Professional ratings
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AllMusic
Boston Herald
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
Entertainment Weekly	A−
Los Angeles Times
Mixmag
Q
Rolling Stone
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USA Today

Now is the third studio album by American R&B singer Maxwell. It was released on August 14, 2001, by Columbia Records. Following the lukewarm commercial performance of his 1998 record Embrya, Maxwell pursued a different direction while recording Now, abandoning the conceptual style of his previous albums.

Now received positive reviews and sold over 296,000 units in the U.S. in the first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan, while earning Maxwell his first number-one album on the Billboard 200. The album's second single "This Woman's Work", a live staple of Maxwell's, charted at number 58 on the Hot 100 and at number 16 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.Now was Maxwell's last album before an eight-year hiatus, which culminated in the release of his fourth studio album BLACKsummers'night (2009).

Now received generally positive reviews from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 78, based on 11 reviews. In Entertainment Weekly, Tom Sinclair found Maxwell's New Age spiritual musings to be outside the R&B mainstream and said "as mellowed-out as much of Now is, it's definitely not aural wallpaper, but a cohesive effort that rewards repeated listenings".Boston Herald critic Sarah Rodman said Maxwell had made the "truly terrific" Prince album the artist himself was no longer making while continuing to "distinguish himself from the current glut of overwrought and under- erotic r & b lotharios with his retro, almost absurdly soulful ways". Daryl Easlea from BBC Music highlighted the cover of the 1989 Kate Bush song "This Woman's Work" and deemed the album "grown-up, frequently gorgeous music that epitomises the very best in neo-soul".Greg Kot from the Chicago Tribune found Maxwell's lyrics far more straightforward than Embrya's "almost impenetrable" songs, while applauding his ability as a singer to achieve an "enlightened empathy" that "neither panders nor demands" to his fictitious lovers. James Hunter wrote in The Village Voice that Maxwell and Stuart Matthewman had avoided the gratuitous productions of Embrya in favor of more grounded music, against which the singer performed masterfully. "He is, as throughout Now, a soul singer who knows precisely what he's doing", Hunter wrote. Fellow Village Voice critic Robert Christgau gave Now an "honorable mention" in his review column, singling out "Temporary Nite", "This Woman's Work", and "Lifetime" as its best songs, while writing that Maxwell "can't outbeat D'Angelo, so he works on outsinging and outsonging him".

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