"I Felt Like I Knew Him Very Well": D’angelo and Prince
Art by Mary Riedy, colors by Cereal Box Studio
Most Prince covers sound like imitations. D’angelo has a way of making Prince songs more.
For the 1997 holiday season, 23-year-old Michael Archer, known professionally as D’angelo, released his cover of Prince’s “She’s Always In My Hair” as part of the Scream 2 soundtrack. (Sometimes slasher movies debut in December.) “I wanted to do a b-side simply because I didn't want to do an obvious cover or something that was a hit. That's the big reason why I chose it,” he told MTV News. “I love the song, I've always loved the song...It hits home with me. I have personal emotions when I sing this song."
“She’s Always In My Hair” is driven by lust, but D’angelo’s version is tinged with desperation and guilt, a familiar combination to people from all kinds of Christian upbringings including Archer and Prince. “Maybe I’ll marry her, maybe I won’t,” he sings in his signature multi-tracked harmonies, sounding proudly undecided, dazed and confused, purple haze-y even. The cover slows down the tempo, emphasizing the groove as much as the yelping guitar riffs. This version fits the era, halfway between G-funk and the metal fusion of Rage Against The Machine, but D’angelo’s vocals are a playful counter-balance.
Listening to the two versions of the song back to back is like the four-color pencilling of ’80s superheroes to the shiny digital coloring of Image Comics. D’angelo’s cover just sounds like an upgrade.
“She’s Always In My Hair” foreshadowed the looser, grittier sound of D’angelo’s sophomore album Voodoo, released in the first weeks of the new millennium. D’angelo and collaborators hosted lengthy jam sessions in New York’s Electric Lady Studios inspired by their Yodas, ultimate masters of their musical styles: Sly Stone, James Brown, George Clinton, Joni Mitchell, Fela Kuti, and Prince most of all. “We got bootleg-concert connects like fiends got drug-dealer connects,” Questlove told Rolling Stone in May 2000, and the crew used these tapes to pick up as much knowledge as possible.
D’angelo and Questlove’s creative partnership began with a deep cut Prince reference deployed mid-set like the Bat-signal. Looking to impress the Virginian singer seated in the audience at the 1996 Soul Train Awards while he was performing with the Roots, Questlove abandoned his plans and instead played the drums from Madhouse’s single “Four.” “I was going to communicate with him, we speak the same language,” Questlove said, “so my first thing was, I said ‘OK, I’m gonna play this break by Madhouse, and see if it catches him.’” D’angelo stood up at attention, and the two began work on Voodoo two months later.
Voodoo’s closer “Africa” emerged from a session of playing through Prince’s Parade in its entirety, and the song contains a sample of “I Wonder U.” Hit ballad “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” is an homage to Controversy, in particular the orgasmic arc of “Do Me, Baby.” In that same RS story, Questlove admitted Voodoo was their audition tape for Prince. "I really, seriously wanna coproduce his next joint," D’angelo said. "Like, me and Ahmir wouldn't even have to use our names. We'd just be on some pseudonym shit. That's what he meant by audition. Just, like, we wanna do his next shit."
The success of Voodoo, in particular “Untitled” with its salacious semi-nude video, had a devastating effect on D’angelo. After the tour concluded, he became reclusive, and only appeared in public life as a result of legal troubles. As a few years stretched into a decade, D’angelo’s next album became an urban legend like Detox and Chinese Democracy.
Prince and D’angelo did not collaborate on any music in that time, as far as the public knows. Prince referred to himself as “the purple Yoda” on the 2010 song “Laydown,” but that was probably a coincidence.
With little warning, D’angelo released his third album, Black Messiah in the fall of 2014. It was worth the wait to hear the artist continue his synthesis of decades of Black pop. Prince’s influence was again evident in the sonic soup, but it even extended to the album’s personnel. Jesse Johnson, founding member of Minneapolis’s The Time, played guitar. The strings on “Really Love” were conducted and arranged by Brent Fischer, the son of Clare Fischer, the composer who frequently wrote orchestral arrangements for Prince albums from Parade onward. Surely not a coincidence.
The following year, D’angelo re-emerged into the music industry with his mystique intact. He played festivals around the world and showed off his newly-developed guitar skills. “She’s Always In My Hair” was a fixture in his sets, and he released a new rendition in a Spotify Sessions EP, basically unchanged since 1997 except for a bluesy ending straight out of “Let’s Go Crazy.” The song was still hitting home for him.
A few days after Prince’s death in April 2016, D’angelo appeared on The Tonight Show to perform “Sometimes It Snows In April,” the last track on Parade. His arrangement was minimal, with just backing singers Maya Rudolph and Gretchen Lieberum to support his piano and vocals.
The song mourns the death of a friend named Christopher Tracy, Prince’s character from the album’s counterpart film Under The Cherry Moon. It’s a song about coming to grips with mortality, perhaps the most universal experience there is, but it’s also specifically about Prince’s idea of himself. “So, in effect, he’s singing as someone else, and mourning his own introjected death,” Ian Penman wrote for the London Review of Books.
In D’angelo’s rendition, the layers of psychoanalysis on top of the grief are replaced with more grief, like a freshly excavated valley flooded with water. He lets the tempo ebb and flow as he keeps his own time through suspended chords. On the second chorus, he hits a churchy high note on the last word of “sometimes you feel so bad.” It’s triumphant, even in the face of death. Just a fleeting moment, a good thing that can’t last because nothing can.
In early 2021, D’angelo spoke about his relationship with Prince. "I felt like I knew him very well,” he said. “I've been studying him all my life. And when I met him, I felt like I'd lived my life for that moment. I had trained—I had done everything I had done—for that moment."
When D’angelo reaches the third verse of “Sometimes It Snows In April,” rather than sing Christopher Tracy, D’angelo cuts to the point: “I often dream of heaven, and I know that Prince is there.” Tears welling in his eyes, he doesn’t sing the next line.
Originally published in Electric Word Life: Writing on Prince 2016 - 2021, available here.