While Maxwell may not be the most prolific recording artist around, he’s certainly one who puts every ounce of himself into his music. The debonair R&B crooner has successfully put his own modern spin on deep, old school Soul music has managed to keep the spirit and the flair of the genre alive.
The Brooklyn native has only released six albums over a twenty year span but each has been warmly and enthusiastically received by his deeply devoted fan base. On the heels of his newest release, 2016’s widely acclaimed blackSUMMERS’night , the second installment of a similarly-titled trilogy, Maxwell is ready to take it to the stage again and is in the midst of a nationwide tour of theaters and smaller venues to support his latest album.
Speaking from Austin, Texas while traveling and in between a thoroughly engaging conversation about nature, his fascination with bodies of water and music, I was able to get plenty of my questions answered and get to know a little more about the incredibly humble man and down to earth artist known as Maxwell.
Maxwell stops at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater (1111 N McMullen Booth Rd.) this Thursday, August 4. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $175, $133, $93, $67, and $45 in advance and can be purchased by phone (727-791-7400) or online here. Read our chat below.
CL: You’re coming back to Clearwater to perform at Ruth Eckerd Hall. Your sold out performance there in 2014 was fantastic. You’re currently rehearsing for the new tour?
Maxwell: Yes, pretty much. The reason why I wanted to come back again is I had such an incredible time. And now that we have this new album, it just felt right because that tour was so special to me I wanted to really go back and give those people who were there after such a long hiatus that were there with such loyalty and love and I just had to say, ‘I gotta go back to them!’, you know what I mean? And now the new record is out and it’s doing well and people have been really positive about it. And it’s kind of difficult to get that, twenty years after the fact. . At the same time, we’re getting to work out a lot of new songs. This is kind of like a set-up for this arena run we’re going to have which is a bigger show but it’ll stay intimate. It’ll be a bigger, larger scale tour but I wanted to go back to those smaller venues to reunite with the people who were there two years ago who made such an incredible statement for me about my music by being there. It’s exciting.
You mentioned the word “intimate”. One of the great things about your show here two years ago was your knack for making the performance seem really intimate. Is that a conscious decision on your part to achieve that?
Yeah, I quite like a smaller venue. It’s nice to kind of really be able to see the back of the room a little more and really get a sense of it.
You like to be able connect with the people who come to see you?
That’s really my goal. My goal and what I serve is the working class man, the working class woman the people who are dealing with real issues. And with the horrible epidemic with regards to police brutality as well as the epidemic of guns, it’s a common thing we all share…it’s about ‘will we be ok? Is our nation gonna be ok?’.
We’re at an incredibly frightening place right now with the possibility of who could be president and who could not be president. Tensions are hot. We pray before we go out and we just thank God that we’re in a position to, in this time and this day and age, that we can freeze time for a minute…you know, bring calm to the moments of stress for the hour-and-a-half or the two hours that people are there, we just get to make them feel good. I’m in that wonderful position where I can hopefully bring that to them…and I’m so grateful. It’s amazing that I’ve been given this great opportunity.
Your new album is out…and there’s another one coming?
Yes, it’s very much done…it’s pretty much done but it’s changing a bit. It’s getting a little more politically social than I thought I would go. But it’s because of where we are right now. I’d be missing a great opportunity to sort of express views on how to unify and how we all need to keep cool heads and remember that we’re all immigrants and we’re all from different places and that we need to bond together as a whole and not divide ourselves by color, by race, by gender, by orientation…all those things are now so prevalent in the present day so I wanted to touch on that on the record that’s already been written.
You’re right…it’s a scary time we’re living in…but it’s nice to have good music to help us escape sometimes.
It’s tough..it’s not easy because sometimes I’ll get all this amazing, positive feedback and then every now and again you’ll get some who say that they’re so hoping you can encapsulate the time when they were 19 or that it was back in 1996 and there’s just no way that I could do that. It would be an exercise in futility to try to recapture a thing that’s passed. It’s like, I’ll never be 23 again…that’ll never happen again. But what will happen is what I can do now.
Sometimes it takes a little bit of time for people to absorb the records. Because people look at (debut album) Urban Hang Suite and they say, ‘man that was the best!’ but in the beginning, it wasn’t seen like that to people. It did not debut high, it wasn’t anywhere near the Billboard Hot 100..I mean, I didn’t even touch it. I was barely skimming the Top 40 in R&B and slowly but surely, this happened, and that happened. These things take time to get into your system. I don’t write from a pop perspective. I’d rather have a mistake that’s human than perfection that’s robotic. But at the same time, I appreciate all kinds of music. I just know what my lane is. I know what my path is and what I’m supposed to be doing but I listen to all kinds of stuff: trap music, rock music, country music…all of it. I’m down.
Growing up in Brooklyn, I have to imagine your musical upbringing and your influences were all over the place. I can hear a lot of that in your music.
Yeah, it goes without saying that Marvin Gaye and Prince and Sam Cooke and all the classics and those guys who embodied that timeless thing were gonna always win. But coming from Brooklyn, of course Biggie’s really huge and 2Pac’s really huge…I’m just so grateful…I’m happy I stuck to the promise of whatever it was that I was doing..although I didn’t always know what I was doing (laughs). I’d be lying if I said I had this strategy or this plan. It just feels right to me to sing about positivity, about women, it feels right to me to express myself in a vulnerable fashion. Especially when so many things around me were about that bravado and how invincible people were and how much money they had and there’s a place for that. You can feel confident in strength but when it comes to love songs and what I try to get into, I sort of touch on the places and touch on the things that would surprise women about and about this journey that we have and about the weight on our shoulders that we feel, it’s pretty big.
On your MTV Unplugged album, when you covered a Kate Bush song (“This Woman’s Work”) and gave her so much credit, you won me over.
For her, to make something like that…when I was asked what cover I wanted to do for that Unplugged album, I was like ‘we gotta do this’. And we figured out a way to retool it and hopefully give it that soulful sensibility. But what brings me so much gratification when it comes to that song is the fact that she was this English white woman that’s so incredibly talented in so many ways and that people could relate to it many ways. And that’s the beauty of music.
The new record is fantastic and its getting great reviews. How prominently is it going to figure in the setlist you’ll be playing in Clearwater? Will you be doing a bit from all the albums? Or will you be focusing on the new one?
I do like one new song every night and obviously I do the single that everyone knows but then I kinda add one new song here and there depending on the mood I’m in.
How’s the tour going so far?
It’s kind of blowing my mind the way things are kinda happening. We were playing on a Monday and there were like 10,000 people in a cornfield there to see us…I couldn’t believe it. I was like ‘whoa? really?’..to have that many people on a Monday? And it rained that day, by the way! And we’re talking about women and their hair! They we’re like ‘I love Maxwell and shit…but that’s a lot of money on my hair!’ (laughs)
That’s true dedication right there.
And we had the best time. We’re just like keeping this tradition going. Because I know so many people are starving for it. There’s a lot of highly educated, refined people who have a broad spectrum in terms of how they think and how they feel about the world and I don’t feel like that’s fully represented in a lot of the music that’s currently being played today. It’s nice to be able to be part of this group of people who I fully support. I call them my associates…people like Ro James and D’Angelo and Anthony Hamilton and there’s a lot of people out there too. And I don’t like have a competitive edge with people. To me it’s all about contributing and adding to a legacy that’s been there forever through the sounds of Prince and Marvin Gaye..and that’s all we’re doing..we’re keeping the force burning.
So you’re happy with with keeping it as a collective effort..not in just one person leading the way?
I don’t believe that there should be just one of anything..there’s not just one pop artist..there’s so many people who have great discs out there and we should support them and facilitate them so that they can not only maintain their lives and live through their dreams but inspire people.
What’s the greatest musical compliment you’ve ever received?
I think it’s really how it affects people’s lives. How people have gotten married and had my song played or how they’ve had a child and even named their child after me. It’s how it really like impacts their world. There are reviews, and there’s the New York Times and Rolling Stone and these are things that are epic..you dream of these things. But when you can see a living human being and you say ‘wow!’, their parents brought them. It happened in Little Rock, this guy brings his son not because they wanted to come to the show but because they’d been playing my music and the kid loved it. So there’s this little kid sitting in the front because that’s what he wanted to do. That to me is the best.
Musically, what would your fans be most surprised to know about you?
That I don’t know what I’m doing really…and that I don’t know if it’s good or not.
Maxwell stops at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater (1111 N McMullen Booth Rd.) this Thursday, August 4. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $175, $133, $93, $67, and $45 in advance and can be purchased by phone (727-791-7400) or online here.
