Songfacts®:

• 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.
• "Brown Sugar" was the lead single from the album and earned Grammy Award nominations for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance and Best R&B song, but D'Angelo's label was not happy with the track.
  
  "You have to realize, at the time, nothing else had that sound," producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad said. "EMI kept insisting that the song was too raw and needed to be finished. I admired the brains and musical knowledge of [EMI A&R man] Gary Harris, but he was another one who kept saying he didn't think that 'Brown Sugar' was finished. It was cool that we were later nominated for the Grammy, but what is cooler to me is the fact that 'Brown Sugar' was the spawn of a new movement. That song has a different texture and feel than everything else on that album."
• The song was featured on the TV drama New York Undercover in the 1995 episode "The Highest Bidder." It was also used in the 1996 comedy A Thin Line Between Love and Hate, starring Martin Lawrence.
• A clue to the song's subject matter is the line, "Even got a big sister by the name of Chocolate Thai," a reference to a strain of marijuana. You'll also notice a lot of smoke in the video.
• In 1971 the Rolling Stones released a famous rock song called "Brown Sugar" that is indeed about a lovely lady with skin, but D'Angelo had never heard it. He was born in 1974 and didn't listen to much rock music growing up.
• D'Angelo liked his brown sugar maybe a bit too much: he pled guilty to marijuana possession after a 2005 arrest. After releasing his second album, Voodoo, in 2000, he pretty much vanished until 2012, when he started touring again. His third album, Black Messiah, finally showed up in 2014 but proved to be his last. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2025 at 51.