“Cue the Record Presents Vinyl Listening Session 028: D'Angelo — Voodoo
Released on January 25, 2000 on Virgin Records, Voodoo arrived as D'Angelo's long-awaited second album, nearly five years after Brown Sugar helped name a movement the industry was still calling neo-soul. Raised in Richmond, Virginia, the son of a Pentecostal preacher, D'Angelo came up playing organ in church before the sacred and the secular began braiding themselves together in his music. The album marked a turning point where the church, the juke joint, and the studio met in a single room, a record less concerned with polish than with feel, groove stretched and slurred until it sat somewhere behind the beat, where the pocket becomes a place you live.
Built from marathon sessions at Electric Lady Studios, the house Jimi Hendrix built, Voodoo grew out of the collective known as the Soulquarians, with Questlove behind the drums, Pino Palladino on bass, Roy Hargrove's horn arrangements, and contributions from J Dilla, Raphael Saadiq, DJ Premier, and Charlie Hunter. The sessions became days spent studying tapes of Prince, Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, and Fela Kuti before a single note was cut, turning the record into something closer to a séance than an album, a conversation with the ancestors conducted in real time.
D'Angelo's writing draws on desire, faith, fatherhood, and the weight of expectation, transforming the vocabulary of the church into a meditation on the body and the spirit refusing to be separated. Anchored by his vision as a musician's musician, the record treats soul not as nostalgia but as a living tradition, something to be wrestled with, honored, and pushed forward.
More than a quarter century later, and in the wake of D'Angelo's passing in the fall of 2025, Voodoo remains a touchstone, frequently cited as one of the greatest albums of its era, standing as both a high-water mark of Black musicianship and a lasting testament to music's power to carry the sacred and the sensual in the same breath.
Event Details 4:30 PM— Doors Open 5:15 PM — Listening Session Start Post-spin — Open convo/discussion Event will conclude no later than 8:30 PM
Guests receive tickets for two complimentary wine pours (or sparkling water) and a raffle entry to win a copy of the record on vinyl. This is a 21+ event.”