''All the things we should've done/That we never did,/All the things I should've given/But I didn't...''
Your first thought: That's ballsy. Come across Maxwell's butterfly-soul treatment of Kate Bush's ''This Woman's Work'' on the radio these days, and what grabs you is the sheer brass of the thing: Here's a guy not only singing a song of fragile femininity, but delivering it in a falsetto so ozone-layer high that it might give Barry Gibb a pulled groin. Are those taffy-larynx notes hard to reach? ''Very,'' Maxwell says. But the hardest thing about ''This Woman's Work'' -- a song that has become both a hit single and Maxwell's onstage coup de grace -- is the emotional nakedness it requires. Says Maxwell: ''The way I look at it, the falsetto represents the male ego becoming so vulnerable that it becomes childlike.''
Rightly, Maxwell's early memories of ''This Woman's Work'' spring from childhood. Now 28, he first heard it on Kate Bush's 1989 album The Sensual World when he was 17. (A fresh notch in your Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon chart: ''Work'' debuted as the maternity-ward crescendo in Bacon's 1988 film She's Having a Baby.) ''I couldn't believe someone wrote something so painful sounding,'' Maxwell says. ''It sounds like crying. I would listen to it all the time.'' Years later, he picked ''Work'' as an unlikely showpiece for a 1997 MTV Unplugged session -- ''I didn't want to do a Marvin Gaye cover or something people would expect'' -- and the song entered a cycle of regeneration. The reclusive Bush mailed Maxwell a letter of praise when he was in London to play the Royal Albert Hall. His rendition popped up again in the film Love & Basketball. He says he revived the song most recently for his 2001 album Now as a tribute to a girl he'd met through the Make-A-Wish Foundation; she'd died of cancer six months after joining Maxwell on stage in L.A. ''I put it on there for her,'' he says.
So is ''This Woman's Work'' about giving birth? Dying? Breaking up? And what does it mean when the person unleashing these seraphic effusions is a guy? ''Sometimes it takes a lot of balls to be not what the expected male energy is,'' Maxwell says. ''I just think for me it's like trying to say to a lady, 'You know what? The pain that you feel is just as real for a guy.''' And the subtext? Wide open. ''I love that I can't tell what Kate Bush intended,'' he says. ''Every time I hear it, I make my present moment the intention of the song.'' Not that he can hear it. Lately, crowds tend to react to Maxwell's gender-blending, exposed-ganglia performances with swoons rising into shrieks. ''Oh, my goodness,'' he says. ''I can't even hear myself. Once they hear the harp, all I hear is YAAAAAAAAH.''
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