Episode #84 A Love Letter from a Black Man to D’Angelo

Coach Chris Rodriguez reflects on how D’Angelo’s music shaped his life and now carries deeper meaning through personal experiences of grief. Inspired by D’Angelo’s legacy, he explores honoring vulnerability, recognizing hidden battles, embracing complexity, and creating from love rather than for reward.

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Timestamps

• 00:00 Membership Sponsor
• 00:42 Welcome
• 01:27 Why D’Angelo Matters
• 02:11 Sneaking Voodoo
• 04:14 Music & Loss
• 04:38 Grief & Vulnerability
• 07:57 Hidden Battles
• 10:52 Multitudes & Change
• 13:25 Create for Love
• 15:43 Rediscover the Music
• 16:01 Closing

Transcript

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This episode is brought to you by the Soulfully You Community membership. What started off as just a podcast has become so much more with live group coaching, a resource library of online courses, guided movement practices, and meditations designed to help you come back to your body. Calm your nerves and show up in every area of your life. More fully growth and change don't happen in a vacuum. It happens in relationship with other people. So if you're looking for a like-minded community, the soul fully you community membership is the space for you to join. Click the link below or visit coach chris rodriguez.com/membership. Hey friend. Welcome to the Soulfully You Podcast with Coach Chris Rodriguez. I'm a movement and mindset coach, and I believe in a deeper way of living, a more soulful way of being. Join me each week for conversations about how to put a little more soul. Into our work, our relationships in our everyday lives. There are artists who make hit records, and then there's artists that make time stop. For me, D'Angelo was one of those artists. For me his voice was not just sound. His words weren't just songs. His arrangements didn't just sound good, but the combination was an embodiment of soul incarnate. It's the music I listen to with my wife. It's the songs I play for my son. It's been the soundtrack of so many. Eras of my life. So today's episode is dedicated to the late, the legend D'Angelo, and all the lessons that we can learn about soulful living from his life. In black Caribbean, Christian homes, there are some understood rules of what can and cannot be in the house. No drugs, no profanity, nothing provocative, and definitely nothing that looked but sounded like witchcraft. So when D'Angelo dropped his sophomore album Voodoo, there was no question for me. If I can go to my local record store and get that album, I understood that it didn't belong in my house. But there was a workaround in high school. I had a bigger cousin and she lived walking distance from my high school. So every day after school, I'd walk over to my auntie's house and she had her own room and her own radio, and she had her own cassette and CD collection. And we'd go in and close the door and I'd get to pick out all my favorite albums that I couldn't listen to in my house. Listen to Boys to Men. I listen to 112. There are albums that every time I put'em on, on a drive or in my house, I'm transported back to my big cousin's room listening to music with her, and I'd listened to D'Angelo on his Brown Sugar album. There was one song that I always made my cousin replay because it was so provocative and so edgy. It was called Shit Damn Motherfucker. And I'd make a repeat it, repeat it, and we'd blast it with the door closed. I thought it was so cheeky, so funny, so, so cool, so bold. For somebody to put that as the title of a song, not a rapper, A singer. I'd listened to songs like Cruising and Feels like Making Love. Not realizing that those weren't songs that D'Angelo wrote, but those were remakes that he put his own spin from. Smokey Robinson and Roberta Fleck. His music moved me and it was different, and his sound, And the music he created with his friends 30 years ago created a genre called Neo Soul. That's the backbone of Pop and today's r and b, even today's gospel and contemporary Christian music. I love the way his music makes me feel. But I also love what his music makes me remember. My big cousin, she gave birth to her second child. Shortly after getting home from the hospital, she was complaining about headaches and didn't think anything of it, and then one day she just passed out and it was a brain aneurysm. And my big cousin that gave me so many memories is no longer there. So every time I listen to D'Angelo's music, I'm reminded of her. It has a special place in my life. The first thing that D'Angelo's Passing teaches me is the reminder of the beauty of grief. How grief is to me over the years has become one of the deepest forms of love. We grieve the people, the things, the relationships, the places that we love. And I've experienced my share of grief over the years. I've had to make sense of it in so many ways, and there's no right way to grieve. Sometimes grief is in the form of tears, and sometimes the grief is in the form of just remembering. Remembering moments, and sometimes you can be intentional about bringing those moments up. And other times you get to these places, you hear a song, you go somewhere and you're transported back to memories and moments with the person you love. I remember I was having a conversation with therapist and yoga teacher, Claire fta, and I was talking about the grief I was feeling when I lost my father-in-law a few years ago and how it was this weird thing of, you know, in my garage several years prior, he put these bike racks up. For us to, you know, just have space and have storage. So every time I ride my bike, it's like, I'm, I remember him, I remember him doing this thing. He was also a coach, like track and lifting and cross country and wrestling. So he always had a home gym. So us having our gym in the garage every time we work out in that place, it's like he's there. He grew up on the northern California coast and he used to always tell me stories about how he learned how to fish and surf at, Stinson Beach and how there's these little sprout plants that, um. I don't know what they're called, but they're little succulent plants that they're all over the coast and you see'em at Half Moon Bay. They're just lying. Half Moon Bay. And how him and his buddies used to jump off the roof and land in them and they were so springy that they would break their fall. I see'em in the coast. I'm there. So Claire was telling me, she said, you know, do you, do you talk to him when, when you. When you're in those moments, and I thought, I said, nah, I don't, I I never thought about it. So I started making a practice of like, just acknowledging him in those spaces of Yeah, I, I know you're with me in these moments. And I do the same thing with my cousin when I listen to D'Angelo's music as a man, as a black man. It's important for me to find the beauty and the vulnerability, not just to find moments of grief, but also to acknowledge my sadness, to acknowledge the moments when I feel lonely. I think loneliness is something that we assume a lot of people assume, you know, I'm a person, I teach a bunch of classes, I have big crowds of people who are attending. I'm married, I got a kid, like we love each other. And people just assume like, you must never feel lonely. You got everything right, but. Even in those moments, I can feel lonely. I can feel like there's something that I'm battling with in my head that I can't talk to my wife about or that people just won't understand. People just assume things about me, and in those moments I feel lonely. I feel isolated. It's important to acknowledge those moments and their depth. So vulnerability is another thing that D'Angelo his life has taught me. The second thing D'Angelo taught me is you never know what somebody's going through. Sometimes all we see is the way they show up or the way they don't, and it's easy to assume the worst without knowing what's going on behind the scenes without knowing the secret battles that they're going through. We've seen this play out so many times, when Chadwick Bozeman was secretly battling cancer, people started making jokes online about how skinny he was. Is he on drugs or all these things. Not realizing that in all those major roles you've seen him in, that he was going in between sessions to go for his chemo and go for treatments. Sometimes they're not going through health situations, but sometimes they're just going through situations in their personal life. Like when Prince changed his name to the symbol, the artist formally known as Prince. I heard every comedian making fun of him about how weird he was. There were all these op adss written about him not realizing that what was going on was he was in this legal battle with his label because he was writing, arranging, producing, engineering, all of his music, but the label was still taking a cut of the stuff as if they had any part in the creative process. So in this battle to get the rights back to his music, he said, all right, well you guys own the name Prince right now, and you own all those records. So these new songs that I produce, that I record, yeah, they're gonna be under this name. He was doing this secret battle that eventually became the lesson for some of our favorite artists like Jay-Z, like D'Angelo, for how to take ownership of your music. And when D'Angelo was taking too long to record music or put out albums, people had all these things to say about him, how flaky he was and, and all this stuff. Not realizing what was going on, that he was still trying to make music while battling something physically. How this relates to you and your life. There are people in your life who are not acting like themselves, who are not showing up in the same ways that they used to in your relationship. They're a little more flaky than normal, and you're probably getting offended, and this is not to excuse folks for just the times when they ghost you or treat you poorly or show up or respond the wrong way to you. But what this is saying is we can all take a step back and say, I think at the bare minimum, they're going through something in their life and maybe they might not have the space or the health or the courage to let you in to what's going on. All you see is the way they're not around anymore. And maybe it's an opportunity for you to either reach out and just say, Hey. I notice you're showing up different. Is everything okay? At the very least, just think better of them than you do. What they'll remember is the way that you were there, even when they couldn't articulate the need they had. The next lesson that I learned from D'Angelo's Life and Music is that you can be more than one thing at the same time. When the Voodoo album came out, he put out his music video that everybody talks about, untitled. The video cost him like$200. It was just a one shot video and it's him and the camera's just circling around his perceivably, naked body, chiseled abs, a little sweat rolling down and he's just singing This dude who was known for being the king of music now is. This sex symbol that everybody's talking about. At the same time, he's getting featured on hip hop songs with Method Man and Jay-Z, and he's doing gritty hip hop, r and b music. He's singing about vulnerability. He's also got songs like Shit, damn Motherfucker. I think it's easier for us to box somebody into one mode. Well, you are just like this. It's safer because we think if you're just like this, you'll always be just like this. I'll always know what to expect and I'll always know that you'll show up for me in the exact same way every time, but that's not real. In fact, it's a problem if you stay the same exact way your entire life. If you stay the same person you've always been your entire life. You don't grow, you don't change. You don't allow circumstances to teach you lessons of ways that you need to pivot. That's not a good thing. But that's something that we praise in society for the people. It's like, oh, this person has always been justice. No, you can be more than that and you are more than that. I think for me personally, this is something that has affected me because, I mean, I've, I've worn so many different hats. I love music. Just as much as I love dance, just as much as I love to learn about things, just as much as I love to talk to folks and coach, I love to create in other ways. I love every genre of music. I love to learn about a bunch of different skills and then I'm also this black Latin Caribbean dude that you just assume it's supposed to be one way. But I've lived a bunch of different lives and I've had a bunch of different experiences, and my curiosity and love for life makes me this other different thing. And tomorrow I might not be the same person I was yesterday, and I hope I'm not. I hope I'm growing a little more. Change'em a little more open to who I'm becoming, and I want to offer that as an invitation to you to be open to the changing you. And the last lesson I learned from D'Angelo's life is there's something powerful about just creating because you love it and not expecting some kind of reward at the end of the thing you create. I think capitalism and consumerism tell us that art should be this commodity. And if you're the person that is producing the art, you should have aspirations of being a New York Times bestseller. You should have aspirations of. Getting a record deal or getting people to just buy your art all the time. But what if you created because you can, because it brings you joy, because you love it, because it makes you a better human to have art as a part of your humanity. When D'Angelo and Quest Love and Eryka Badu and J Dilla were just in the studio recording and creating sounds and studying, they were just trying to replicate the legends. They were trying to produce something that was authentic and the best thing that they could ever do out of love for the craft. So they would study Prince and James Brown and Jimi Hendrix, and they would just listen, analyze the music, practice, listen, analyze the music practice. And then try to create something. And the sounds that came from the study became this music that changed our lives. So many artists have stories of, oh, I know where I was when I heard that song. There's a whole type of percussion that you hear and pop and hip hop music today that comes from one song, from D'Angelo that everybody was trying to just replicate years later. Friends, just having fun doing the thing they love. Change the world. What problem can you solve by having fun and creating and exploring with people you love who are like-minded and like-hearted. Who don't take themselves too seriously, who find joy in being together. Not looking to be a legend, not looking to be somebody that people talk about 20, 30 years later, and out of that, becoming someone who actually influence and inspired people. So after this episode, go discover, rediscover, fall in love with the sounds. Fall in love with the songs of D'Angelo. Share it with somebody you love. Move a little bit. And let it inspire you to live a beautiful life and create something that matters in the world. Thank you for listening to the Soulfully You Podcast with Coach Chris Rodriguez. If you like the show, help others find me by subscribing and leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. And don't forget to connect with me on Instagram at Coach underscore Chris Rodriguez. For more episodes along with all of my coaching programs, visit me@www.coach chris rodriguez.com. Special thanks to my team behind the scenes music by Dan Smith. And remember, whatever you do, wherever you find yourself today, make sure you put some soul in it.