It has the personal songs and “the pop songs,” as Maxwell puts it. It has range and luxuriousness—a horn section, strings, lap steel, shimmering touches in the vocals, and just enough of the blistering guitar from the first record. Did I mention beauty? “Walking Through The Water” has a lush, spreading Bacharachian splendor, a song about Maxwell’s troubled younger brother, who died last year, and the ways that an addict can bring nearly everyone down with him. “All heads shake / All hearts break / All hands wave goodbye.” Another song, “Cause and Effect,” describes a car accident, which I find out from Maxwell is based on an actual teenage experience of spinning out of control one day while riding in a car driven by his best friend Wade. Wade died in the crash.

Maxwell can tell you all this in a gentle, even-handed sort of way. Is he trying to keep himself from flinching or is he doing this as a kindness to you? Hard to tell. Like when he mentions a crazy Christmas when his stepfather held the family hostage at gunpoint. It sounds so absurd you don’t know quite how to react. He still looks kind of baffled himself. Now he’s got a beautiful wife and son and he’s baffled by that good luck, too, which he’s also written songs about—happy songs. But “Song Turns Blue,” which is where he says this record started—he calls it the “fulcrum song”—is about dealing with a particularly challenging period of depression in his life.