D’Angelo was soul music’s bard of devotion

The late artist helped shape modern R&B with his songs about intimacy and feeling.

- MIKAEL WOOD POP MUSIC CRITIC

D'ANGELO leaves a slim but vital discography blending sensuality and swagger.

(LUIS SINCO Los Angeles Times)

“How does it feel?” D’Angelo asks that question — worries it, caresses it, plumbs its unseen depths — no fewer than two dozen times in what might have been his signature hit.

A meticulous, slow-to-boil ballad from the R&B singer’s 2000 album “Voodoo,” “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” is basically a seduction in seven minutes: The song opens with D’Angelo asking a woman to come closer, which because the grooveis so spare and his voice such a murmur, she can’t help but do. As the song gradually picks up steam, his singing gets grittier and the words more graphic; he offers to take off her clothes and to “take the walls down” between them. Yet even with electric guitars and background vocals cascading around him, he continues checking in with his lover until the music cuts offabruptly as though somebody turned on the lights.

“How does it fe—,” we hear him sing, a man suspended in a state of eternal concern.

D’Angelo, who died Tuesday at 51, made soul music for three decades in that tender and attentive spirit. His song “Brown Sugar” catalogs the pleasures of a partner’s body; “Really Love” contemplates the not-espe-cially-sexy reality of long-term coupledom. In “Lady” he’s exhausted his ability to keep secret his relationship with a woman he knows “every guy in the parking lot” wants to steal from him.

“Ym tired of hiding what we feel,” he pleads, “I’m trying to come with the real.”