D’Angelo’s ‘Brown Sugar’ Celebrates 30th Anniversary With Vinyl Reissue
The debut album from the neo-soul pioneer will be reissued in a special, 2LP format.
Brown Sugar, D’Angelo’s classic 1995 album that helped mainstream the neo-soul genre, celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, and fans will soon have the opportunity to experience it as never before. A new, 2LP version of D’Angelo’s debut, featuring one LP in translucent honey sugar vinyl and another in opaque burnt sugar, is available for pre-order now.
When it was first released in 1995, Brown Sugar was a slow-burning success that eventually came to be one of the defining records of a musical moment and movement. Though neo-soul’s roots predate D’Angelo, it was the success of Brown Sugar, along with work from fellow artists like Erykah Badu and Ms. Lauryn Hill, that helped the genre earn mainstream attention and critical acclaim. Though Brown Sugar was not a high-charting album immediately upon release, its third single “Lady” peaked in the top ten of the Hot 100 and the album has since been certified platinum by the RIAA.
D’Angelo wrote and recorded much of Brown Sugar by himself, even playing many of the instruments on the record, before the album was released when he was just 21 years old. The fact that he played all his own instruments earned early comparisons to Prince in a variety of interviews, and D’Angelo supposed that what they had in common was a desire to “stretch” soul music and what it could be. “Prince is extremely soulful, but he can get real rock-‘n’-rollish. So can Lenny Kravitz,” D’Angelo said in a 1996 interview with Interview magazine. “I’m making black music. That’s the only outline for me, really. That’s the only boundary to stay with. It’s soul music. I’m going all out in those terms.”
It wasn’t long after it was released that the mainstream realized that Brown Sugar and D’Angelo were something special. The album received four Grammy nominations, including for Best R&B Album, and sparked high anticipation for what he would do next. D’Angelo kept people waiting until 2000 for his follow-up record Voodoo and until 2014 for his third, Black Messiah. While those albums were similarly acclaimed, Brown Sugar still holds a special place in D’Angelo’s work.
