A suit. A tie. An electric guitar. A few bars sung in raspy falsetto. That’s all it took for me to believe the rumors: D’Angelo is back. You can see for yourself in the behind-the-scenes video GQ posted alongside Amy Wallace’s excellent profile of the long-lost singer. In the clip, he moans and croons and makes the guitar ring and growl with casual command. It’s as if he hasn’t been gone for twelve years.

At just over ninety seconds, the clip has the feel of a film trailer, which is fitting considering how often D’Angelo’s life has felt like a biopic unfolding in real-time. As Wallace reports, he is the son of a Pentecostal preacher who taught himself “Boogie Wonderland” on the piano at age four. By eight, he had discovered his Uncle CC’s record collection – Otis Redding, Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield — and, after Marvin Gaye’s death, started having dreams he was shaking the singer’s hand. Just over a decade later, he became his own star: a suave musical perfectionist who played every instrument the on the title track his debut album, “Brown Sugar,” from the buzzing engine bass to the flickering organ to the punching-bag drums. He made a song called “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker” sound heavenly and a gospel-drenched number “Higher” sound x-rated. He sounded vaguely like a few other artists, only better.

Then came his 2000 sophomore album, Voodoo. It begins with sound of a knife hitting a chopping block and muffled voices. Then a thick bass bubbles up slowly, as if crawling out of a swamp; the drums and horns click in for a stuttering funk stomp; and the singer whispers a refrain of “Play on, play on…” If Brown Sugar intrigued fans, Voodoo bewitched us. It was mind-boggling display of technical skill, a showcase for a performer who could slide between hip hop swaggering ( “Devils Pie,” “Right and Left” ), Latin shuffles ( “Spanish Joint” ), new-millennium updates of old-school soul ( “Feel Like Makin’ Love” ) and pure James Brown funk ( “Chicken Grease” ) without ever seeming like he was trying to impress.

It was generous album, too. The songs pushed past five, six, seven minutes with horns and harmonies drifting through like smoke clouds. They were less symmetrical tunes than the ones on Brown Sugar, often beaking into key changes and counter-rhythmic riffs and jams. They were more raw, too. Nearly half of the songs — “The Line,” “Send it On,” “One Mo’ Gin,” “The Root” – bled into one another, which didn’t make them repetitive so much as remind readers that they were all ladled from the same simmering pot of lust, joy, and anger. The album was brilliant, perfect. The praise it inspired was well-deserved.

But a great album doesn’t necessarily sell. And, for better or worse, D’angelo’s handlers drew up a music video for the ballad “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” featuring the singer alone, naked, sweating, screaming in front of the camera. The stunt worked too well. He became more than just a sex symbol; he was sex, itself. He was “The Naked Guy” for schools of new, lusty fans, even if, for his loyal followers, was just the talented guy who got naked. As Wallace explains, D’angelo’s body went to his head. After women shouted “Take it off!” and tossed dollar bills onto the stage during the Voodoo tour, he told friends he was going to “go in the woods, drink some hooch, grow a beard, and get fat.” He meant it.

Here’s where the biopic film enters its dark, “Is he going to make it?!” section, where Ray Charles writhes on a bed in withdrawal and Johnny Cash goes to jail. For the next decade D’Angelo disappeared, popping up only in a decade’s worth of bad news. He rolled his Hummer off of a Virginia road, got pitched from the car, and broke his ribs. Later, a record company A & R man arrived at his house to find him draining the last drops from liquor bottles before being hauled to rehab. In a flash of irony, the former ladies’ man solicited an undercover officer for sex in New York City and got busted for it. Spin magazine published an infamous mug shot – bloated, scraggly – accompanied by the headline that perfectly captured what we were all thinking: “What The Hell Happened?”

Bonnaroo Superjam – photo by John Patrick Gatta

Around this time, I (like many) had a startling moment in my local record store. I spotted a CD case on the rack with a picture of D’Angelo I didn’t recognize and a strange album title, YODA: The Monarch of Neo Soul. A new album? And I hadn’t heard about it? It turned out to be a bootleg anthology, featuring unreleased covers of Al Green and the Ohio Players and a few hypnotic studio jams. A false alarm. D’Angelo wasn’t back.

Until now. Now, Wallace reports that “D” is back in the studio, in the gym, on the wagon, on the stage. He’s on Youtube, tearing through old Funkadelic songs in front of adoring crowds of European fans. Questlove – D’Angelo’s friend and frequent collabator – tells Wallace that his friend is “the last pure African-American artist left.” And Wallace doesn’t argue. Toward the end of her week following him on tour, the GQ writer describes a tour stop at an arena in Paris called “Le Zenith.” As the show is winding down and the singer plays a single note on the piano: the beginning of “Untitled (How Does it Feel),” the Naked Song. “What happens next is the most soulful, palpable connection I’ve ever felt between an artist and an audience,” she writes. “People are crying, swaying, raising up their hands. I’m one of them.”

A few weeks later, Jon Pareles provided corroborating testimony for the New York Times. “There was nothing tentative about D’Angelo’s performance,” he reported from the singer’s surprise set at Bonnaroo. Running through tunes by Led Zeppelin, Sly Stone, The Beatles, Curtis Mayfield, and Funkadelic, D’Angelo “was in full voice, or, to be more precise, voices: the silken falsetto, the funk yowl, the love-man tenor, the full-throated shout. Playing keyboards and guitar, flaunting muscles and charisma, D’Angelo was intact.”

The next question, then, for those of us who weren’t in France or Tennessee, is obvious. When does the album come out? Some say we’ll get it before the September Grammy deadline. Others say 2013. Surely, it will as the most anticipated album of the year, whatever year that is. And it’s not just fans who are lining up. It’s everyone from Chris Rock to Eric Clapton to George Clinton to Marvin Gaye’s second wife, Janis. There a rumors that over fifty songs have been recorded and D’Angelo, ever the perfectionist, simply needs to pick the final list. Our ears are drooling.

In the meantime, we have that GQ video. The suit. The tie. The guitar. The voice. When I saw it, I didn’t immediately think of D’Angelo’s idol, Marvin Gaye, but of another man who scorching the middle ground between sacred and secular. When Al Green took a break from the world of R & B stardom in the early ‘80s to sing only religious tunes, there was a film crew there to record it for documentary called The Gospel According to Al Green. His moment singing “I Love You” for the cameras is an eerie predecessor to D’Angelo’s GQ clip. Just another sharply-dressed man playing his guitar and singing as if he’d never left.