Easily one of the more polarizing and reclusive artists in popular music today, D’Angelo has always done his own thing in his own time.
Us long suffering fans have had many false alarms in anticipation of the follow up album to 2000’s masterful Voodoo. But if we are to believe long time music executive Kevin Liles, as he tells Billboard Magazine, the wait may soon be over for real this time:
There’ll be an album this year. There’s 14 records so far, we might have a couple of bonus records, but all the recording is basically done and we’re mixing and mastering now. Definitely, he’ll be back.
When asked to level with the public about D’Angelo’s extended absence from the scene and repeated missed released dates, Liles says it was all “a process” and that the new album has been in the works for over a dozen years:
Here’s the thing: with D’Angelo it was a process. He didn’t perform for 10 years and he’s been working on an album for the past 12 years. I actually got him to go out and do 30 shows [in 2011-2012], and then we did some ‘Brothers in Arms’ shows. I said, ‘We have to get motivated around what people want to hear from you, and what does it mean to come back to that space?’ He very bluntly put it, ‘Kev, the studio and the stage: that’s my lifeblood. Now that I’ve touched it again, now that I see it again, I wanna be sure that the baby I’m about to have — the album — that I take it to the point where it’s all it can be.’
