the things that perhaps shouldn't be sung." Almost all of Topley-Bird's vocals on Maxinquaye were recorded in a single take, a process she later said was "totally instinctive. There was no time to drum up an alter ego." Topley-Bird, a soft-spoken singer, found herself backed on most tracks by Tricky's rapped vocals. According to the journalist Sean O'Hagan, she sang with a "broken voice" that acted as "the perfect foil to Tricky's whispered and drawled raps". The liner notes credited Tricky and Topley-Bird for vocals on all songs except "Pumpkin" and "You Don't", which Tricky performed with Alison Goldfrapp and Ragga, respectively. A printing error mistakenly credited the then-unknown Topley-Bird as "Martine" on the record. Other musicians were recruited to play instruments for some tracks, including James Stevenson on guitar and Pete Briquette on bass. The band FTV performed on "Black Steel", which was a rock version of Public Enemy's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" (1988) and one of two remakes on Maxinquaye; Tricky also remade one of his contributions for Massive Attack, "Karmacoma" (1994), retitling it as "Overcome". Saunders contributed guitar himself, with the resulting improvisations treated as samples. Themes Much of the thematic content on Maxinquaye is informed by Tricky's late mother. He explained the title's connection to his mother in an interview with Simon Reynolds, saying that "Quaye, that's this race of people in Africa, and 'Maxin,' that's my mum's name, Maxine, and I've just taken the E off"; Reynolds interpreted this as a "place name" similar to the Rastafarian idea of Zion. In another source, Tricky was reported as saying Quaye had also been his mother's surname. According to Greg Kot, his mother's name provided the album its title while her suicide, along with his father abandoning him and Tricky's lack of moral sense as a youth, helped inform his "unsentimental grasp on reality", which was reflected in Maxinquayes "collision of beauty and violence". In the opinion of Stylus Magazines Kenan Hebert, who called it "a document of obsession, mistrust, misconduct, solipsism and sociopathy", the songs dealing with dysfunctional sexual relationships and fear of intimacy were given a Freudian angle by his mother's influence on the album, including Tricky's reference to her on "Aftermath". In an interview for The Wire, Tricky explained his mother's influence and his use of female vocalists like Topley-Bird: While songs such as "Overcome" and "Suffocated Love" deal with themes