Cruisin

He takes a song already saturated with smooth-soul associations — Smokey Robinson wrote and recorded it, it became a pop standard — and runs it through a psychedelic soul filter that makes it feel newly minted and strangely private. The arrangement is built around a slow, almost narcotically relaxed groove, with guitars that sound like they've been run through slightly-too-warm analog equipment, all soft edges and gentle distortion. D'Angelo's voice sits low in the mix relative to contemporary production norms, another choice that creates intimacy — you lean toward the speakers. His delivery is unhurried to the point of seeming unconcerned, but that ease is deliberate; it creates the sonic equivalent of having nowhere to be and not minding at all. This was part of the *Brown Sugar* era, his debut, which announced a young man who had absorbed every strand of soul history and was capable of synthesizing it into something that didn't sound like nostalgia. The mood the song inhabits is specific: late summer, early evening, the kind of day that has been good enough that you want to extend it, to make it last a few more minutes by just sitting still and listening. This is driving-with-the-windows-down music, but without urgency — drifting rather than going anywhere.