I'm almost afraid to download the entire Maxwell album. Frightened that the disc, BLACKsummers'night, out now after an 8-year respite, couldn't possibly live up to the large expectations set forth by the lingering lead single, "Pretty Wings."
I wish all men got better with time the way this neo-soul singer has. I've had two Maxwell sightings in the last half decade or so. The first was at an Urban Outfitters in the West Village and he was chatty with me when I went up to him giggling and giddy.
The second, last year, in TriBeCa, was just around the corner from the Cary Building where my newspaper's offices were situated.
He had shorn his thicket of locs by now so I had to give a second look, and as he unchained his bike from a railing, I looked again. He seemed serious, far off. I wanted to say something meaningful.
But what? Thank you for recreating Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work"? That Urban Hang Suite was the soundtrack to which I fell in love with a boy and "Reunion" played as it came to a halt?
I said nothing. I watched him mount his bike in dark cargo pants and a ratty black t-shirt, riding down West Broadway, perhaps a version of these lyrics forming in his mind: "If I can't have you/ Let love set you free / to let you flap your pretty wings around."
How to describe his face, every visible muscle? Mmm...he was heartbreakingly handsome, the stuff of sonnets and rambling soliloquies.
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