Brown Sugar

D'Angelo's song "Brown Sugar" is not an ode to a dark-skinned woman, but it's a love song to marijuana, very similar to the topic of Rick James' song "Mary Jane," which is also about his love for marijuana. In 2005, D'Angelo pled guilty to marijuana possession.

Soul singer Angie Stone was involved in a relationship with D'Angelo at the time of the recording of this track. She contributed to several other tracks on the Brown Sugar album and was the inspiration for this song. D'Angelo, however, walked out on her a few days after she had his son. Despite the hurt, Stone still appreciates her former partner's talent. She told the Guardian newspaper in 2004: "Whatever has happened between us, I love D'Angelo's music. His song 'Brown Sugar' is very special for me because that has a rare innocence about it. If Marvin Gaye is the king of soul music, D'Angelo is the prince."

The song came about by accident while D'Angelo was noodling around on the piano while the engineer was fixing a computer problem. "At first, it sounded like intermission music," Ali Shaheed Muhammad, the track's co-producer, told Wax Poetics in 2010. "But then he started playing this chord progression, and I stopped and looked at him. Even he wasn't aware of what exactly he was playing, he just had his hands on the keyboard. When I asked him what he was playing, he said, 'Nothing'." Luckily, Muhammad was recording the "nothing" and within the next fifteen minutes, he was programming a beat, and D'Angelo was adding bass over the chords and throwing in some lyrics of what would shortly become "Brown Sugar." "It was like it was too good to be true, because that song came out of twenty minutes and a mistake," Muhammad added.