I'm Brian Hyatt. This is Rolling Stone Music Now. Back in October, we lost one of the greatest

musicians in the last 30 years or so, DeAngelo. He had been quietly battling cancer, and I know

it's a loss that his fans and friends are still trying to grapple with. Our sister publication

Vibe ran a great cover story on DeAngelo by Keith Murphy, and I definitely

recommend you check that out. One of the most incredible and also tragic things about DeAngel's

career is that he only released three albums, all of them great. Brown Sugar, the absolute classic

voodoo, and what turns out to be the final album of his career, Black Messiah,

in 2014.

In 2015, just a few months after the release of Black Messiah,

I was lucky enough to spend some time with DeAngelo for a story in Rolling Stone.

We talked for hours late at night about Black Messiah, about voodoo, about the beginnings of his career. Since October, I've been

going through my audio from those interviews, and I wanted to present some of it to you today.

Obviously, it was never meant for a podcast at the time, so it was not up to our usual audio quality,

but I think you'll find it listenable. And I think it also conveys a lot about who DeAndrella was as a musician and a human being.

So as we spoke, DeAngelo was working on new music. His idea at the time was that he was going to put out a quick follow-up to Black Messiah.

That never happened, although I know there's a lot of music in the vaults, so I hope

we'll be hearing a lot more DeAngelo music. But again, let's go back to those late nights in 2015,

and here's some of my conversations with the great De Angel. If you look at someone like Marvin Gay, I think you read that biography, the David

Rich one, Divide the Soul.

Yeah.

And it's like his whole thing was like, you know, sacred versus sexual.

Is that a conflict for you or have you ever seen it as a conflict versus someone like

...