J Records released Mahogany Soul 25 years ago today, on Oct. 16, 2001, an 18-track album that runs just under 75 minutes. Angie Stone cut it in more than a dozen rooms, from Chung King in Manhattan to Skip Saylor in Northridge and The Studio in Philadelphia. Raphael Saadiq, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Warryn Campbell and Swizz Beatz all worked on it, but the liner notes list Stone as executive producer and credit her on most of the songs.

This is the first milestone anniversary the album has reached without her. Stone died on March 1, 2025, hours after performing at a Mardi Gras ball in Mobile, at 63 years old. The van carrying her and her band overturned on Interstate 65 near Montgomery, Alabama, and was then struck by a tractor-trailer. Two days ago marked one year since D'Angelo, her former partner and the father of her son, Michael Archer Jr., who records as Swayvo Twain, died of cancer at 51.

Across a career that began with The Sequence on Sugar Hill Records in 1979, Stone kept coming back to this album as the one that defined her. When The House That Soul Built asked her in 2018 to name her defining musical achievement, she picked Mahogany Soul and explained why:

"Because Mahogany Soul was mostly me. It wasn't watered down by anyone else's help. I had some lyrical help to some degree, but I started it, somebody jumped on the bandwagon and either I finished it or we finished it. But all the concepts and subject matters came from a very, very broken... young woman, and a very headstrong woman at the same time."

The record has lasted on the strength of two singles that reached two very different crowds. One was a love letter to Black men aimed squarely at the neo-soul faithful. The other was a Philly soul flip Stone did not want to record, and it ended up at No. 1 on Billboard's dance club chart and closing out one of Ibiza's most famous nightclubs.

"Brotha" Went First

"Brotha" went to radio on Sept. 25, 2001, three weeks ahead of the album. Stone wrote it with Saadiq, Harold Lilly, and Glenn Standridge and Robert Ozuna of the production duo Jake and the Phatman. Saadiq played the guitars and bass himself, while Jake and the Phatman handled turntables and drum programming.

Chris Robinson directed the video, which put Will Smith, Luther Vandross, Sinbad, Avant and Larenz Tate on screen alongside images of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Marvin Gaye, Muhammad Ali and Colin Powell. The song peaked at No. 52 on the Hot 100, No. 13 on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs and No. 3 on Adult R&B Songs. It also drew a Soul Train Music Award nomination for best female R&B/soul single.

A remix followed within weeks, as "Brotha Part II" added Alicia Keys and Eve. Keys' longtime collaborator Kerry "Krucial" Brothers rebuilt the track around a piece of Albert King's "I'll Play the Blues for You." J Records liked it enough to slot it onto the album as track 17, and the remix reached No. 37 on the UK singles chart in March 2002.

Those two versions carried the album to a No. 22 debut on the Billboard 200 for the week of Nov. 24, 2001, on 71,000 first-week copies. It also reached No. 4 on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums. The RIAA certified it gold on Feb. 12, 2002, and by September 2003 it had sold 758,000 copies in the United States.

The Song She Didn't Want

"Wish I Didn't Miss You" came from outside her circle. Andrea Martin and Ivan Matias wrote and produced it around a sample of the O'Jays' 1972 hit "Back Stabbers," which is why Leon Huff, Gene McFadden and John Whitehead share the songwriting credit.

In a 2023 interview with VladTV, Stone said she disliked the demo when it reached her and saw no reason to cut more songs for an album that was mostly finished. Clive Davis talked her into recording it anyway, even though the extra session pushed the release back, and Stone and Swizz Beatz came away with co-production credits.

J Records sent the single to urban and rhythmic radio on Feb. 25, 2002, and at home it stalled at No. 79 on the Hot 100 and No. 31 on the R&B chart. Overseas it did far better, reaching No. 7 in Australia, No. 30 on the UK singles chart and No. 7 on the UK's hip-hop and R&B chart. Hex Hector and Mac Quayle remixed it for clubs, and those mixes went to No. 1 on Billboard's Dance Club Play chart and finished third on that chart's 2002 year-end ranking.

The song kept moving long after J Records stopped working it. Carl Cox played it as the final record at Space in Ibiza on Oct. 3, 2016, the night the club closed. The BPI has certified it gold in the U.K. for 400,000 units, a tally that only counts sales and streams from 2005 onward.

In the week after the crash, "Wish I Didn't Miss You" drew 1.44 million official on-demand U.S. streams, up 1,008% from the week before. "Brotha" jumped 2,026% to more than 907,000, according to Luminate figures reported by Billboard. On the R&B Digital Song Sales chart dated March 15, 2025, "No More Rain (In This Cloud)" debuted at No. 1, "Wish I Didn't Miss You" at No. 2 and "Brotha" at No. 5.

What Sits Between the Singles

"More Than a Woman" appears on Mahogany Soul as a duet with Calvin Richardson. The single version, recut with Joe, earned the pair a nomination for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals at the 45th Grammy Awards. It was the first of three Grammy nominations Stone would receive, none of them a win.

"The Ingredients of Love" pairs her with Musiq Soulchild over a replayed passage of Freddie Hubbard's "Red Clay," produced by Carvin Haggins and Ivan Barias. Gerald Isaac built "20 Dollars" on Al Green's "Simply Beautiful" and brought in Ray Chew to arrange strings for "Bottles & Cans." Ali Shaheed Muhammad played every instrument on "What U Dyin' For" except the lead guitar, which went to Bob Power.

Year-end lists in 2001 put the album at No. 3 on Billboard's Critics' Choice and No. 7 on Rolling Stone's top albums of the year. It went gold in the U.K. and the Netherlands and reached No. 5 in Finland, which made it the biggest international album of her career.

Our read, a quarter century on, is that Mahogany Soul is a long sit at 74 minutes and 58 seconds, with two interludes, an outro and a remix of its own lead single near the end. The version of it that has survived is the handful of songs that left the tracklist and found their own audiences on radio, in clubs and on streaming playlists.

The Money Question

Stone spent part of her last months fighting over what her catalog had earned. In December 2024 she said on a livestream that she was preparing to sue Universal Music Group over unpaid royalties, and she died less than three months later.

Her memorial service was held on March 14, 2025, at Word of Faith Cathedral in Austell, Georgia. Tyler Perry, who acknowledged he had not been close to her, asked the mourners where the money owed to her for all those years and all those songs had gone. "It's wrong, this is wrong, and I'm tired of seeing us struggle and go through things and work hard and not reap the benefits of what we were supposed to reap," he said, according to Atlanta Black Star. Four days later he told the Associated Press he had paid for the funeral himself. "I shouldn't be having to pay for funerals for someone who's got 40 years in the business, who are owed royalties."

Who Picked It Up

Olivia Dean recorded "Wish I Didn't Miss You" for the Mahogany Sessions, the London live-recording series, and on Feb. 1, 2026, she won Best New Artist at the 68th Grammy Awards. That same night, Saadiq, who produced "Brotha," stood with Anthony Hamilton and Leon Thomas in the Grammys' tribute to D'Angelo, whose debut album, Brown Sugar, Stone had helped finish three decades earlier.

Stone kept the album in her sets until the end. At London's Roundhouse in July 2018, the night before that interview was published, she opened with "Pissed Off" from Mahogany Soul. Later she brought her backing singers to the front of the stage for Curtis Mayfield's "The Makings of You" in three-part harmony, the interlude she had tucked into the middle of the album 17 years earlier.