Raphael Saadiq

1966 –

← Randy Crawford Ray Charles →

THE ARCHITECT OF NEO-SOUL'S BACKBEAT

He walked into a recording studio in the early 1990s with a bass guitar, a falsetto, and a vision for R&B that would not arrive in the mainstream for another decade. Raphael Saadiq grew up in Oakland, the youngest of sixteen children, and learned music in the church before forming Tony! Toni! Toné! with his brother Dwayne Wiggins and cousin Timothy Christian. The band brought live instrumentation back to R&B when the genre was dominated by drum machines and sequencers, recording with real bass, real horns, and real drums.

Saadiq became the producer and songwriter that the neo-soul movement depended on, writing and producing for D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, the Roots, and Stevie Wonder.

The cost was working behind the scenes while other artists took the spotlight. Saadiq wrote and produced for some of the most important artists of the 1990s and 2000s, but his own name never carried the same weight as the acts he produced. He did not seem to mind the anonymity -- he preferred the studio to the stage. His solo career launched in 2002 with Instant Vintage, which earned him a Grammy nomination. He shifted to a 1960s-inspired Motown sound on The Way I See It in 2008, featuring Joss Stone and Stevie Wonder.

I Want You Back is the track he produced for Maxwell on the Love Jones soundtrack -- not the Jackson 5 song, the Maxwell cover that showed what Saadiq could do with a classic song and a vocalist who trusted his production completely. He scored films, mentored younger artists, and became the connective tissue between 1970s soul and 21st-century R&B.

← Back to Hot Supper

Image Credits

1,414 artist portraits across 5 genres (Rock, Jazz, Soul, Blues, Folk). 1,363 sourced from Wikipedia (Creative Commons / Public Domain), 50 from Deezer (promotional artwork).

Full attribution breakdown →

Raphael Saadiq

1966 –

← Randy Crawford Ray Charles →

THE ARCHITECT OF NEO-SOUL'S BACKBEAT

He walked into a recording studio in the early 1990s with a bass guitar, a falsetto, and a vision for R&B that would not arrive in the mainstream for another decade. Raphael Saadiq grew up in Oakland, the youngest of sixteen children, and learned music in the church before forming Tony! Toni! Toné! with his brother Dwayne Wiggins and cousin Timothy Christian. The band brought live instrumentation back to R&B when the genre was dominated by drum machines and sequencers, recording with real bass, real horns, and real drums.

Saadiq became the producer and songwriter that the neo-soul movement depended on, writing and producing for D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, the Roots, and Stevie Wonder.

The cost was working behind the scenes while other artists took the spotlight. Saadiq wrote and produced for some of the most important artists of the 1990s and 2000s, but his own name never carried the same weight as the acts he produced. He did not seem to mind the anonymity -- he preferred the studio to the stage. His solo career launched in 2002 with Instant Vintage, which earned him a Grammy nomination. He shifted to a 1960s-inspired Motown sound on The Way I See It in 2008, featuring Joss Stone and Stevie Wonder.

I Want You Back is the track he produced for Maxwell on the Love Jones soundtrack -- not the Jackson 5 song, the Maxwell cover that showed what Saadiq could do with a classic song and a vocalist who trusted his production completely. He scored films, mentored younger artists, and became the connective tissue between 1970s soul and 21st-century R&B.

Albums

Instant Vintage (2002)

Instant Vintage (2002)

The Way I See It (2008)

The Way I See It (2008)

Other Works

Instant Vintage (2002)

Ray Ray (2004)

The Way I See It (2008)

Stone Rollin’ (2011)

Jimmy Lee (2019)

Styles

neo-soulr&bfunk

Image Credits

1,414 artist portraits across 5 genres (Rock, Jazz, Soul, Blues, Folk). 1,363 sourced from Wikipedia (Creative Commons / Public Domain), 50 from Deezer (promotional artwork).

Full attribution breakdown →