🎤And It's Bad, Bad Leroy Brown 🎹
D'Angelo: The Neo-Soul Architect Who Made the Piano Sacred Again The music world has lost one of its most enigmatic and influential voices. D'Angelo , born Michael Eugene Archer, died Tuesday, October 14, 2025, after a courageous battle with cancer. He was 51 years old. To understand D'Angelo's impact is to understand what soul music became in the 1990s—and what it could never be again without him. When his debut album Brown Sugar arrived in 1995, it didn't just introduce a new artist; it announced a movement . Neo-soul , they would call it, though that label always felt too small for what D'Angelo accomplished. He took the church-trained reverence of his Virginia upbringing and merged it with hip-hop's rhythmic complexity, creating something both ancient and utterly new. But it was 2000's Voodoo that cemented his genius. Here was an album that moved like molasses, that understood silence as music, that made the piano not just cool but e...