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Perhaps I made him nervous? Maxwell is the best soul singer and songwriter since Marvin Gaye. But his conversation is strangely impenetrable, says Neil McCormick
For my audience with Maxwell, the great black hope of soul music, I was escorted into a darkened hotel room. Blinds had been pulled down to block out the sun, the only light coming from an array of thick church candles. Incense wafted through the air, adding to the sense of new-age spiritual sanctuary. In the midst of this sat my host, dressed in smart designer black, his braids of hair tied back, spouting forth huge chunks of largely incomprehensible mumbo jumbo. Let me give you an example:
"This represents the burgeoning period for me," Maxwell announced, discussing the musical direction of his new album, Embrya (released by Columbia on Monday). "The more potential, the more kind of going-to-be thing that Maxwell's going to be or that I'm trying to do. It's kind of a thing that's quite not known. It's like the break of dawn. There's something so amazing about looking at the road ahead. Kind of getting caught up in the idea of the potential of your destination more than actually kind of letting people know that you're there. Isn't everyone sometimes in a state of gonna-be happiness, or gonna-be sadness? And it just makes perfect sense. I'm gonna-be with this record, I'm not being. Which I'm so cool with." Well, I'm glad we cleared that up.
I think that maybe I was making him nervous. When I later told him how much I liked his debut album and how impressed I had been by his live performances, he was genuinely surprised. "That's so weird!" he said, and laughed. "Thank you. I just don't get the impression that you like anything I do." He went on to apologise for his vagueness, suggesting that it stemmed from a vagueness within the album itself. "It's funny, I kind of pride myself in trying to know what I'm talking about, but I think this record just needed to be liquid, to be like vapour, with no specifics or particulars, that it just didn't have to be anything but what you thought or what you felt, be it positive to me or negative to me. I think you know what I'm saying."
To be honest, I didn't. But then, why should anyone care what the 25-year-old New Yorker has to say? The phrase "shut up and sing" springs to mind. After all, he has a gorgeous voice, capable of shifting effortlessly from a rich tenor to a yearning falsetto. His sinuous vocals glide in and out of his smooth, immaculately produced songs, filling them with tender, imploring emotion and wide-eyed wonder. Yet it would be doing Maxwell a disservice to dismiss him as just another empty head with golden tonsils. He may well be the most significant soul singer-songwriter to emerge since the Seventies heyday of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. It was to this golden era that his 1995 debut album, Urban Hang Suite, harked back.
Turning away from the streetwise sounds of hip hop and the bump' n' grind of New Jack Swing, the young multi-instrumentalist created a sublimely restrained, evocatively sensual, soft-funk and jazz-tinged sound, drawing on such classic influences as Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and the Isley Brothers. The term being bandied about was Nu Classic Soul, but what set Maxwell apart from other proponents of the genre (such as D'Angelo and British star Omar) was the totality of his vision. Urban Hang Suite related a romance in three acts, spinning out a moving tableau of introduction, seduction and rejection over deceptively subdued, sweetly mellifluous jams. There was an emotional and psychological depth to it rare for the genre. With his new album he has added a spiritual dimension, describing the more free-flowing and instinctive Embrya as a love letter to God. Mind you, Maxwell is one of those seductive soul preachers who can make the Second Coming sound like something from the Kama Sutra.
Attempting to explain the appeal of classic soul, Maxwell spoke to me of its ""deeper sentiment" and of songs that explored""spiritual psychology" rather than just banging on about getting laid.""Sometimes, when I'm at a club, I don't wanna get all deep. I just want some booty shaking,"" he said.""But I know what I always dig is depth and booty. Soul and ass is the best combination.""
Which was the most succinct thing he said during our encounter.
Like Prince and Lenny Kravitz, Maxwell was one of those reclusive musical prodigies who seem to have developed in the solitude of their bedrooms. He was brought up in a tough area of Brooklyn, and after the death of his West Indian father, when Maxwell was only three, his deeply religious Puerto Rican mother became somewhat over- protective, refusing to let him play outside. By his own admission friendless and insecure, it was the discovery of a cheap Casio keyboard at the age of 16 that liberated him. He mastered it, began making demos and had composed some 300 songs by the time he signed to Columbia in 1994.
It may be his youthful isolation that has left him with such an odd conversational style. At times it is almost as if he has invented his own language. He speaks confidently, attempting to articulate complex ideas, but he regularly misuses words, blithely carrying on as he leaves his baffled listener behind, following a trail of ever-expanding sentences.
While Maxwell's recorded music, with its qualities of restraint and subtlety, appears to reflect his evident introversion, he is an entirely different proposition live. Fronting a classy eight-piece band, the handsome, debonair singer becomes the very personification of charisma. His music takes on a much punchier aspect, while he sails around the stage, reaching out to audiences with widespread arms and a headlight smile. He himself professed to being baffled by the transformation that takes place.""A lot of the performance stuff really just came out of insecurity,"" he said.""I've been so, so insecure, and so kind of like frozen with fear about messing up. It's funny, it's like when I'm so close to that, I think I just jump. I say, **** it, I'm just gonna be as this is, I'm gonna be so another thing, not to get away from who I am but just to kind of enhance what I know who I am . . . a bit."
Perhaps the most unusual thing about our encounter was that Maxwell seemed to enjoy it so much. Courteous as most stars are during interviews, they treat the process as something they must grin and bear. In the dark, peaceful environment he had created, however, Maxwell was apparently intent on getting more out of the experience than just publicity for his new album.
"All this stuff that I have to do, it's wonderful," he said, out of the blue. "I feel like this is therapy to me. You get to talk about yourself and get to kind of revisit things inside of your soul. You already in this interview allowed me to find something about what I was doing that I had no clue about."
Well, at least one of us ended the conversation more enlightened.
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