Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite in The Song Remembers When

The other day I realized that it had been 20 years since this album had come out. It made me kind of sad. I mean, I hadn’t actually listened to this album the year it had come out, I wouldn’t discover it for a few more years, but it still reminded me of a different time and it just seemed like a reminder that that time has not just passed me by, but gone the way of the dodo.

I discovered this album through Joe. Usually he liked really awful frat-rock. At the time it was defined by Dave Matthews Band or Ben Folds, music that didn’t appeal to my angry chick-rock-defined mind. We usually loathed getting in the car with one another until we discovered that we both shared a mutual love for jazz.

One night about a month into our relationship, I had somehow gotten the whole night free and I was going to spend the night with him at his house, and he pulled out this record and started playing it. I’d never really understood the term “baby making music” until I heard this. It really transformed him.

Joe was romantic in our daily lives, the way we communicated, he always showed me his affection… but that primarily ended when we had sex. Our sex was transactional, which bothered me in the beginning which is why we split up for a bit. But I discovered the night he played this that, like any true musician, music focused his thoughts and emotions into a single focal point, and that focal point was me.

We used this album as a kind of shorthand for the foreplay that would sometimes escape his attention or as a suture to heal things that bothered us. It was like glue that held us together when we couldn’t say it ourselves. This album is like every unexpressed feeling I ever had for that man… and those feelings are 20 years old.