Maxwell makes his comeback

A man like Maxwell doesn’t like to be rushed.

When he put out his last album in 2009 — the twelve-time Grammy-nominated and two-time Grammy-winning record “BLACKsummers’night” — it had been a whole eight years since his previous release. It was the first of a trilogy, and yet, nearly five years on, we hadn’t heard a peep more from him. Now he’s ready to make his return with an album by the name of Summers, which will mark part two of a projected three albums.

Many of the upcoming songs had already been written in the seven years leading up to BLACKsummers’night. But then Maxwell began to travel, fall in love with new places, people and things, and that re-informed his vision, making him rework the songs into what they are today.

“When I’m ready for music, I do it,” the neo soul performer told tabloid! on Wednesday night. “Coming to Dubai, going to Capri, going to South Africa and performing while Mandela passes away, these life experiences imbue new life into these songs. I’m definitely ready for this record to come out now. It’s just time. It’s time. I’m excited.”

Escaping the cold of his hometown New York, Maxwell plans to master and finish the record in Miami, but he will return to the Big Apple for a Valentine’s Day event at the Borgata to unveil the album at a show for the brokenhearted.

“You can always write a song about people who are in love, but they’re in love so they’re happy, they don’t need you,” he said. “But the people that I try to worry about are the ones who don’t have anyone to give chocolate to, and the girl who doesn’t have flowers coming to her. This show is fashioned around that — it’s called The Three of Swords.”

Maxwell’s dreamlike chronicles of trekking the world and reinventing his creative vision on his own time are perfectly in character for the self-professed king of spontaneity. He says his current month-long stay in the UAE (December 14 to January 13) was all last minute. He’d been asked to perform at the Global Gift Gala months ahead — a fundraiser in Dubai that was hosted by Eva Longoria — but everything else merely fell into place, including “one of those freak, momentary things” where he, Tyrese Gibson, and Will Smith bumped into each other in the city and ended up hanging out in the desert.

“I love my last minute lifestyle because I just sort of don’t have plans and things kind of happen. Plans make me annoyed a little bit, personally. I’m not the most prompt, on-time person,” he confessed with a roguish smile.

He wasn’t late for our interview, though he did make a quick dash to change out of his Polo gear before a round of press at the Dubai Polo & Equestrian Club. Flanked by two publicists, he stopped to ask me and one other reporter if we’d like anything to eat or drink while we waited for him, and upon his return a few minutes later, he asked again: “Are you sure you don’t need anything?”

It was clear we were dealing with someone who hadn’t let the fame or fortune get to him. And through my subsequent conversation with him, I came to realise that Maxwell wasn’t the kind of self-important musician who looked at the industry as a food chain, but a champion of co-existing talents instead. At the mention of R&B shifting away from its forefathers and slipping into the hands of pop stars like Justin Bieber and Justin Timberlake — Timberlake won Favourite Soul/R&B Male Artist at the 2013 American Music Awards — Maxwell shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

“Soul is a colourless thing. I don’t think you have to be a black person to be automatically soulful,” he said. “I respect Justin Bieber and Justin Timberlake, they do what they do. For me, my philosophy has always been contribution before competition.”

“Our industry definitely likes to pit people against each other — they love watching the rise, and they definitely love watching the fall,” he laughed. “If you can give them a bit of both, and come back, and keep it interesting creatively, and keep a good sense of humour and don’t take yourself too seriously, then I believe that you’ll be around longer than people maybe expect you will.”

Despite an intimate knowledge of the nooks and crannies of the music world, Maxwell shared that he doesn’t enjoy the fame, and finds it to be a hindrance in terms of meeting people who genuinely appreciate him for who he is, rather than what he does.

“Am I complaining about the perks? No. It’s nice when a pretty girl just likes you and knows your name, but it’s [also] nice to know that there’s something real behind what happened.”

As for whether the soul scene has simmered down since the roaring days of Erykah Badu, Sade, and D’Angelo, Maxwell had other thoughts.

“Soul music is soul music. It can be wrapped up in a neo soul package; it can be called hip-hop soul. But soul is soul, and it’s been around; it will never go away. It’s great to see people [now] like Miguel, to see people like Frank Ocean. It’s not named the same way, but it’s still going on, right?”

The 40-year-old singer performed at The Act nightclub (Shangri-La Hotel, Dubai) twice during his UAE visit — once on New Year’s Eve and again on January 9. At the latter show, he performed his new song Of All Kind from his upcoming album, though he admitted to having debuted it somewhere else.

“I did it already in Africa, because like I say, Africa is my lucky charm. I sang [Grammy-winning] Pretty Wings for the first time ever there,” he said with a grin. “When I was looking out in the audience and no one had run away — and no tomatoes were being thrown — I was like: ‘Okay, I’ll release this thing. This might work out, right?’ I thought it would work out.”

Indeed, it worked out just fine.