INTERVIEW: R&B singer Maxwell aims for a triple play (New York Times Syndicate)
R&B singer Maxwell aims for a triple play by Gary Graff
New York Times Syndicate
Maxwell had not planned to go eight years between albums.
And with the new “BLACKsummers’night” only the first of three scheduled releases, the R&B singer admits that the wait was hard for him, maybe even harder than it was for his fans.
“I definitely missed it,” said the Brooklyn-born Maxwell, who debuted with the Grammy Award-nominated “Urban Hang Suite” (1996) and released four more albums before fading from sight in 2001. “Sometimes there was fear, like, ‘Am I waiting too long? Have I ended my career?’ Some people wondered if it was over for me.
“But in the end I feel super-rejuvenated. I feel like I have a zest for what this is again, something that was slipping away from me. Music is such a special thing to me. It’s a gift from God, and I never want to feel like I’m working or can’t be bothered, you know?
“So I think the time (away) really kind of leveled all that, and it kind of made it feel new again for me. I just love everything about it again.”
Maxwell is certainly coming back with a vengeance. “BLACKsummers’night” is a dark, soulful album dominated by themes of romantic loss, but “blackSUMMERS’night,” due out next year, is intended to be more spiritual and gospel-flavored, while “blacksummers’NIGHT,” due in 2011, will be slow jams and love songs.
“My ultimate dream was to make a ballad album,” he said, “and I finally got to do that as part of this process.”
The delineation between the three projects isn’t entirely clear-cut, however.
“I wanted something, at least one song, to be a little light on this ‘BLACK’ record,” he explained, referring to the song “Love You,” a ballad that he says is “much happier than a lot of the other songs on the album. A lot of them are pretty despondent and somber, and I didn’t want to completely bum people out.”
Maxwell does, however, want to challenge his fans in much the same way that he pushes himself as an artist. He has been singing since his youth, but turned serious as a teenager, writing songs on a cheap Casio keyboard and playing in New York clubs by the early 1990s, when a Vibe magazine writer dubbed him “the next Prince.”
Columbia Records signed him in 1994, but, despite collaborations with soul veterans such as Leon Ware and guitarist Melvin “Wah-Wah Watson” Ragin, the label waited nearly a year after its completion before it finally released “Urban Hang Suite.”
The results proved worth waiting for. Praised as a pioneering work in the neo-soul genre, mixing classic R&B conventions with contemporary sounds, “Urban Hang Suite” launched the hits ” Til the Cops Come Knockin’,” “Ascension (Don’t Ever Wonder)” and “Sumthin’ Sumthin’,” and has gone on to sell more than 2 million copies.
Maxwell did not rest on his laurels, however. Following the live “MTV Unplugged” (1997), the studio albums “Embrya” (1998) and “Now” (2001) both experimented with different styles and song structures. Each went platinum, but neither was what his audience had expected after “Urban Hang Suite.”
“I’m not one for keeping everything the same,” the 36-year-old musician said. “I came out with ‘Urban Hang Suite,’ and then I put out ‘Embrya,’ and they were just totally different records. A lot of people thought I was crazy – ‘You got a thing, man, stay with it!’ – but that’s safe to me. Safe is good, but it’s not exciting. I like people who take risks.”
Nevertheless Maxwell found himself at a bit of a loss after “Now.” He was, he acknowledges, a bit burned out after four albums, plus extensive touring, in a six-year span. He calls it “just growing pains, just becoming a man.”
But he was also disconcerted by changes within the industry, particularly by the growth of the Internet as a vehicle for distributing music, usually without the formality of paying for it.
“How music was perceived and just the value of music, what it actually meant to the consumer, changed in a way I couldn’t imagine,” the self-confessed “music nerd” said. “I don’t think music has ever been seen so casually by society. Some people don’t think they even need to pay for it anymore, and I’m like, ‘What?’
“So that was a little disappointing to me. And a little daunting, too. I thought it was a good time to step back from it and take a break and let things sort themselves out.”
The audience’s turn toward singles rather than albums also troubled Maxwell, who cites full-length works by the Beatles and Stevie Wonder as huge influences and had meticulously crafted his three previous releases as interwoven, conceptual pieces rather than mere collections of songs. The idea of a “Blacksummers’night” trilogy, he says, came as a reaction to that change and as a way to reassert the value of an album in the marketplace.
“In 2002 I was like, ‘You know, I really want to do a trilogy,’” he recalled. “I’d done single albums before, so I wanted to take this somewhere else. It was kind of like an anti-single thing. I wanted to be ambitious with it.”
Working with longtime collaborator Hod David, Maxwell spent the better part of six years working on new music for all three albums, mining both his personal life – “Pretty Wings,” the new album’s first single, is about a former girlfriend – and current events, injecting a bit of social commentary into songs such as “Help Somebody.”
Sex remains a significant part of the mix too, particularly on “Stop the World.”
Maxwell confesses to some anxious moments as the years ticked by, but adds that he found a positive side to the steadily widening gap between albums.
“It took me out of my comfort zone in some ways,” he explained. “In some ways not being famous for a while was like boot camp, because I couldn’t rest on my laurels.
“I couldn’t think ‘I got this’ and feel like I was set, you know? I had to ask myself a lot of hard questions about ‘Who am I?’ in terms of career, so I could ultimately make something better.
“That same sort of urgency that I had coming into the game is the same feeling that I have now. And there’s so much life behind me now that it feels just as potent as if it was the first record ever written, so that’s an enjoyable feeling for me.”
Maxwell did give his fans something to talk about during the interim.
The Internet may or may not be savaging the music industry, but three years ago it certainly helped to spread the word that he had trimmed his trademark Afro.
“I woke up one day and I was someplace warm, like Mexico probably, and my hair was just too hot for me,” he recalled with a laugh, “so I just cut it. And it was cool. There were times when I got to walk around and do things I had never done before, because no one knew who I was.
They were waiting for the Afro.
“So I just kind of went incognito for a few months, and then people figured it out and there were photos and all this ‘Oh, man, why’d you do it?’ But there was nothing major surrounding it at all.”
The new-look Maxwell previewed some of the “BLACKsummers’night” material on tour in 2008, and this year he will be doing the same with songs from the other two installments of the trilogy, which are still being recorded.
Mostly, however, Maxwell is happy to be back and is looking forward to what he considers a new start.
“The best thing is that I’m much more grown now so my sense of myself is a lot different,” Maxwell said. “I’m not still sketching it out as a 20-something-year-old. I kind of know where I’m at with things, so there’s a great confidence that I feel more than I did before.”
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 1:32 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.
Katina July 14th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Great interview, I really enjoyed reading it!!!