The Singles Jukebox

If only Maxwell wasn’t such a good singer, so I could make the Bad Key Machine joke only one of you will get…

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Thomas Inskeep: No one does woozy, dreamy R&B quite like Maxwell, and this isn’t just R&B at its dreamy wooziest, it also features a prominent timpani. And when’s the last time you heard a timpani on the radio? 
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Alfred Soto: “I’m hearin’ and I’m sayin’ things all the time/The word on the street is I’m slowly losing my mind,” the auteur sings, as worried as Barack Obama in November 2008. In his putative late ’90s heyday the falsetto suggested a reach begging for a grasp. Now he’s written a melody that honors it and the accompanying strings.
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Katherine St Asaph: I don’t know which is more refreshing: the drifting, fractured arrangement, stardust as asbestos crystals; or the novelty-that-shouldn’t be of someone owning being an adult.
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Tim de Reuse: I spent a good thirty seconds trying to think of a more awkwardly un-erotic phrase than “I can climax with reason” before realizing that if there is one I would prefer not to know about it.
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Jonathan Bogart: “We will climax with reason ’cause we’re grown and we own it” is not much of a seduction line unless you’re a very specific kind of person. Good for Maxwell that a) I am and b) the actual words get swallowed up in the mood.
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Cassy Gress: You know, for a languorous, starry-eyed R&B sex song, this has a lot of drive to it. It’s not the sound of a man who wants to take his time and make love to you for hours; it’s a man who, yes, really does think you’re a goddess, but wants to have sex right now, dammit.
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A.J. Cohn: Rivera may sing about the failure of music to truly express the wonder of, well, making love–as the chorus goes: “There’s no song that defines it/There’s not music behind it/There’s no lyric to read from”–but this song gets pretty damn close to capturing it. Rivera’s falsetto alone sounds like what intimacy should be: tender, beautiful, and open.
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