Maxwell ready to seduce Atlanta with Mary J. Blige

The second album in a trilogy by soul artist Maxwell, “blackSUMMERS’night,” has arrived a mere seven years after the first album in the series, “BLACKsummers’night.”

That’s about par for the course for Maxwell, who over his 20-year recording career has released five studio albums. Part of the reason that Maxwell doesn’t crank out albums every other year or so is he feels in order to bring the proper amount of passion and understanding to his songs, he needs to live some life away from music and have experiences from which to draw on in writing his lyrics and delivering his words.

"It's like have I lived enough to be able to fully capitalize on the song creatively?" Maxwell said during a recent phone interview. "I look at someone like Mary J. Blige (his co-headliner on his current tour, which plays Philips Arena on Friday) as a very good example in terms of someone who has always made her life reflect the songs and the theme and (the way) she performs to people. And so that's how my approach is."

During the course of making “blackSUMMERS’night,” Maxwell went through some significant life experiences, including the deaths of his grandmother and a cousin in his 30s, who fell victim to a heart ailment — two losses he has said informed some of the songs on the new album.

But perhaps the biggest life experience for the 43-year-old singer-songwriter born as Gerald Maxwell Rivera was reaching the milestone 40th birthday.

“I feel, in turning 40, that was probably the biggest part of the delay,” Maxwell said of the gap between albums. “I can tell you that just being 40, you really understand everything that you didn’t understand before. You see what played into everything, what made you feel what you felt, why you were the way you were, why you viewed relationships the way you viewed them, how you idealized them and romanticized them, how you were pessimistic about them, why you were optimistic. All of those things came into play.”

Both “BLACKsummers’night” and “blackSUMMERS’night” have seen Maxwell, who has been a lifelong bachelor but said he hopes to marry and raise a family, thoughtfully explore love and relationships and their many complexities. That’s no surprise for an artist who, with the arrival of his critically acclaimed 1996 debut album, “Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite,” began creating some of the era’s most sensual yet intelligent songs about love — and has no doubt provided a soundtrack for romance for many of his fans.

His simmering soulful and richly melodic music and his lyrics clearly struck a chord. “Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite” established him as a force in urban music, topping 1 million copies sold and helping to shape the neo-soul movement of the late ‘90s.

His next three albums, “Embrya” (1998), “Now” (2001) and “BLACKsummers’night” (2009), continued the momentum. All three went platinum and only enhanced his artistic reputation.

Maxwell said even though it took years to bring his latest album to fruition, he went into “blackSUMMERS’night” with some clear thematic ideas and a central musical goal for the album.

To that end, “blackSUMMERS’night” finds Maxwell mixing things up just a bit musically. His core sound remains very much intact, but along with the expected rich ballads, a few songs (“All the Ways Love Can Feel,” “Lost” and “Hostage”) bump up the tempos and groove.

Maxwell, with his tour with Blige, is in the early stages of what he expects could be two years of touring behind “blackSUMMERS’night.” He likes how his show has come together.

“It’s exciting. We take you back in time. We put you in the future,” Maxwell said of his live show. “It’s a fun show. It’s loose, it’s improvisational. I work with the city I’m in. I try to tie in certain aspects of where I’m at within the show. We try to do that, for sure.”