Alan Leeds is a legend in his own right. He quit college to work with James Brown, and by his early 20s he was Brown’s tour manager, publicist, and anything else the Godfather of Soul needed him to do. Leeds went on to do the same for Prince, in 1989 becoming the president of Prince’s label Paisley Park Records. Leeds, currently a writer of extensive liner notes and music archives, manages tours for musicians and comedians, most notably for Chris Rock’s tours over the last few years. Leeds met D’Angelo during his Brown Sugar days, when the artist was just an opening act.

“I saw him a couple of times back then,” Leeds recalls, “and this was how I described him: a kid in a trench coat who sat at a keyboard. I don’t if he was shy or just getting his performance feet wet, but remember this is someone who has been performing in front of audiences since he was a kid in church. It’s not like standing in front of an audience and singing was new to him.”

Alan Leeds has worked directly with three generations of soul men, including James Brown, Prince and D’Angelo

The two formed a friendship. By the year 2000, Leeds was working, as the manager for the tour supporting D’Angelo’s follow-up album, Voodoo. There, he witnessed D’Angelo’s unraveling from within. It started with the video for Voodoo’s lead single “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” where a half naked D was positioned at the front of the camera to make his six-pack abs the star, at the encouragement of his then-manager Dominique Trenier and director Paul Hunter. Leeds asserts that while most men might enjoy being ogled, D’Angelo felt his bare pecs were getting in the way of fans absorbing his music when he performed it live. When fans would chant “Take it off!” during shows, D would ask Leeds: “What the fuck is this, Chippendales? Are they paying attention to the music?” Leeds says D’Angelo’s humiliation provoked, in part, his extended break.

Leeds talked frequently with D’Angelo over that time, mainly about sports and music, before becoming D’Angelo’s co-manager around 2012. Says Leeds: “I always knew that sooner or later—praying to God he stayed healthy—he would reach the point where he would say: ‘Ya know what? Enough. Let’s put something out.’ Because, contrary to popular belief, he could’ve put it out six to 10 years ago. There’s enough material that could’ve been finished. It wasn’t like he spent 14 years on just these songs. It just never came together as an album that he felt represented the statement he wanted to make. There was never a collection of songs that he felt strongly enough as a unit to put out as an album.”

Leeds argues that D’Angelo’s perfectionism is funded by a personality that isn’t bound to the almighty dollar. Most artists have to return to the spotlight to pay for their lifestyles. Not D’Angelo. “He’s the least materialistic person I’ve ever encountered in my life,” says Leeds. “You get questions all the time like, ‘What does he do for money? How does he live? Doesn’t he worry about his career?’ All of the questions that even I would ask about this talented artist who goes years and years without new product. It raises all of these obvious questions. The bottom line is I think if he weren’t an artist—if he wasn’t an artist gifted the way he was—he would be a hippie living in the woods off the salt of the earth. I don’t mean that he’s not cosmopolitan or sophisticated, he just isn’t driven by materialistic things.”

D’Angelo’s precision requires an almost superhuman patience from his creative team, and his disregard for wealth means that no one can be in it for the dough. Thankfully, everyone surrounding him had their own means of making a living, so they could afford the labor of love. “This is probably the first time in his career where he has a team around him that all see things the same way,” says Leeds.

“The good news,” Leeds explains, “is it is absolutely delightful to work with an artist that works the way he does, as untraditional as it is. There are dozens and dozens of humongously talented artists of all kinds that never find the commercial niche that can be artistically challenging to work with, but it’s almost coitus interruptus, because you don’t get the orgasm, you don’t get the success at the end of the rainbow. With D’Angelo you get your cake and eat it too because you get the artistic vision of the passion project, but you also get the orgasm of the success.”