Song Lyric Sunday was created by Helen Vahdati from This Thing Called Life One Word at a Time and author Jim Adams from A Unique Title For Me is our current guest host. For complete rules or to join in the fun, click here.

The theme for Song Lyric Sunday this week is “Bird/Fly/Sky/Wing.”

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His first single in seven years, neo-soul artist, Maxwell described the 2009 Pretty Wings to MTV as “a bittersweet love song about meeting the right girl at the wrong time.” Maxwell also told Billboard Magazine: “I met this girl who I still respect very much, and although it didn’t work out, I got lots of inspiration from it. This track speaks of my time with her. ”

Pretty Wings won the Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance and was nominated at the 52nd Grammy Awards for Song of the Year and Best R&B Song in 2010.

FUN FACTS:

• Pretty Wings reached the top forty on the Billboard Hot 100. It also topped the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, making it Maxwell’s first song in ten years to have done so (the last having been Fortunate in 1999). It remained at number one on that chart for fourteen consecutive weeks, which remains tied for the third-longest run at the top in the chart’s history.
• The lyrics of the song express “pretty wings” as a metaphor; “If I can’t have you, let love set you free to fly your pretty wings around.”
• Along with fellow musicians D’Angelo and Erykah Badu, Maxwell has been credited with helping to shape the “neo soul” movement that rose to prominence during the late 1990s.

To date, the music video has been viewed on YouTube over 50 million times. The video takes place in a dim household and some scenes show five separate women in their beds sleeping. Maxwell served as an Incubus who is in bed with the women in their own scenes. In the final minutes of the video the women all levitate above their beds after reaching a state of euphoria by the Incubus. The final shot is Maxwell leaving one of the bedrooms of one of the five women. The music video was ranked #9 on BET’s Notarized: Top 100 Videos of 2009 countdown.

Enjoy!

See my Song Lyric Sunday selection for Nesie’s Place!

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Disclaimer: I have no copyrights to the song and/or video and/or hyperlinks to songs and/or videos and/or gifs above. No copyright infringement intended.