Songfacts®:

• D'Angelo wrote this steamy song with Raphael Saadiq as an homage to Prince, particularly his early ballads. It finds him opening up to his girl, letting her know he's ready to take it to the next level. Check out Prince's 1987 slow-burner "Adore" to hear the influence.
• This is one of those songs that is more famous for its video, which is a single shot of a very ripped D'Angelo lip-synching into the camera, wearing nothing but a gold cross around his neck. Or so it appeared: He was actually wearing pajama pants during the shoot but pulled them low to preserve the illusion that he was naked.
  
  "When I did that scene, I wasn't thinking about sex," he told the Daily Telegraph. "It was really a spiritual thing. The director asked me to think about the church, the Holy Ghost, speaking in tongues. That's where I went when I sang that song."
  
  The video was directed by Paul Hunter and Dominique Trenier.
• "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" earned D'Angelo a Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance in 2001. It was also nominated for Best R&B Song but lost to "Say My Name" by Destiny's Child.
• This was featured in the 2011 romantic comedy No Strings Attached, starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher.
• In 2015, D'Angelo explained to Rolling Stone that the only issue he had with the video was that it sometimes overshadowed the song, but that's he's made peace with it. "I think people gravitated to how sexy and beautiful the song was," he said. "It wouldn't have raised the eyebrows it did if the song wasn't good. The video was just accompaniment."
• "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" is the most popular song from D'Angelo's second album, Voodoo. His first album, Brown Sugar, was released in 1995 when he was 21, and it blew some minds by blending live instruments with hip-hop production to create something funky and soulful. But D'Angelo worked slowly, and at one point he scrapped what he was working on for Voodoo and pretty much started over. The album didn't arrive until 2000, but it didn't disappoint. Unfortunately, there was a much longer wait for his next one, Black Messiah, which didn't show up until 2014. D'Angelo had problems with substance abuse and depression that hindered his productivity. Black Messiah ended up being his last album; he died from pancreatic cancer in 2025 at 51.
• The song is called "Untitled" for a very prosaic reason: When D'Angelo and Raphael Saadiq made the demo, they didn't have a name for the song, so they labeled it "Untitled." When it came time to name the song, they just added a subtitle, making it "Untitled (How Does It Feel)."
• The album version runs 7:10, with the single (which is used in the video) cut down to 4:21. In both cases, the song cuts off abruptly. This is because the tape it was recorded to came to an end, and instead of fixing the ending, D'Angelo decided to leave it that way.
• D'Angelo and Raphael Saadiq also teamed up to write "Lady," a hit from D'Angelo's 1995 debut album, Brown Sugar. Saadiq was a member of Tony! Toni! Toné! and also a successful solo artist. Behind the scenes, he's written and produced for many other artists, including Beyoncé. He's a co-writer on "16 Carriages" from her 2024 Cowboy Carter album.