Book Maxwell

It wasn’t until the spring of 1996 that Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite finally appeared. Sales were slow to take off at first, even though Maxwell scored some airplay with ‘…Til the Cops Come Knockin’.’ The gold-selling second single ‘Ascension (Never Wonder)’ lit the fuse, however, and Urban Hang Suite went platinum before a year had passed, also earning a Grammy nomination. Now elevated to sex-symbol status, Maxwell capitalized on his breakthrough with the MTV Unplugged EP, taken from his live MTV performance.Additionally, the Unplugged version of ‘Whenever, Wherever, Whatever’ earned him another Grammy nomination (for Best Male Pop Vocal).

Anticipation for his second full-length album was high, and when Embrya was released in 1998, it entered the charts at number three and the record duplicated its predecessor’s platinum sales. In 1999, Maxwell scored his biggest hit to date with the single ‘Fortunate,’ an R. Kelly composition he recorded for the soundtrack of the film Life; it was a mammoth success, ranking as the number one R&B hit of the year in Billboard magazine. Later that year, he also cut two songs for the soundtrack of The Best Man. In August 2001, Maxwell returned with his third full-length album, Now, which was touted as a return to the more straightforwardly romantic atmosphere of his debut. It entered the album charts at number one and quickly launched a hit single in ‘Lifetime.’ Maxwell didn’t resurface until 2008, when he performed Al Green’s ‘Simply Beautiful’ as part of the 2008 BET Awards. A handful of intimate performances prefaced his fourth studio album, BLACKsummers’night (the first installment in a promised trilogy of albums), released in July 2009. ‘Pretty Wings,’ its lead single, was in the Top 20 of the R&B/Hip-Hop chart within three weeks of its May release.