in a room with a hundred people with Elton John playing the piano and playing his songs. I felt the same way with Michael. It was like an out-of-body experience.” 

Cooper promptly signed D’Angelo to a publishing deal and polished up his demo, shopping it to whoever would listen. But there were no takers.
Mercury Records turned him down. Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis didn’t bite. Interscope couldn’t be bothered. 

Yet EMI’s senior A&R man, Gary Harris, saw the vision. After witnessing D’Angelo in the flesh via Massenberg, he played his demo — which included the future Brown Sugar track “Smooth” and “You Will Know” — for his boss Fred Davis. The latter gospel-tailored number, co-penned with D’s brother Luther, was later recorded as an all-star choir production for 1994’s Jason’s Lyric soundtrack featuring Usher, Boyz II Men, and the late Gerald Levert. God was never far behind. 

“D’s mother, Mariann, had raised an oldest son, Luther, a decorated Marine and gifted lyricist,” Harris said. “Another son had been a graduate of an Ivy League law school. And the kid was a prodigy who had been the director of his grandfather’s senior choir in the church that his grandfather built. They made something out of very little. D was a product of that.”

D’Angelo’s religiously strict parents eventually allowed their gifted son to express his talents in the secular world. His closet-size bedroom, where he kept a six-track board and rigged keyboard, was covered with Prince posters. But D’Angelo could still kick a verse to his favorite Rakim, KRS-One, A Tribe Called Quest, and Dr. Dre songs.

As a student at Richmond’s Huguenot High School, the quiet kid was obsessive when it came to his craft. D’s music teacher Ms. Bacon remembered her former student walking the halls carrying around a synthesizer during his sophomore year. “[He] didn’t cause any problems,” she said. “But we knew Michael was special.”  

—

WITH EMI firmly on board and Massenburg in the fold, D’Angelo was finding it hard to deal with the fast-paced lifestyle of New York. He slept on a white leather couch in his manager’s apartment in Brooklyn. Massenburg knew it was time to get his future star serious about his career, but the handler needed someone to help hone D’Angelo’s ambitious vision. Angie Stone fit the bill. 

At the time, the soulful, southern singer-songwriter was performing as part of the R&B duo Vertical Hold before charting her own gold, Grammy-nominated solo ascent with her 1999 debut Black Diamond. This was an artist who knew the ins and outs of the music industry from her days as a pioneering member of the groundbreaking Sugar Hill Records female rap trio The Sequence. 

“D didn’t have a license, so [Angie] drove him around, cooked and looked after him,” Massenburg recalled of their budding relationship. “I didn’t think anything was going to happen. Next thing I know, they have a kid,” he says with a laugh 

It was all coming together. Tribe’s longtime engineer, Power, imbued songs like the elegant “Lady” and the Smokey Robinson cover “Cruisin’” with a striking organic feel. Tony! Toni! Toné! frontman Raphael Saadiq was brought in to help steer the ship for the young performer. Stone, a powerful singer in her own right, also contributed background vocals on several songs as well as co-writing the heavy boom-bap, Q-Tip nod “Jonz In My Bonz.” But ultimately, the majority of Brown Sugar was written, produced, and arranged by D’Angelo.  

This was the new dope, combining the dusty digging-in-the-crates mindset of the Natives Tongues hip hop crew and vintage R&B vocals distilled by the gospel roots of his rural Richmond church upbringing. 

Since D’Angelo was now a star, there was nothing wrong with enjoying the spoils of success, right? At his New York platinum party on September 13, 1996, he showed up arm-in-arm with up-and-coming Hollywood starlet Vivica Fox, unbeknownst to his girlfriend. Stone understood the game. 

“The criticism that [he] and I received about our relationship only began once he became successful,” she said years later in a 2020 interview with Essence when asked about the former couples’ much discussed age difference (Stone was 30 when she started seeing a 19-year-old D’Angelo), later adding, “To set the record straight, D’Angelo is a genius and he doesn’t need Angie or anybody to make him who he is. D’Angelo and I are parents first. For the sake of my son, I would never disrespect his father.”    

Soon, the new sensation was followed by like-minded talents. Maxwell (Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, 1996), Erykah Badu (Baduizm, 1997), Lauryn Hill (The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, 1998), Jill Scott (Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds, Vol. 1, 2000). Over the span of six years, fresh, critically acclaimed classics were being released as cash registers sang the sweet tune of multi-platinum sales. Grammy Awards were won; careers made. And D’Angelo was crowned the leader of the new school. 

I let four minutes [pass]… I couldn’t stop. I felt more guilt that I cried more over [D’Angelo] than when my own father died…I didn’t cry like this when Prince died. I didn’t cry like this when J Dilla died. This is the most cathartic healing that I’ve ever experienced in my life.

Questlove

Palladino joked to D that the “Untitled” video was going to change everything. “But he just laughed and said, ‘What are you talking about?’” recalled Palladino. “I don’t think he really understood what he had done.” 

D’Angelo would soon find out during the Voodoo Tour. By all accounts, the trek was akin to a Baptist revival. Backed by the Soultronics, the singer stepped from behind the keyboards and revealed surprising song-and-dance-man showmanship and bandleader control that screamed James Brown. The funk was nasty and loose; some songs were stretched out over 30 minutes. Celebrated music critic Robert Christgau dubbed D’Angelo “R&B Jesus.” 

After the tour, D’Angelo needed to decompress. For the burned-out artist — who was already dealing with the pressures of being the savior of R&B — living up to the title of sexiest man in music wasn’t part of the deal. By late 2000, he retired back to his hometown of Richmond. But the cracks were starting to show. 

Within music industry circles, people were talking — the drugs; the drinking. D’Angelo turned to music for solace. From time to time, he and Questlove would get together to work on tracks for an unreleased project entitled James River, named after a Richmond landmark where believers were baptized. 

The wailing guitar funk-rock of George Clinton’s early 1970 self-titled Funkadelic album was an intriguing springboard. Yet more high-profile scrapes with the law impeded progress on a follow-up album. 

—

“IT’S NOT STRAIGHT UP AND DOWN CLASSIC R&B… there’s heavy funk to a lot of the songs,” explained RCA Chairman and CEO Peter Edge, who in 2008 was charged with overseeing D’Angelo’s long-in-the-making return that would eventually lead to Black Messiah. 

It had been an arduous journey back from hell and back for Michael Archer. Edge was in an optimistic mood. Maybe too optimistic. “He’s playing some amazing guitar and definitely in the spirit of Jimi Hendrix,” a hyperbolic proclamation that made my eyes roll like a seven in a Las Vegas dice game. Back then, such bluster smacked of over-the-top, music executive bullshit. 

Yet as a sequestered D’Angelo was healing from his battle scars, he was also mastering the axe behind closed doors. By 2012, he was confident enough to show off his hypnotic blues licks at a January 26 gig in Stockholm, Sweden, with a new musical unit that included co-songwriter and singer Kendra Foster, background vocalist Jermaine Holmes, Soultronics OG’s Dave and Palladino, keyboardist Ray Angry, and lead guitarist Jesse Johnson of the legendary band The Time. The Vanguard was born. 

“Baby steps,” remembered Questlove, who convinced D’Angelo to go out on the road together as a duo for a few spot dates in 2013 billed as Brothers In Arms. “Anything I did with him, after 2010, was in the name of just motivating D and reminding him how much fun this is.”

By late 2014, Black Messiah was in the can, but D’Angelo was still jittery on unveiling his new provocative project. One of the earliest songs recorded for the album, “1000 Deaths,” featured the voice of police-slain Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, who, in the 1969 speech excerpt, declared: “The people that we’re asking for peace — they’re a bunch of megalomaniac war-mongers… We’ve got to struggle with them to make them understand what peace means…we’ve got to fight them.”  

D’Angelo’s nearly indecipherable, ghost-in-the-machine vocals bobbed and weaved through the chaotic percussive groove, all anchored by a pulsating bassline. There’s a riotous guitar freakout. This was not “Brown Sugar.” 

Despite its surprise release on December 15, 2014, Black Messiah raced up the Billboard album charts, moving an impressive 117,000 copies in its first week. A decade later, the uncompromising work stands as D’Angelo’s last official studio album. 

“For those of us who worked on that project, it felt like a huge responsibility,” said Theola Borden, former Senior VP of publicity at RCA, whose clients include alternative R&B superstar SZA. “But more personally, as a Black woman, I felt like it was my duty to do my part to do right by D’Angelo and his legacy. From Brown Sugar and Voodoo to Black Messiah, we were in a cauldron of love, anger, violence, chaos, fear, but also hope. D’Angelo hit every emotion for Black people. His death is a profound loss.” 

“I saw him at the hospital,” echoed Cooper of her final days with D’Angelo. “We were texting until he passed. There’s a great sadness that the world will never get the opportunity to see him perform when he is 80 years old, because that’s what he would have been doing. He was just a student of understanding the soul.”

Before his death, D’Angelo granted what would end up being his final interview for Questlove’s February 2025 documentary on enigmatic music visionary Sly Stone,  SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius). He spoke candidly about the pressure to live up to the hype. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing music, sports,” he said. “We as Black folk always gotta be three-four-five steps ahead of everybody else in order just to break even. It’s just always been that way.”

And so we are left with three towering albums, the same number as Jimi. Not bad company. Hendrix frequently crossed Questlove’s mind when D’Angelo would come in and out of his life. Will this be the day he receives the news… the phone call? As I wrote in his obit, Michael Archer is now an ancestor. And Questlove, the griot, is still telling stories about his beloved.

There’s the time the pair got ass drunk off hooch in the deep South at the kind of Geechie establishment that plays ZZ Hill, Johnny Taylor, and Clarence Carter records. He mentions their private hangs watching bootleg videos of old Prince concerts. D would laughably ask to raid Quest’s infamous Purple collection. The conversation then steers back to healing. It seems death has even managed to mend past fractured relationships.

Following D’Angelo’s wake, Dave Chappelle rented out a restaurant as a sort of repast for extended friends and family. Quest was sitting next to the comedian when his old touring mate, Lauryn Hill, walked in. “Ms. Hill,” Questlove respectfully noted. The two had not been on speaking terms since the ’90s, when the Roots, the Fugees, and Goodie Mob were on the road together. They had a falling out. D’Angelo’s passing made such past petty grievances seem trivial, silly even.  

“You know my first words to her was?” Quest said. “I was like, ‘Yo, man. You don’t know how much I miss our water gun fights.’ And she laughed so hard… I didn’t know if she remembered that or not.” Quest pauses. “And I’m like, “That mothertfucker!” D’Angelo has become the adhesive that has healed us. I just want to thank the brother.”