INTERVIEW: MAXWELLs Golden Comeback (Free Press)
R&B singer flies high on ‘Blacksummers’night’
BY BRIAN McCOLLUM | FREE PRESS POP MUSIC WRITER
The R&B champion of the year is feeling relaxed. He’s also, depending on the moment, ecstatic, triumphant and even a little overwhelmed.
Few comeback stories this decade can top that of Maxwell, who has blown back into the public eye with a chart-topping fourth album and a much-praised tour that will bring him to Joe Louis Arena on Saturday.
Gone for nearly seven years, having disappeared after three dazzling albums of sophisticated throwback soul, Maxwell has been greeted with open arms by an audience that loyally bided its time.
It’s as if fans trusted that he’d do what he needed, returning with something worthy of their wait.
“If I could put the world together in one big group and just kiss it, I’d do it,” says the New York singer-songwriter. “Because my life has been very blessed.”
He fondly remembers his first area gig: a 1996 set at Pontiac’s Mill Street Entry, just as his first album, “Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite,” was making his mark. He became an instant Detroit favorite.
And likewise: “My favorite place in the world,” he says earnestly, noting the city’s rich music heritage. “Detroit is just amazing.”
The comfy, upbeat tone is a revelation of sorts. The Maxwell of 1996 — the 23-year-old wunderkind with the exotic debut record — was a man of much mystique. In the mode of heroes like Prince, he was publicly guarded, reticent with news media, content to let his music do the talking. Even amid broad acclaim, he remained cynical about the music industry, determined not to let his ego get bound up in the fame game.
“It’s in the duration of what you do, not the initial hype,” he told the Free Press at the time. “So I can’t let myself fall in love with this even just a little bit.”
It was that same vigilance that ultimately led Maxwell away from the music world. In 2001, he released his third album, the dreamy “Now,” to another round of critical kudos and platinum sales. But he was perceptive enough to glimpse looming danger: the risk of losing the creative energy that had fueled his work in the first place.
He knew he needed a break, a chance to recalibrate his system and save his music.
“You start to regurgitate yourself,” he says of being caught in the career whirlwind. “So all of it becomes completely bogus. You start reading magazines to get inspiration, watching TV, checking out the trends. It stops being about your one-to-one contact with people who actually live in the world with you and challenge you as a person, who don’t just say yes all the time.”
Maxwell, in other words, needed to keep it real. He needed to stop being a star. Quietly, unannounced, he slipped out of public life, keeping busy around New York and going “virtually unnoticed for a few years.”
Over time, he got what he needed: reassurance that he was still himself.
“Having that time away — getting to be a non-person in terms of music — was really, really helpful,” he says. “I remembered what it means to be human.”
Easing back into the spotlight was nerve-racking. “I was scared out of my mind,” Maxwell says of his return to the stage in summer 2008.
The butterflies were familiar, he says, but so was the creative sensation as he embarked on the writing and recording that would become his fourth album.
“It’s like it was new, yet it was the same source that had edged me on back in the beginning,” he says. “It was that urgency of sink-or-swim.”
It swam: Led by the lush single “Pretty Wings,” “Blacksummers’night” debuted atop the Billboard 200 in July, with a glowing critical reception that will no doubt propel it onto the year’s best-of lists. Rich, sensual and organic, it’s a classic soul record with a mature exploration of lost love. It’s also the first installment in a finished trilogy, with the second scheduled to roll out next fall.
Maxwell remains old school to the bone. He still extols the virtues of live instruments, still rhapsodizes about Michael Jackson and Prince. Onstage, he and his 10-piece band groove through a scrupulously arranged three-act show: a set of deep soul, an uplifting, gospel-infused segment and a final “slow, cuddle-up part,” as he describes it.
He calls 2009 the most amazing year of his life, and gets sentimental as he remembers his teen years working at a movie theater and saving cash to buy his first keyboard. If the opening chapter of his music career was an eye-opener, this latest has been “a total joy.”
“To come back from nowhere, to get to this place where people even still care, it makes you want to do good work,” he says brightly. “It makes you want to put out the best you can — not to outdo people, not to be the most No. 1, but literally just to bring a service to those who love music. That’s my driving force right now.”
Contact BRIAN McCOLLUM: 313-223-4450 or mccollum@freepress.com
NOTE: A version of this story appears on page 10Z of the Thursday, Sept. 24, 2009, print edition of the Detroit Free Press.
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Maxluv508 September 25th, 2009 at 6:33 am
Nice article..I know he gonna give Detroit luv this weekend.