Beyoncé, Solange, Dirty Projectors, Janelle Monáe, More Pay Tribute to D’Angelo’s Voodoo for Solange’s Saint Heron Site

D’Angelo‘s landmark Voodoo recently celebrated its 15th anniversary. In its honor, Solange’s Saint Heron website has organized a tribute, featuring several musicians sharing their thoughts on the album.  Beyoncé, Solange, Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth, Janelle Monáe, Ariel Rechtshaid, A-Trak, Kindness, Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly, Thundercat, and more contributed.

Read a few contributions below, and see all of them at the Saint Heron website. 

Beyoncé:

Voodoo is as relevant today as it was when it first came out. D’Angelo’s harmonies, instrumentation and arrangements are iconic and timeless. His song structure of mixing classic R&B with the true roots of gospel jam session still resonates today. It is an album you can listen to from start to finish. This is the DNA of black music; all the love, pain, social statements and rawness punctuated by his effortless vocal progression from his funky low register to his sexy falsetto. My favorite song on the album is “Africa” and “Untitled” definitely inspired my song “Rocket.”

Solange:

Voodoo is the church in which we all come to worship the religion of soul music. It is the word. It is the temple. It is the law for all lovers of true rhythm and blues. At 15-years-old, Voodoo is the most self-assured, decisive, deep in its roots, and “grown as hell” album in recent musical history I’ve ever experienced. A true testament to the term, timeless. Since its birth, it has always gone hand and hand with reflections of various milestones in my life. I was 13, when I heard “Untitled” and got goosebumps at the first knock of the snare. I couldn’t have been farther from having the answers when he belted “How Does It Feel,” but the deep down gutters of my soul said “Daaaaammmn Goot!”

Longstreth:

Voodoo collapses time, it feels eternal. Voodoo is a voice that’s been whispering vines into the margins of medieval manuscripts in some Alexandrian library beyond the barbarous antiquity of the present. It posits an alternate reality where traditionalism and technology aren’t at odds: the palette of the recording is so futuristic and crisp but the playing is so real, so effortlessly true. The grooves are at once taut as an airlock and free as a handful of almonds strewn on a tabletop, and the One always snaps back, elliptical as a portrait of Jupiter’s orbit in a convex mirror. D’Angelo’s voice is insanely elastic, his runs so crispy, his vibrato a light green leaf in the May breeze, and the thrum of him singing with himself is an inexact three-color silkscreen, as if his spirit is constantly leaving his body and then returning to it glossolalia — to testify, to affirm, to explore, to assure.

Rechtshaid:

Been coming back to those 78 min and 54 seconds for the past 15 years. Shit was so next level when it came out… I didn’t even know what to think. The video for “Untitled,” Quest Love’s drumming and programming, Pino Palladino… Those songs, that voice! The bar is raised forever. Early 2000s, D’Angelo and Soulquarians was a special time for music. I think all us fans are growing and making records now. Hopefully we can give back some of what we got from that album! 

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