"Black Messiah is a hell of a name for an album. Many will think it's about religion. Some will jump to the conclusion that I'm calling myself a Black Messiah. For me, the title is about all of us. It's about the world. It's about an idea we can all aspire to. We should all aspire to be a Black Messiah.

It's about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen. It's not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them. Not every song on this album is politically charged (though many are), but calling this album Black Messiah creates a landscape where these songs can live to the fullest. Black Messiah is not one man. It's a feeling that, collectively, we are all that leader."

1. Ain't That Easy
2. 1000 Deaths
3. The Charade
4. Sugah Daddy
5. Really Love
6. Back In The Future (Part I)
7. Till It's Done (Tutu)
8. Prayer
9. Betray My Heart
10. The Door
11. Back In The Future (Part II)
12. Another Life

CD
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QR7ZN16/?tag=imwan-20

MP3
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QXL7MC4/?tag=imwan-20

Vinyl
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R20DOUY/?tag=imwan-20

Initial reports of a new album surfaced as early as 2009...

Questlove: New D'Angelo Album Will Be 'A Radical 180 Turn'
'He's discovered Bowie and Zeppelin, the Beatles, Pet Sounds, Captain Beefheart and Zappa,' says Roots drummer

By Patrick Doyle, Rolling Stone
June 18, 2012
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/ ... n-20120618



Questlove remembers the moment he called D'Angelo and asked him to make his first U.S. concert appearance in 12 years on June 9th, for the drummer's late-night Super Jam at Bonnaroo. "I said, 'It will be a whole night doing what we used to do at Electric Lady in the Nineties,'" Questlove tells Rolling Stone. "'Playing the Funkadelic catalog and seeing what we get, the Prince catalog, Hendrix, the Meters.' He said, 'Go ahead.' And once he said, 'Go ahead,' I was like, 'I got you now.'"

During the live jam session, D'Angelo surprised the crowd by grooving with Funkadelic singer Kendra Foster during a funky cover of the Beatles' "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" and shredding guitar on Jimi Hendrix's "Power of Soul."

"He's elated," Questlove says. "He was just amazed. I wanted him to see how loved he really is, because he really doesn't get it. He seriously doesn't watch television. He's not on a computer at all. He's still listening to vinyl, cassettes and a Discman."

The Roots drummer hopes the appearance will convince D'Angelo to finally release his first LP since 2000's Voodoo. Questlove says roughly 30 tracks have been recorded over the last few years, with many sessions taking place at Electric Lady in New York, where the singer cut Voodoo. "He is about to take a radical 180 turn with this record," says Questlove. "It's going to throw people off the same way that Prince's Dirty Mind threw his R&B fanbase off. In the past few years, he's discovered Bowie and Zeppelin, the Beatles, Pet Sounds, Captain Beefheart and Zappa.

"My whole reasoning for doing [Bonnaroo]," Questlove says, "was to show him who his real audience is."

On the upcoming album, fans will also hear a new side of the singer: as a guitarist. "I saw a guitar in the studio and I was like, 'What the hell's this?'" Questlove remembers. "One night, when he didn't know I was watching, he took a dinner break from recording. Suddenly, I heard [Funkadelic's] 'Maggot Brain' playing. I realized he was in the studio room matching it note-for-note. For the last 12 years, he's been strumming the guitar … He is so painfully shy about it. I think in his head, if he doesn't surpass Eddie Hazel, Santana, James Blood Ulmer and Frank Zappa as an axeman, he doesn't want to share it with the world."

D'Angelo has also been creating his own keyboard sounds for the album. "He's very particular about his patches," Questlove adds. "I've never heard these sounds before. He'll take an ordinary sound and he'll filter it through a guitar processor. He'll take that particular sound and put some wave envelope noise on it, and he'll put it back in the keyboard and that's his sound. There's song we worked on called 'The Charade.' There's this symphonic trombone sound, which normally would be a cheesy sound Swizz Beatz uses. But he'll take that sound and then put it through a guitar filter and put it back in the keyboard and then put it through another filter. It's totally unique."

Fans should expect to hear some of the new songs during an appearance at New Orleans Essence Festival on July 6th. Questlove says the goal is to release the LP around August. "Nothing is official ­– it is year 12," he laughs. "I'm just hoping that this was enough fire to really make him do that. Because we spoke the day after [Bonnaroo] and he said, 'I'm so happy.' I said, 'Now you just turn in your damn record. Just finish. Just turn it in. Let your children go already."

Could the finish line finally be in sight?

http://instagram.com/p/UNiEupwa47/

Questlove: D'Angelo's Album '99% Done,' Sounds Like an Instant Classic

By Chris Payne, NY | January 21, 2013
http://www.billboard.com/articles/colum ... nt-classic



If anyone knows the latest on the near-reclusive R&B sage who goes by D'Angelo, it would be Roots' drummer and NYU professor ambassador Questlove.

Lately, he's spent a great deal of his free time outside of "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" laying down drum tracks for D'Angelo's perennially-anticipated follow up to 2000's classic LP, Voodoo. And according to Quest, not only is the album nearly finished, but it's sounding like an instant classic.

"I'm heading out to Asia right now praying that we're still on schedule for when we said we were going to turn that record in," Questlove told Billboard. "All last week, I was in the studio finishing (the album). We spent close to 18 hours, well not me personally because I have to go to 'Fallon,' but usually right after work. He's the only person that I'll actually go to the studio with and stay there to six in the morning, re-doing these drum parts. I won't even do that for my own band, but I'll do it for him. Right now, we're just tightening up the loose ends. But I still stand by, 99% of it is done."

Since its 2000 release, Voodoo has been almost universally acclaimed -- a sprawling, effortlessly visionary work that sounded incredibly ahead of its time, yet brought D's many muses (Stevie Wonder, George Clinton, Marvin Gaye, etc) into present-day context. Questlove's got similarly strong words to describe D'Angelo's long-brewing third LP:

"I would not be far off by saying this is probably my generation's version of Sly (and the Family Stone)'s There's a Riot Goin' On. It's potent. It's funky. It's an extremely hard pill to swallow. He's one of those artists that have, of course, taken 13 years to follow up a record. It's going to take you about 10 years to digest this record. Totally brilliant. Just the way this society works with music… being able to judge if something is a classic after the first listen, you can do that after thirty seconds on this. And the fact that we started this record in 2004, and it still sounds like it came out five years from now, it is a testament to the timelessness of it."

Since 2004, the music world has seen plenty of false alarms regarding D'Angelo's untitled third album, though Questlove is fairly certain it'll be submitted for review by February, setting up a potential release during the calendar year.

"If this record is not turned in by February, then something is extremely wrong. Because we worked to the bone in the entire month of January just to tighten up all the loose ends."

Last year, D'Angelo took part in a series of covers and jam sessions alongside The Roots and others Jun. 10 at Bonnaroo, marking his first U.S. performance in a decade. With the Roots, Quest has a pair of albums slated for a 2013 release: the band's 17th studio album and a just-announced collaborative effort with Elvis Costello.

D’Angelo’s ‘Black Messiah’ Was Released in Response to Protests
By Joe Coscarelli, Dec. 16, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/arts/ ... -rush.html



For almost 15 years, the long-teased third album from the embattled soul singer D’Angelo came not at all. Then, on Sunday, the album — “Black Messiah” — came all at once, debuting at an industry listening party in the sleek rooftop lounge of a Manhattan hotel.

The writer Nelson George, who introduced the record and broke the news of its imminent commercial arrival, said some employees of RCA, D’Angelo’s label, were only then hearing the album for the first time. Before midnight, “Black Messiah” was available on iTunes, and by Monday the CD was in stores.

D’Angelo and RCA, partly inspired by the nationwide protests over the police killings of unarmed black men, had moved up the release of “Black Messiah” and spent the past month working many all-nighters to decide everything from the track list to the album art, according to interviews with D’Angelo’s collaborators and confidants.

After a grand jury didn’t indict a Ferguson, Mo., police officer last month in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, D’Angelo called his co-manager Kevin Liles. “He said: ‘Do you believe this? Do you believe it?’ ” Mr. Liles said. “And then we just sat there in silence. That is when I knew he wanted to say something.” (D’Angelo declined to be interviewed for this article.)

RCA had planned to release “Black Messiah” in early 2015, but its reclusive singer was done waiting. “The one way I do speak out is through music,” D’Angelo told his tour manager, Alan Leeds. “I want to speak out.”

Combining the chronic delays (and fan incredulity) of Guns N’ Roses’ “Chinese Democracy,” which took Axl Rose 14 years and nearly as many band members to finish, and the industry-shaking surprise download strategy Beyoncé used for her self-titled album last year, “Black Messiah” hit like an earthquake.

The album, when it finally arrived, came without the traditional monthslong major-label rollout, which typically includes sending a single to radio stations and building buzz with press and public appearances.

Peter Edge, chief executive of RCA Music Group, said D’Angelo liked the idea of the record’s “just appearing.” Mr. Edge chafed at the idea that Beyoncé owns that concept. (Kid Cudi, Skrillex and others have opted for similar release tactics.)

“Of course, she started something with that, but this couldn’t be more different in terms of the record,” he said. “That was a ‘visual album’; this is a musical album.”

With frenetic instrumentation and lyrics alluding to race and violence, Mr. Edge added, “it’s really caught the zeitgeist of what’s going on.”

Russell Elevado, D’Angelo’s longtime studio engineer and mixer, said he put the finishing touches on the album only about three weeks ago. “It’s pretty much right out of the oven — it’s still hot,” he said.

The pair began work on what would become “Black Messiah” after D’Angelo’s 2000 tour for “Voodoo,” his previous album. “We’ve been close for the past two and a half years,” Mr. Elevado said, after they worked on and off for well over a decade between the singer’s trips to rehab and self-imposed exile.

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
“It’s fair to say that there were a lot of revisions on songs,” Mr. Elevado said. “Sometimes it was just a specific lyric that wasn’t quite right.”

He recalled recording sessions that went on for three days straight, partly because the album was recorded entirely analog, on two-inch reel-to-reel tape. If work on one song wasn’t clicking, he explained, it could take up to two hours to pull up a new one. “It’s not just moving a mouse around,” he said.

The finished album used about 200 reels of tape, Mr. Elevado estimated, and “that alone is more than most budgets for entire projects.”

While D’Angelo’s team declined to reveal the album’s total budget, Mr. Leeds said that “there are probably 25 accountants trying to figure that out, and none of them agree.”

With the track list whittled down to 12 songs from more than 20 “really strong contenders,” Mr. Elevado said, the label looked to Afropunk, an arts group and creative agency, to direct the album’s art, marketing materials and more.

Afropunk’s work on “Black Messiah” often went until 4 a.m., including time spent deciphering the dense, distorted vocals for a lyric booklet. That was still too late to make the CD, but it will be included in the forthcoming vinyl version.

“We were able to put six months’ worth of work into two weeks,” said Jocelyn Cooper, Afropunk’s co-founder and D’Angelo’s music publisher, who signed him as an unknown teenager in 1993. D’Angelo is “a bit of a vampire,” she added. “It’s easier to get ahold of him at 2 a.m.”

The singer, ever the perfectionist, was involved at every step. D’Angelo had hoped to commission art for the album from Emory Douglas, once the minister of culture for the Black Panthers and art director for the group’s newspaper, but Matthew Morgan, an Afropunk co-founder, said there wasn’t time to wait for original illustrations.

Instead, the cover shows a black-and-white still from a 16-millimeter film shot at Afropunk’s annual concert, which D’Angelo headlined last summer.

“That image was captured during the festival when we were asking the audience to put their hands up in protest,” Mr. Morgan said. “But it was also symbolic of praise in church,” he added, saying that D’Angelo, a Pentecostal preacher’s son, “loved it immediately.”

Not all details were so well received. The font used on the album materials, for instance: As with the record, Ms. Cooper said, “he wanted to tweak it a lot more.”

D’Angelo believed it was “too clean and structured,” she said. “He wanted something that was more free-flowing, that more reflected anarchy and urgency and revolution.”

Ultimately, D’Angelo gave in. “He’s probably still not convinced,” Mr. Morgan said. “It’s not what he wanted, perhaps, but he’ll live with it. We just didn’t have time.”

And a largely supportive track-by-track analysis from The Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicb ... esh-lustre

This album is absolutely wonderful.

My Album of the Year, easily.

An excellent album, definitely worth the wait.

Lyrics are here- http://www.metrolyrics.com/news-story-d ... aled.html- for anyone who wants to read along.