Finding the Groove Again — D’Angelo and the Search for Soul
By Rafi Mercer
It’s funny how some artists never really leave you — they just wait for you to listen properly. D’Angelo is one of those. Every few months, his name reappears in the Tracks & Tales analytics, tucked between search terms from New York, Paris, São Paulo, and Seoul. People are looking for him again — for that feeling, that rhythm, that sound.
I’ve written about D’Angelo before, but he’s the kind of artist who reveals something new each time you return. Voodoo, especially, is an album that keeps unfolding the more you give it your attention. It’s not background music. It’s not clean or polite. It breathes. It drifts in time. It asks for presence.
Listening to it now, through the lens of everything Tracks & Tales stands for — slow attention, deep sound, the art of space — it feels prophetic. Recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York, it was an album that trusted the room. You can hear it in the warmth of the drums, the way the air vibrates between snare hits, the natural compression of tape. It’s not perfection; it’s feel.
What fascinates me most about D’Angelo is how he bridges eras — the spiritual and the physical, the analogue and the future. He learned from Marvin, Curtis, Prince, but filtered it through a rhythm all his own. And that rhythm still moves differently. There’s nothing rushed, nothing overproduced. Just tone, texture, and conviction.
Maybe that’s why people keep searching for him. In a world that moves too quickly, D’Angelo’s music feels like resistance — a reminder that groove is time made human. The pauses matter. The imperfections matter. It’s what makes it alive.
Every listening bar I visit has a version of him somewhere in the shelves. Sometimes it’s Brown Sugar playing just before midnight, sometimes it’s Spanish Joint at golden hour when the light hits the bar in that perfect way. Wherever it is, it always changes the room. His music does that — it reshapes the air.
Seeing his name pop up in searches across the world feels like a small sign that people are craving that kind of sound again. The kind that doesn’t shout for attention, but earns it.
So if you’re reading this, and you haven’t listened in a while — pour something good, dim the lights, and play Voodoo from the start. No skipping. No shuffle. Let it unfold the way it was meant to. That’s deep listening. That’s D’Angelo.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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