It was a suprise to everyone when a D’Angelo song called “May I? Stand Unshaken” surfaced following the release of Red Dead Redemption 2. The track, which appears in the game between the Paradise Mercifully Departed and Dear Uncle Tacitus missions in chapter five, came about due to his love of the game while testing it out before release.
“He would come in here [Rockstar’s New York city office] and just play the game. We weren’t even talking about doing music,” Pavlovich of Rockstar Games told Rolling Stone. “When D’Angelo comes through, he shows up at midnight, and he’s playing the game until four in the morning. Each time he was just like, ‘it’s incredible.’ It just blows his mind. He’s such a fan. I have never seen someone that excited.”
Pavlovich then asked D’Angelo if he wanted to contribute music to the game, to which he agreed. “I had a New Orleans groove in my back pocket, a percussion track with Brian Blade [Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan] on the drums and Cyril [Neville, New Orleans R&B royalty, thanks to his work in the Meters] playing cowbell,” said Bob Dylan and U2 collaborator Daniel Lanois. “I fished that out, tied the ‘Unshaken’ chorus on top of it, and then D’Angelo loved what he heard. He’s a great Fender Rhodes [electric piano] player. He played that, I did the guitar, we sang the chorus together as we played the instruments over that rhythm track.”
OS REWIND: D’Angelo – May I? Standing Unshaken
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