Angie Stone was no overnight success. By the time 2001’s Mahogany Soul made her a star, she’d logged two decades in the game, starting out in pioneering all-girl rap trio the Sequence, before passing through went-nowhere R&B groups like Devox and Vertical Hold and writing and singing with other artists (including D’Angelo, her former lover and father of their son, Michael). Once Clive Davis’s Arista Records signed her in 1999, those years of experience set her apart from the neo-soul pack, having worn a powerful grain into her rich, agile voice, and steeping her music in soul’s deep history.
Her debut for Arista, Black Diamond, retooled lush 70s soul for the new century: Green Grass Vapors – a love song to the sweet leaf with Stone “higher than the Thunder Dome” – was from the same funky swamp as D’Angelo’s Chicken Grease, its smouldering guitar like a moaning panther. A remarkable reading of Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man, meanwhile, mastered the track’s breathless, staccato chorus without breaking a sweat, channelling Gaye’s existential agonies with every holler to an oblivious lord.
But it was Mahogany Soul – her first for Davis’s new label, J Records – that announced Stone’s true arrival. It opened with Soul Insurance, backing singers bending the hook to Lady Marmalade around Stone like armour as she delivered a fearsome rap like Caught Up-era Millie Jackson, hard and wise but with a heart ready to get broken again. The 75-minute epic celebrated good men (Brotha) and spiritual forebears (If It Wasn’t), and served up gritty memories of her years of pre-fame struggle (20 Dollars); More Than a Woman was a wonderfully sinful slow-jam with Calvin Richardson. But the album soared highest when Stone skimmed the painful depths of love – What U Dyin’ For? sought to liberate good women from bad men, while her signature anthem Wish I Didn’t Miss You, repurposed O’Jays’ Backstabbers to deliver a new classic rumination on love’s eternal sting.
Stone was now a contemporary of the neo-soul uprising led by friends and collaborators D’Angelo, Erykah Badu and Musiq Soulchild, but her age and experience gifted her music a superior weight and authority. Follow-up Stone Love opened with an a cappella riff on the Supremes’ titular hit and then quickly revisited the boudoir where Mahogany Soul’s charmed break-ups and make-ups occurred (on Stay for a While, a delectably slow-burn suite of longing and lust, Stone got carnal with Anthony Hamilton over molasses-sweet swing). Elsewhere, Stone’s classic sensibility negotiated the new era – Lovers’ Ghetto lifted the same Dynasty sample Camp Lo rode for their cult hit Luchini (This Is It), while the joyous I Wanna Thank Ya paired Stone with Snoop Dogg.
Stone relocated to the reborn Stax Records for 2007’s The Art of Love and War, a perfect home for an artist so steeped in soul and funk’s 70s glory days. The album offered killer duets with legends Betty Wright (on Baby, a storming repudiation of a man who’s left his former lover behind now he’s hit the big time) and James Ingram (My People, a lithe update of Stevie Wonder’s Black Man). It was Stone’s highest-charting LP, but her next, 2009’s Unexpected, stumbled. If Stone sounded uncharacteristically disengaged throughout its upbeat bangers, she probably was; her father had died shortly before production began.
Unexpected didn’t trouble the Billboard 100, and Angie exited Stax to find herself adrift in a disrupted industry. But while the albums that followed never matched Mahogany Soul’s triumphs, the deep cuts were golden. Forget About Me, from 2015’s Dream, evoked D’Angelo’s offset groove while taking potshots at her former lover. Full Circle in 2019 served up Dinosaur, a squelchy swamp of dark funk wondering “where did the good ones go? They’re on the verge of extinction”, and Grits, where Stone played a frank sex therapist: “You call it smashin’/ What about passion?”; “Tell that boy to stir like grits / circular motion / nice and slow”. Meanwhile 2023’s Love Language peaked with The Gym, a final, beautiful duet with longtime foil Musiq Soulchild. In these moments, you can hear the glory of Mahogany Soul echoing, the promise of further brilliance. And it’s a compounding tragedy that last night’s terrible accident has deprived us of any more of Stone’s magic.
