Maxwell Black Summer`S Night Album Download
Maxwell spent part of the eight years between his third and fourth studio albums walking the Earth, attempting to experience a life resembling that of a human. One of neo-soul's most visible faces, along with Lauryn Hill and D'Angelo, he had been on the music industry's hamster wheel for most of his twenties and needed some tangible inspiration. At some point he got down to scheming and quite a lot of recording; BLACKsummers'night is the first release of a trilogy, with BlackSUMMERS'night (rooted in gospel, with a twist, apparently) and Blacksummers'NIGHT (promised as a disc of slow jams) to follow. Just as he arrived in 1996, offering an alternate option to the exaggerated masculinity that was dominating contemporary R&B, he returns as the airwaves are stuffed with raging hormones expressed through Auto-Tune. He has made no concessions to them. BLACKsummers'night is all devotion, regret, and heartache, written with Now collaborator Hod David and played by a session band, including a horn section, that sounds closer to a touring band that has been supporting the singer for years. The musicians morph with every shift in emotion through arrangements that are unfailingly exquisite and sensitively nuanced, even when they are briskly played. If the singer got into adventures while he was away, he does not detail them during these 38 unified minutes, but he did go through a serious, failed relationship, just as "Pretty Wings," the album's floating pre-album single, suggested. Like the real-life flip side to Al Green's "Simply Beautiful" -- the song Maxwell performed at the 2008 BET Awards, signaling his return -- it's catharsis through bittersweet elegance, equal in its enamored resentment ("You toyed with my affliction/Had to fill out my prescription") and remorse ("I came wrong, you were right/Transformed your love into like"). Although the rest of the album leaves plenty of space for the most common form of pleading, the disarming "Fistful of Tears" is as impassioned as the steamiest moments and indicates the complexity of Maxwell's relationship: "'Cause I go insane, crazy sometimes/Trying to keep you from losing your mind/Open your eyes, see what's in front of your face/Save me my fistful of...tears." For all its dimensions and progress, the album is simultaneously designed to ensure that devoted fans will feel the wait was worth it. After all, its opening lines are "Make me crazy, don't speak no sound/I want you to prove it to me in the nude," and they are sung in falsetto.
Maxwell Black Summer`S Night Album Download
"I just wanna dance, baby," Maxwell sings on III, a pulsing track on his new album, blackSUMMERS'night (* * * out of four), out Friday . Then, a moment later, he begs, "Let me feel something/More than just an ordinary night."
But the overall tone on blackSUMMERS'night is still one of hope and gratitude. If Maxwell seems to approach bitterness or desperation on the previous two songs, he never succumbs to them, or tries to drag his subject down. At once meditative and playful, sexy and sincere, the album proposes that romantic love can grow even more intense, and rewarding, with time.
Maxwell does things on his own schedule. The 43-year-old R&B singer just celebrated the 20th anniversary of his first album, Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite, which helped inaugurate the neo-soul movement. Now, he's releasing his fifth studio album, blackSUMMERS'night.
To say that people have been eagerly awaiting this record is an understatement. It's been seven years since his last project, the Grammy-winning album BLACKsummers'night. His new release is the sequel to that album and the second in a proposed trilogy.
For Maxwell, who very proudly calls himself a R&B singer, anything new he does is about the long-term, about adding to the storied legacy of his more than 25 years as a respected artist. So, for him, when he releases a new album, as he will soon with blacksummers'NIGHT, and plans a tour, which will kick off March 2 in Dallas and run through May 8 in Miami, he is looking to create art that will last through the years and instill in fans the same feeling he had watching Questlove's Oscar-nominated Summer of Soul.
Maxwell: I'm sitting here and I'm working on this album which would be out spring, summer-ish, spring-ish. And I'm like, "I have to make a record that lives up to everything that I did before and hopefully surpasses what I could have ever imagined." So every time I'm about to begin a new part of the trilogy or an album or whatever, I'm always confronted with this great, huge responsibility of like, "Is this bigger than that? Is this better than the past?" But I have to ex that out of my mind because the thing that makes the past so beautiful is that there's nostalgia connected to it, there's the fact that you can never get it again, you can never go back to 1996, '97 before cell phones, when people actually had to watch the show and pay attention. But you can only remember trying to get the essence of what made that happen and push forward in a new time without compromising your creative integrity on some level. So that's the battle. The battle is like yourself competing with what you were.
Baltin: What's the greatest thing that you can hear from people, both fans coming to the show and also the people that you're working with on these shows, that you can hear after they watch the "BLACKsummers'night" tour this summer?
Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Elvis Costello is expected to revisit 1982 album "Imperial Bedroom" on a summer tour billed as "Imperial Bedroom and Other Chambers." Fan favorites "Almost Blue," "Beyond Belief" and "Man Out of Time" first appeared on the 35-year-old album.
Maxwell's fourth studio album BLACKsummers'night was the first in a music trilogy series that Maxwell began in 2002. The record features the singles "Pretty Wings", "Bad Habits", "Cold" and "Fistful of Tears". This is the first time the album is available on vinyl.
The only one song on this list that comes from our current decade. Between the years 2009 and 2016, new solo material by Maxwell was nowhere to be found after BLACKsummer'snight. However, in one of the rare instances in his career, we were lucky enough to hear Maxwell on a recorded duet, and we were lucky that on other side of this collaboration was Alicia Keys. I have conflicted feelings about Alicia Keys. She's a little too mainstream. She's often corny. She can't *really* play the piano. She's getting cornier and cornier these few years. However, here are two things that cannot be denied about Alicia: girl is classy af, and girl can sing the hell out of a song, albeit oftentimes resorting to a lot of forced and unhealthy belting. While this duet was rare for Maxwell since most of his recorded material has been solo music, "Fire We Make" also saw Alicia Keys stepping out of her comfort zone (AKA boring ass piano ballads), as she takes on a slow, seductive quiet-storm song with her outstanding vocals in the rare low register. When I first heard this song, I thought, "Well this just makes so much sense. Why doesn't she do more stuff like this?" Alicia and Max worked together like bread and butter, the former blesses the listeners with a soothing, tender and moanful performance, and the latter follows her lead with his own uncanny impression of the melody in his signature falsetto. Boy, when dude comes in with the "Hey baby", that was the original "oooh baby Maxwell is back baby" moment before "Lake By the Ocean".
Where's your fro, DUDE?! I honestly still don't quite know where I stand in terms of my opinion on the titles of the trilogy. I mean, I hope that the different themes and focuses brought about by all this different capitalization are worth the confusion that comes along. Just one thing: how are people supposed to talk about these two albums, and the last one coming up? "Hey man I liked black summer's night, but I thought black summer's night was better. Black summer's night was disappointing, though." Ugh, getting a headache just thinking about that. "Pretty Wings" was otherwise a hell of a comeback in 2009 (also 7 years after his previous album). As a matter of fact, it actually might have trumped his old records and become Maxwell signature track among the younger audience, which is a little sad, but hey, it's a great song. Maxwell is a master of reverb and ambience, and the atmosphere he crafts in "Pretty Wings" is *pretty* magical. Everything is on point on this track. Not much else to say about it.
Florida, 1983. The latter contains 191 letters selected from more than one thousand in the collection. 2Bigelow, Frontier Eden, p. 3. 3Bigelow and Monti, Selected Letters, p. 37. MKR to Editor of Ocala Star, January 31, 1931. MKRMSS. All correspondence hereafter cited is from the MKR MSS Collection unless otherwise noted. 4MSS dating from summer of 1930. MKR MSS. 'Francis Harper and Delma E. Presley, Okefinokee Album. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981. pp. 24, 60, 109, 135. 6MKR to Maxwell Perkins, August 31, 1932; November 17, 1934. 7MKR to Maxwell Perkins, November 4, 1931. ""Invisible Florida," A talk given by MKR at Florida Southern College in 1935. MKR MSS. 'Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, South Moon Under. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933. pp. 38,45. 10MKR to Maxwell Perkins, February 17, 1934; June 1, 1936; June 20, 1937; September 21, 1938. "Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, "A Mother in Mannville," Saturday Evening Post. December 12, 1936. l2James Still to Author, February 17, 1985; James Still to MKR, October 31, 1936. "James Still to MKR, September 21, 1938. l4Chicago Daily News, December 3, 1941. l5James Still to MKR, December 11, 1941. 16MKR to Maxwell Perkins, September 22, 1936. 17MKR to Aunt Ida, September 22, October 1, 5, 15, 1936. '"Rawlings, "A Mother in Mannville." l9Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, "Mountain Prelude ," Saturday Evening Post. April 26, May 3, 10, 17, 31, 1947. 20James Still to MKR, September 21, 1938. 2lLouisville Courier-Journal, October 5, 1939, p.l. 22Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, "Regional Literature of the South," College English. February , 1940. pp. 381-389. "Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1942. 24Bigelow, Frontier Eden, p. 153. 25EUen Glasgow to MKR, April 20, 1942. 26Dean Cadle, "Man on Troublesome," Yale Review , Winter, 1968. 'James Still to MKR, December 11, 1941; James Still to Author, February 17, 1985. 'Jesse Stuart to MKR, March 8, 1953. 'Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, "Mountain Rain," Scribner's Magazine, July, 1938. This is a poem: . . . How could I know that Rain would make this high, proud place A supplicant? . . . 'Robert J. Higgs and Ambrose Manning, Voices from the Hills. New York: Frederick Unger, 1978. p. 218. Junior High Snow Storm By this time we are all wide-eyed, scheming our own fantastic adventures through flurries; sledding behind 4-wheel drives up on White Creek Road, Grandma's snow-slush cream, the hurry and fury of snowball fights. We imagine our homes, not our homes at all, but a house, solitary porch light on, a beacon through the magic, beautiful, wild, killing-cold snow. Imagining being surrounded by the blinding torrents of whirling flakes. Imagining the earth, one large snowball, shaped by God's near frost-bitten fingers, hurling through the black night. Suddenly, from the P.A. comes, "You are dismissed." And so we are. -Jeff Hardin 21 ...