D’Angelo’s Last Song

Jay-Z doesn’t even appear until the three-minute mark, sauntering in with a verse that hews closer to spoken word stream-of-consciousness, trading in his player image and tapping back into his 4:44-style vulnerability with his bars, as D’Angelo coos in the background: “Life don't taste the same without you, tears in my champagne bout you/Quit playin’ girl, you know I'm crazy bout you/You know that week you ran back to your momma house, ask my friends, they can vouch/Slept on the couch, cause the bed ain't a bed without you.”

Jay ends his verse vowing that he and this unnamed lover can’t “end up like his folks,” and the track breaks down into orchestral violins and horns, with Samuel adding vocals of his own and blending them with D’Angelo’s into a sort of cosmic haze. If this song was your only interaction with The Book of Clarence, you’d be forgiven for assuming the movie concerned star-crossed lovers searching for each other across space and time instead of a biblical epic. But there is a spiritual element to the song, particularly in the ethereal crescendo that closes it out, as well as in the idea of the spirituality of love.

“Someone like D’Angelo, he moves in his own speed and his own time, so there’s no planning there. You can’t [just] say, ‘I’ve got this song, come over Tuesday,’” Jay-Z said in a Twitter Spaces conversation that he hosted to promote the film’s release. “The circumstances, the vibes, the music, everything has to be in a perfect space for something like this to happen. Obviously, we haven’t collaborated for our entire careers, so it was meant for this moment right here.”