Neo Soul at it’s finest!
And I mean FINEST.

D’Angelo’s Untitled (How Does It Feel) is straight fire. 😮‍💨🔥

When the song appeared on Voodoo in 2000, I was doing my nighttime Quiet Storm on 1.FM, and this record became one of those songs I had better keep close.
Every single night, women would call asking me to play it.
Not occasionally.
I’m talking five or six requests on a regular night, and sometimes more. 📻☎️

The women were definitely calling, but let’s not rewrite history.
Men loved that song too.

That opening is so quiet and patient. Then the guitar starts moving, the harmonies build, and D’Angelo begins singing like he has all night to make his point.
By the end, he isn’t merely singing anymore.
That man is reaching down into his soul, grabbing those gritty, deep notes and pulling them all the way up. You can hear the church in him, the passion in him and the ache in him, all fighting for the same microphone. 🎙️

And then there was that video.
Lord Have Mercy.🤤

The first thing you see;
Is that right ear
Followed by those tight ass cornrows.
Then that left ear.
Those beautiful brown eyes
The camera drops down to those lips as he licks them.
Then that voice.
That chest. Those abs.
That V.
Just watch the damn video.🤤

Director Paul Hunter stripped away the storyline, the dancers, the fancy set and nearly all the clothes.
It was just D’Angelo against a black background, looking into that camera like the rest of us had interrupted something private.
The video was sexy because he was sexy, plain and simple.
That body got everybody’s attention, but his face and voice kept you there.
He wasn’t doing much, yet somehow he was doing entirely too much. 😏

The wild part is that the visual became so huge it nearly swallowed the music.
People remember the abs, the sweat and that camera slowly traveling south, but listen again with your eyes closed.
The record is even hotter without the video.

Untitled was written and produced by D’Angelo and Raphael Saadiq, and listening now, I can hear Saadiq all through it.
He has a way of writing soul music that feels familiar without sounding copied.
A lot of people know him as the voice of Tony! Toni! Toné!, but they may not realize how many records he helped shape for other artists.
Once you know his musical fingerprints, you start hearing them everywhere.

The song was created as a tribute to Prince, and that influence is obvious, especially in the falsetto, the guitar and the slow-burning arrangement.
But D’Angelo never sounds like a cheap imitation.
He takes that Prince energy and drags it through gospel, Southern soul and his own beautifully ragged voice until it belongs to him.

Commercially, Untitled reached No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 2 on the R&B chart.
It also earned D’Angelo the 2001 Grammy for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance.
Those numbers are impressive, but they still don’t explain what happened every night when those phone lines lit up.

I basically bought Voodoo to support D’Angelo because of this one song.
Truthfully, Untitled was the only track on the album I kept returning to.
I played it constantly on the radio then, and it has never stopped hitting me.

When D’Angelo died in October 2025, it hurt. 💔🕯️
Listening to this song now makes that loss feel even heavier, because voices like his don’t come around often.
He could be smooth, sensual, spiritual and vulnerable in the same breath.

More than 25 years later, that final climb still gets me.
The video may have shown us his body, but the song gave us his soul.

And that is the part I’ll never stop playing.
Never.

DJZ7

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