Brown Sugar

D'Angelo's song "Brown Sugar" is not an ode to a dark-skinned woman - it's a love song to marijuana. That's why his eyes are "a shade of blood burgundy." D'Angelo admitted this early on, explaining that he liked the misdirection in the lyric. This is something Rick James did back in 1978 on his song "Mary Jane," although that one was a little more obvious.

"Brown Sugar" is the title track to D'Angelo's 1995 debut album, which was on the vanguard of the neo-soul movement. He started dating the singer Angie Stone when he was recording the album, and in 1997 they had a son together. They split up a few years later, but 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." D'Angelo was just 21 when the album was released. Stone was 33.

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 20 minutes and a mistake," Muhammad added.