In case you missed it, Maxwell was featured in Sunday's New York Times. The crooner finally explained his long absence from music when he said:“When we all [him, D'angelo, etc.] came out,” Maxwell said, “it was just too much adulation, the accolades: the next this, the next that.” He felt confusion, he said, about “which part of you is that extension of the music and which part of you is that real person. I think my stepping away was my own sort of weird therapy for that.” On the state of music today he said: “It’s made to have no peaks, no valleys. And we wanted [with this album], like, landscape. I wanted the music to sound like, ‘Oh my god, I’m looking at a vista, like I see a mountain over here, and water, and some clouds.’"