While many celebs spent Easter Sunday posing in pastel-filled photo shoots and chasing bunnies, Maxwell went to the church.
Captured on Snapchat, the “Pretty Wings” singer attended service at Cornerstone Baptist Church in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn on Sunday. The 43-year-old spoke to the congregation and even sang a gospel song.
“Happy Easter to everybody, Happy Resurrection Day,” he begins. “I’ve been in the music business for a long time and I can tell you at the end, no matter where we go or how many songs we write, it always comes back to God.”
Maxwell, born Gerald Maxwell Rivera to a Haitian mother and Puerto Rican father, was raised in East New York, not far from where Cornerstone is located. He’s credited the Baptist church for forming his interest in music.
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“The circumstances of my life—my mother’s origin, my father’s origin, how she was 16 when she had me and he was much older, being shipped off here—I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me,” he told Pitchfork in a 2016 interview.
“I felt transformed through this music thing. It was like I finally felt good about myself. That’s why I didn’t really connect myself with the energy people gave me onstage back then. It was like, This is happening… but, really? Because most people grow up with parents and family that really love them and nurture them to the point where they believe the world revolves around them. I didn’t really have that.”
“But I have great forgiveness and love for my mother, because she had that life,” he added.