× × Skip to main content Questlove and D'Angelo rehearsing in 2012 W hen I was awoken on the morning of Tuesday, Oct. 14, I stared at the phone. No call that early is good news. I braced myself. I knew … but I didn’t know. Sigh. But I knew. I had one propitious foot in the fight beside D’Angelo, another irresolute one in the “maybe it’s time for him to go home, Ahmir” shoe. D himself told me in our last convo at Sloan Kettering, “I’m hanging on, brotha … but today was hard … y’know?” I know, man … I know. Truthfully, I wasn’t ready for that gut punch. I’d been bracing for it for some 25 years — since the deluge of Voodoo in 2000. I always had a looming feeling concerning D like a “any moment now I will get ‘the call’“ feeling. Most of our mavericks who fly that close to the sun never get to see that journey through. And now here we are at 5:30 a.m. I had seconds to decide: How do I process this new reality? My preference was not to start my Tuesday morning … mourning. Tear ducts filling, I searched for a happy distraction to slow this grand-piano-speeding-down-a-San-Francisco-hill feeling in my stomach. I wanted one bright memory. One. And…
Published: October 30, 2025 1:01 pm
Source: Rolling Stone — Read original