page_title: Voodoo (D'Angelo album)
section_title: Grooves and beats
hierarchical_section_title: Voodoo (D'Angelo album) / Recording and production / Grooves and beats
caption_attribution_description: Questlove with The Roots at the 2011 Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest.
context_page_description: Voodoo is the second studio album by American neo soul singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist D'Angelo. It was released on January 25, 2000, by Virgin Records.
  D'Angelo recorded the album during 1998 and 1999 at Electric Lady Studios in New York City, with an extensive line-up of musicians associated with the Soulquarians musical collective. Produced primarily by the singer, Voodoo features a loose, groove-based funk sound and serves as a departure from the more conventional song structure of his debut album, Brown Sugar. Its lyrics explore themes of spirituality, love, sexuality, maturation, and fatherhood.
  Following heavy promotion and public anticipation, the album was met with commercial and critical success. It debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200, selling 320,000 copies in its first week, and spent 33 weeks on the chart. It was promoted with five singles, including the hit single "Untitled", whose music video garnered D'Angelo mainstream attention and controversy. Upon its release, Voodoo received general acclaim from music critics and earned D'Angelo several accolades. It was named one of the year's best albums by numerous publications.
context_section_description: D'Angelo and his supporting personnel constructed several of the songs' grooves for the album to sit far behind time, directly on top of time, or pressing on the time, making them cluttered and loose in style. Questlove helped design the sparse funk, soul and hip hop beats on the generally groove-based record. In later interviews, Questlove discussed that he and D'Angelo incorporated much of the distinctive percussive rhythms of Detroit hip hop producer, Slum Village-member and The Ummah-affiliate J Dilla, also known as Jay Dee. A part of the musical collective Soulquarians, Dilla served as a frequent collaborator of theirs. Although album tracks such as "Left & Right" and "Devil's Pie" help to bring this claim to light, J Dilla himself was not officially credited for production. However, he contributed significantly to Voodoo's overall sound, specifically the rhythm and percussion.
  One of the characteristics of the drumming style implemented in recording the album is its adherence to human timing, as the tracks were mostly programmed mechanically during recording, therefore resulting in the album's intentional sloppiness. In a later interview, Questlove discussed the intention and purpose of including imperfection in the album's sound, stating "we wanted to play as perfectly as we could, but then deliberately insert the little glitch that makes it sound messed up. The idea was to sound disciplined, but with a total human feel."
  Questlove also acknowledged J Dilla's influence over the recording sessions for Voodoo. He said of Dilla's unique programming method during the sessions, "He makes programmed stuff so real, you really can’t tell it’s programmed. He might program 128 bars, with absolutely no looping or quantizing ... When Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest first played me some of his stuff, I said, 'The drums are messed up! The time is wrong!' And when we did a song for D'Angelo's record that Lenny Kravitz was supposed to play on, Lenny said, 'I can’t play with this — there’s a discrepancy in the drum pattern.' And we’re like, 'It's supposed to be this way!'
caption: Questlove played drums, co-wrote four songs, and assisted D'Angelo.
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