INTERVIEW: Back in BLACK (Timeout New York)
Maxwell returns with the first installment of a soulful CD series.
By Jesse Serwer
IN BLACK AND WHITE Neo-soul crooner Maxwell spells out the reasons behind his seven-year disappearance.
Photograph: Eric Johnson
“I’m in Las Vegas,” Maxwell says when asked for his coordinates during a recent telephone interview. No, wait, he corrects himself: “I’m in Hammond, Indiana.” That Chicago suburb is not easily confused with Vegas, but the singer is in the midst of a theater tour that includes stops in such comparative backwaters as Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Hammond’s Horseshoe Casino, where he’s set to perform just moments after our talk. When the East New York native returns to the metropolitan area on July 22, he’ll be skipping Gotham for a date at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. “I’ve been calling this the ‘road less traveled’ tour,” he says, explaining that the trek is a precursor to a slate of arena dates planned for the fall. “We’re hitting all these places where you’re thinking, Why don’t people come here more often?”
But more than just singles “Pretty Wings” and “Bad Habits,” it’s been live performances that have stoked anticipation for BLACKsummers’night, Maxwell’s first LP since 2001. Appearing onstage at last year’s BET Awards after seven years away, he delivered a stunning cover of Al Green’s “Simply Beautiful.” And at Radio City Music Hall last October, in front of a crowd that included a dispropotionately high number of attractive thirtysomething women and music-industry players, the singer left little doubt that age and his time away had enhanced, not lessened, his considerable sex appeal.
“In this day and age you’ve gotta surprise people,” Maxwell says of the decision to wet his feet on the road before his new release, the first in a trilogy of discs he plans to issue over the next three years. “There’s no mystery to anything anymore.” Testing the material onstage also helped the self-produced singer spiff up a project he’d struggled for five years to complete. “Sometimes I do things off the top of my head [live] and then, from the audience reaction, you’re like, This is what I gotta say here ’cause when I was in Minnesota or Chicago people freaked on this,” he explains. “It was almost like the people helped me produce the record. Kinda like how jazz artists go out and play and play, and then they cut the album.”
That’s not how R&B songs are typically made, but Maxwell has always broken with the genre’s conventions, even as he paid homage to its history. Issued at a moment when hip-hop’s growing influence seemed to signal the death of live instrumentation in black popular music, his 1996 debut, Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, put a bohemian spin on the full-band sounds of early-’80s “sophisticated funk” groups like Slave; late-model Marvin Gaye; and, on its tender ballads, the Quiet Storm radio format. It was also a heady concept album whose movements reflected the ebb and flow of an actual relationship. After releasing the even more ambitious, if less effective, sophomore effort Embrya in 1998, he solidified his love-god status with 2001’s Now, an album that featured his surreal, falsetto-flexing cover of Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work.” Then he abruptly disappeared.
“I kind of played catch-up,” the 36-year-old says of the intentions behind his hiatus. “For most of my twenties, I was this focused, driven person trying to make a mark and live up to the promise of whatever I’m supposed to mean. I really missed out on just being a dude, somebody who was anonymous on some level. There’s something about that which kind of adds to the music you do. I got to just live life before I was too old to really be carefree.”
A lower profile—and the shedding of his signature Afro—gave the amorist the opportunity “to have relationships with girls who didn’t know who I was,” he says. “They weren’t meeting me because they thought I was gonna get them somewhere or give them things,” Maxwell says. “It was more like, ‘What’s your name and, oh yeah, you do music?’?”
These experiences provided fodder not only for BLACKsummers’night—“Pretty Wings” speaks to a recent breakup—but also for parts two and three of the trilogy, BlackSUMMERS’night and Blacksummers’NIGHT. The albums were recorded concurrently, though the question of whether they’re part of an interlocking puzzle isn’t one Maxwell is ready to answer. “There’s a ‘to-be-continued’ vibe, but I’ll leave it up to the people who listen,” he says. “It’s your money, your time, so listen how you want. But, yeah, [together] these albums represent a time in my life.”
BLACKsummers’night is out Tue 7. Maxwell plays the New Jersey Performing Arts Center July 22.
Sources – Timeout New York | Shorefire Media
This entry was posted on Friday, July 3rd, 2009 at 8:10 am and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
tee July 3rd, 2009 at 11:10 am
great artist = great music…07/07/09!