Among Sinners‘ record-breaking 16 Academy Award nominations Thursday was a nod for Best Original Song, shared by neo-soul legend Raphael Saadiq and composer Ludwig Göransson. For Saadiq, the nomination for “I Lied to You” (performed in the film by Miles Caton) comes after a brutal year — he lost his brother and Tony! Toni! Toné! co-founder D’Wayne Wiggins, as well as his good friend and collaborator D’Angelo. Saadiq jumped on a Zoom with Rolling Stone to talk about the song, his grieving process, and more.
2025 was a heavy year for you, now capped off by this nomination. Congratulations, and how are you doing?
It’s still affecting me a lot. I had a dream about my brother this morning. Losing my brother and also my good friend Michael Archer, D’Angelo — it put a battery in my back. It’s sometimes hard for me to listen to D’Angelo’s music. When you meet somebody at the beginning of their career and you’re very tight and you understand each other, you just really miss them. I feel like I am talking to them through spirit and energy. Working on all this stuff has been the sweeter part, making it all make sense — who I am as a man, and a friend, and a brother. That’s what’s prepared me to work on Sinners, to work with Ludwig and Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan. I’ve always been a team player.
In the final version, “I Lied to You” brings in much of the Black music that followed, all the way up to hip-hop, and the way it’s used in the movie is really powerful. But your version was just the blues, right?
Ludwig added that part in. It was a blues song at first. [Director] Ryan Coogler and Ludwig pitched it to me and said, “Can you write the song right now?” Me and Ludwig just picked up guitars and started playing. I never read the script, so I didn’t know about the juke joint burning or the father-son relationship. I just had to go off of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Hubert Sumlin — what I knew about the blues. I didn’t know why I said “Take me in your arms tonight.” It just came out. I was just a vessel. How Ryan told the story, I’m like, “This is my life.” My actual dad, Charlie Wiggins, sang blues. So for me to write a blues song in a film, it came natural.
You wrote the song just days before production began, right?
Yeah, I went over, they pitched me the story, and the next thing you know I’m sitting in front of the board singing. I left and never heard the song again until Ryan invited me to watch it at IMAX in Culver City. It was so beautifully done. It was threaded through the whole film.
Did they just say “We need a blues song”?
Nothing else. They really trusted me. Ryan explained his [bluesman] uncle to me. People looked down on blues players, but the blues was these men’s church. They got a bad rap. That connected to me — in my neighborhood, the church told me I was going to hell for singing secular music. My dad said, “The key of E-flat in the blues is the same E-flat they play at church.” That set me free. I’ve always had it in my music. I’ve never made a song that didn’t have some type of blues in it. And this showed me that respecting the history of all types of music pays off. That the Academy acknowledged a blues song — win, lose, or draw, that’s amazing to me.
D’Angelo told me he heard the “devil’s music” stuff growing up too.
That’s why we were really good friends. We both grew up with [gospel singers] the Hawkins Family. When we found out we were both from that cloth — I had an album of theirs in my studio. D was in my studio for a year while I was touring. When I came back, he’d taken that album and blown it up and made a poster and framed it for me. I still have it. When people see that picture, they know what cloth we’re cut from.
Questlove talked about possible posthumous D’Angelo music coming. Do you know anything about that?
I don’t know that he has enough to make an album. But he did have a lot of jams that are better than albums. If you got Pino [Palladino], Questlove, [guitarist Isaiah] Sharkey, and D — that’s all you need. If D is just mumbling and humming, that’s a record. So hopefully they do have something they could pull into it.
What’s next from you?
I’m working on four projects for my vinyl club. Two [live albums], and two more records — one is a band that’s gonna feel like Chic, with Sharkey playing the part of Nile Rodgers. And then my own album based on something in the U.K., from a certain period. I’m working hard.
