With the arrival of new single “Off,” the singer looks ahead to a future where he finishes his blacksummers’NIGHT trilogy — and owns his music for the very first time
Maxwell is the best soul singer on the planet and his songs are so classic that they don’t get old. His style is from the greats. Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye and all of his videos have beautiful women in them. His style is classic cool I don’t know if he knows how talented he is. All of his Video are like mini-movies well done.
Back in 2016, as the snappy, swooping “Lake by the Ocean” was blanketing R&B radio, Maxwell was already thinking about the end of a long-gestating album trilogy that started in 2009. He had just released the second part, blackSUMMERS’night, and he was daydreaming aloud about following it quickly with part three, blacksummers’NIGHT. “Then I’ll be free,” he joked. Free to start a new trilogy, perhaps. “I can have PURPLEwinterafternoon!”
That vision is now hardening into a reality — with the possible exception of PURPLEwinterafternoon — in more ways than one. On Tuesday, Maxwell released “Off,” a probing ballad full of bass slink and Prince-like vocal flourishes, which serves as the opening single from blacksummers’NIGHT. The singer’s freedom is also quite literal this time, as he’s finally out from under a major-label deal he signed back in the mid-1990s, allowing him to finally own his masters moving forward. His upcoming albums will be released through a partnership with the company BMG, which has become an increasingly popular home for R&B
“There’s so much happening,” Maxwell says. “The end of the trilogy; the opening of a new chapter. When I started out I didn’t know the power dynamics, the ins, and outs of the record industry. I was just happy to be on the rise. Later I would hear from Prince, like, ‘You should own your masters and understand the business.’ I was signed back in 1994. Things are different now, and gatekeepers have changed.”
He plans to release blacksummers’NIGHT next spring, after which he’ll return to the stage, where few can match his prowess, hitting 25 arenas in 2022 along with the singers Anthony Hamilton and Joe. And later this month, the singer will also be anointed with a Legend honor at the Soul Train Music Awards, where he’ll perform “Off.”
Maxwell sees symmetry between the opening to this “new chapter” and his very first, likening “Off” to his 1996 debut single, “… Til the Cops Come Knockin’,” a wake-the-neighbors-with-our-sexcapade ballad that lasts around seven minutes. “It feels full circle a little,” he notes.
But that’s not to say that he could have predicted that “Off” would start his latest album cycle. “I didn’t think this would be a debut single at all,” he says cheerfully. “I had a whole other idea, a whole ‘another song that I thought would be better.”
Unconventional choices have worked out for Maxwell in the past: He led off the album trilogy with “Pretty Wings,” which starts with a series of eerie plinks — the track went on to become one of his most beloved releases. Fans may think of that opening when they queue up “Off,” which begins with a quivering metallic curtain that sounds like a guitar but actually comes from a synth patch. “I’m a James Bond fanatic,” Maxwell explains. “When things feel epic, they feel Bond-like. That patch, that keyboard sound, gave me that feeling.”
As those metallic shards shimmy across the top of the track, the bass also starts to throw its weight around — Maxwell envisioned the low-end in “Off” as a nod to Parliament and Funkadelic. “Some people forget how much P-Funk had to do with experimentation of music, but I don’t,” the singer says. “I wanted to put that into something that’s ballad-y.”
In addition, Maxwell aimed to pay tribute to Heatwave’s “Always and Forever,” 1977 classic written by Rod Temperton. (Temperton would go on to write George Benson’s “Love x Love” and Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall,” which are about as close as music gets to walking on water.) “Always and Forever “is one of those songs that achieves every vocal possibility in one song,” Maxwell says. “It’s very silky. That was the goal.”
In the past, the singer has often started songs by wowing listeners with falsetto; this time, he flicks through micro-shades in lower registers. “I wanted to do something toned down melodically,” he says. And when Maxwell sings, “Let’s drink lemonade” in the second verse, he adds a playful shudder to the end of the word. “I realized I could do this bizarre, sheep-y bah-ah-ah kind of thing,” he says. “I did it and I wanted to keep it. ‘This is kind of odd!’ ” His longtime touring backup singer LaTina Webb adds ethereal harmonies.
