Maria McKee: A Love Letter in 16 Songs

David pays tribute to an artist he loves on her sixtieth birthday

Maria McKee turned sixty on Saturday. The singer-songwriter has been among my favorite artists since the emergence of her band, Lone Justice, during the Great Roots Rock Scare of the 1980s and then right on through the seven studio albums of her mercurial solo career. She and I are about the same age, so I’ve been thinking of her and her work as contemporaries of mine, as a kind of musical friend, for most of my life now—and for the entirety of my “career” as a critic. I owe her and want to say thank you.

Though she has a devoted audience, and at least early on received a lot of music-press attention, she’s never been a big star or sold a ton of records, and she’s hardly been as critically admired as I’d argue she deserves. Most of that’s been out of her hands. Many music critics, especially those from the post-punk and indie-rock eras she’s mostly worked in, are suspicious of acts who slot as “roots,” as McKee did for the first not-quite decade of her career. Double that for someone, particularly for a young woman, as hyped as she was out of the gate. David Geffen was all in on making her a superstar. Jimmy Iovine was determined to make her into “the female Bruce Springsteen.” Bob Dylan wrote a song for her before she’d even completed an album, for God’s sake. She had an enormous voice, played rock guitar and was traditionally cute to boot. Both attention and skepticism trailed her like a stalker. She put her head down and did the work of creation and perpetual self-transformation, a rock-biz trooper and a seeker all at once. For most of her subsequent career, she’s been not so much underrated as ignored altogether, at least critically speaking, even sometimes when hiding in plain sight (That’s her, for example, behind Adam Duritz on “Mr. Jones”). Music writers have thankfully become much more intentional about putting women at the center of pop music narratives, yet even now McKee remains overlooked.

McKee is an underappreciated songwriter. To my ears, she tends to save her best stuff for herself but has had a handful of commercial successes to help her get by in lean years. She didn’t get around to cutting her “A Good Heart” until 2007, but Feargal Sharkey had an enormous British hit with it all the way back in 1985. The Chicks famously cut her “Am I the Only One (Who’s Ever Felt This Way),” and Quentin Tarantino grabbed her haunting “If Love Is a Red Dress (Hang Me in Rags)” for Pulp Fiction. Still, it’s the “singer” half of McKee the “singer-songwriter” that I love most of all. I’d like to underline then that McKee’s a fantastic interpreter of other people’s work, with powerful and distinctive recordings of songs by Van Morrison and Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen and Victoria Williams, Lou Reed and Blind Willie Johnson, Jimmy Webb and Merle Haggard, among others. Her 2005 recording of the jazz-pop standard “(You Don’t Know) How Glad I Am” (no offense, Nancy Wilson) is my favorite version of the song. As it happens, I didn’t pluck any of these for my 16, but I sure could have.

McKee’s tendency to shift gears artistically, pushing herself and her audience, has been thrilling to my ears, and challenging—repeatedly helping me to think and feel through my own evolving tastes. Fans haven’t always appreciated such reinventions. Punk and roots-rock audiences, who were there for McKee first, often demand authenticity and purity from their artists. Artistic changeups, especially ones in a pop direction, land as inauthentic. For her part, McKee has always embraced artifice. She’s an intensely in-the-moment vocalist but, at the same time, understands that art is artifice by definition; putting on a show is a big part of the gig. The thrift-store Depression-era frocks she wore back in her Lone Justice days signaled this from the jump, and her shifting sonics have followed suit across the decades. If her career best isn’t Americana masterpiece You Gotta Sin to Get Saved, then maybe it’s her neo-glam rock follow-up Life Is Sweet. And the musical theater I hear prominently in her performances—she has some of Stephen Sondheim’s beau ideal, Bernadette Peters, in her, I think—is the quality in her work I’ve grown to value the most.

When she was 53 or so, McKee came out as queer, a “midlife lesbian,” as she Tweeted at the time: “I suppose ‘technically’ I’m BI/Queer/Pan but really just enjoying my Dykedom right now.” (She’s since deleted her X account, but she’s fairly active on Instagram.) This journey of self-discovery resulted in a song cycle, 2020’s La Vita Nuova, still her most recent album and, at the time, her first in 13 years. Appropriately, it took wholly new directions, suggesting light opera in moments, but heavy. The album is more layered, more poetic and more personal, at once wilder and more controlled than anything this already idiosyncratic artist has ever put on record. It was another shift in directions for McKee, another rebirth, and I expect to be exploring it for the rest of my days.

So… Here are 16 of my favorite Maria McKee tracks. (Why 16? Why not?) There’s plenty I missed, particularly if what I wanted was to be comprehensive or to initiate newcomers. I didn’t any include of her film score work with husband, dear friend and artistic collaborator Jim Akin, skipped her three live albums entirely, and haven’t heard more than pre-release singles from the forthcoming archival set Viva Lone Justice. I’d love to hear from you about any of your favorites I may have passed over. But this is my love letter, and I just went with what’s dearest to my heart. Let me count the ways…

1. “Ways to Be Wicked” (from Lone Justice, 1985)

The tracks on This Is Lone Justice: The Vaught Tapes surely do a better job of capturing the early rawer sound of the L.A. cowpunk band McKee started with friend Ryan Hedgecock when she was still only 18. They were soon drawing superstars like Stevie Nicks, David Byrne, Dolly Parton, and Linda Ronstadt (who McKee believes was the one who urged David Geffen to sign her pronto) to their gigs. But “Ways to Be Wicked,” a radio single with its MTV video, is Maria McKee as the rest of the world first met her, big-voiced and bratty. The song, written by Tom Petty and Mike Campbell, is a good one, but the record’s better, a paragon of roots rock that reimagines Cosmic American Music as eighties AOR. “You know so many ways to be wicked / Oh, but you don’t know one little thing about love,” McKee snarls, telling off some asshole boyfriend. “No, you ain’t afraid to stick it in.” The rock boys thought that was cool, no doubt, but notice it’s the little girl singer who’s turning the knife.

2. “Don’t Toss Us Away” (from Lone Justice, 1985)

“Don’t Toss Us Away” was written by Bryan MacLean, a guitarist and songwriter for L.A. psychefolkadelic legends Love. MacLean was also McKee’s adored big brother, who introduced lil’ sis to the music of his Laurel Canyon running mates while also kicking off her lifelong love of show tunes. You can hear the latter influence in her reading of her brother’s song: the way she belts it to the back of the house, steps briefly out of melody and into speech, the way when she begs for her lover not to cast her aside that she (big finish!) really makes sure to sell it. If Lone Justice’s brief career was scripted for the stage, this torch song would make a fine first-act closer, McKee spotlit downstage, singing for love and for her life.

3. “I Found Love” (from Shelter, 1986)

Still looking to make her into a female Bruce, Jimmy Iovine brought Steve Van Zandt on as co-producer for Lone Justice’s sophomore effort. And he tagged Bruce Brody, who was the keyboardist in The Patti Smith Group on “Because the Night” and who became a key McKee collaborator going forward, for that Danny Federici sound on circus-party organ. The result was this album opener, a McKee/Van Zandt cowrite, that winningly captures the thunderous high-gloss twang of Born in the U.S.A. Except: McKee’s spiky lead splits the difference between pop-punk and ecstatic soul, and her call is answered by a masterful trio of R&B vocalists (Vesta Williams, Portia Griffin, Alexandra Brown). Is the thrilling joy McKee extolls of the romantic variety? Has she been born again? I sometimes feel like what she’s really singing about loving here is… singing.

4. “I’ve Forgotten What It Was in You (That Put the Need in Me)” from Maria McKee, 1989)

Lone Justice broke up in 1988, a victim of excessive hype and its predictable backlash, of unreasonable commercial expectations and record company micro-management. Their debut had been quintessential cowpunk, its follow up was roots-adjacent heartland rock, and for her solo debut, McKee switched it up again. Produced by Mitchell Froom, Maria McKee was devoted to lithe but muscular pop rock. Its opener is a gem of that type, a showcase for McKee’s driving acoustic strum, her evocative word play (“after the moment of emotion, it’s kinda hard to keep the mood up”), and her gift for conveying the bitter and the sweet. She’s having a hard conversation on this one, telling a lover she’s fallen out of love, and the empathy that flows from her soprano on “Oh honey please don’t cry, I’m sorry and ashamed” is devastating. On the other hand, her closing La-La-La’s sound thrilled to be free—and eager to try love again. 

5. “Has He Got a Friend for Me” (from Maria McKee, 1989)

On Richard and Linda Thompson’s I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, Linda makes this one sound both lonely and alone—hopeless in a private, keep-calm-and-carry-on British sort of way. Just piano and voice, McKee’s version hits differently. Her pathos is more sad-sack and fuller of self-pity. It feels as if it’s partly a showy performance for an audience of coupled friends. Now, that’s not a better way to play the song, but it’s a smart and equally valid one—and one, I must admit, that comes much closer to hitting me where I’ve lived.

6. “Panic Beach,” (from Maria McKee, 1989)

McKee betrays a strong musical theater influence almost always, but with “Panic Beach” she leans into that world explicitly; it’s a key track, I think, for getting where she’s coming from. McKee’s cast of characters here—a dog act, the King and Queen of the waltz clog team, Miss Billy Begonia, and so on—anticipates the photo of circus acts and “vaudeville bums” that grace the cover of her later Life Is Sweet. Her song unfolds with an early Springsteen-ish grandeur. Instead of a guitar solo, though, we get Benmont Tench’s organ whirling about some little long-in-the-tooth midway. McKee has imagined a group of small-time oceanside show people, but her song- and stagecraft isn’t stagey. Her subtle phrasing comes off as conversational, even amidst writerly similes like “She don’t sweat, she just sours and melts like ice cream in the sun,” and even with delightful rhymes like “When my trunk is filled with taffeta / those Big-Time hacks won't laugh at us.” The trooper in the last verse must literally sing to her landlord for her supper and a room: “If a tear comes to his eye, he may let a month go by / Before he takes away my key.” She dreams of saying goodbye to Panic Beach forever, but you suspect she’s not going anywhere soon.

7. “Show Me Heaven” (from Days of Thunder: Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack, 1990)

On the one hand, “Show Me Heaven” is far and away McKee’s biggest hit. It topped the charts in the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway and charted across much of the rest of Europe. On the other, it failed here even to crack the Hot 100 (though it did inch as high #28 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart). Supposedly songwriters Jay Rifkin and Eric Rackin sent McKee a song called “Secret Love” that they hoped she’d record for a new Tom Cruise movie. She liked the melody but hated the lyrics, which she rewrote from scratch into “Show Me Heaven.” It’s easy to hear why she recognized the melody as one she could work with. The epitome of a romantic power ballad, “Show Me Heaven” finds McKee riding the tunes highs and lows, leaping from sharp gale-force cries to breathy falsetto, from whispers to screams and back again, often all in the same phrase.  Her voice embodies a way that sensual, emotional passion can feel. It’s a show-stopping performance, a diva turn in the best sense and spotlighted all the more intensely by a quiet arrangement: just drums that sound like bongos, an organ, a tambourine, and Maria McKee.

8. “I Can’t Make It Alone” (from You Gotta Sin to Get Saved, 1993)

Another McKee album, another new sound. For You Gotta Sin to Get Saved, McKee teamed with producer George Drakoulias on a soul-heavy roots grab-bag that, in hindsight, anticipated so much of the big-tent Americana dead ahead. (It’s my favorite McKee album, if I had to pick, and my fave album of 1993; I wrote a little about it, here.) As always with a Drakoulias recording, the album’s sonics, its clarity and separation, are their own reward. As always with a McKee recording, the vocals are the thing. This Carole King and Gerry Goffin number is probably best known by way of Dusty Springfield—Dusty in Memphis feels like a touchstone throughout here. But McKee reinvents Springfield’s vulnerable, sexy bedroom symphony as a full-on chugging guitar rocker. McKee’s version isn’t seductive at all; it’s just desperate. For the prideful character McKee’s portraying, asking her lover to take her back feels impossibly difficult, so the only way to do it is just to blurt it out, to shout and beg before she loses her nerve. I love that Jim Keltner’s insistent drums are so way up in the mix, like they’re her duet partner. And like their answer is still “No.”

9. “Why Wasn’t I More Grateful (When Life Was Sweet”) (from You Gotta Sin to Get Saved, 1993)

McKee uses melisma in her delivery like just about any pop singer of the last seventy-five years or so, but it’s rarely among her primary tools. Her singing is all about tone and range, her remarkable sustain, her bracing vibrato, and her power—in terms of volume, sure, but more so her emotional presence and conviction. Even here, working with an arrangement that is entirely gospel-bred and country-soul-derived, she still resists the temptation to go all Aretha Franklin or Whitney Houston the way we’ve come to expect a “Little Diva” (her publishing copyright) to do. There’s more than one way to share your testimony, though, and she belts her regrets in her singular squall. McKee’s sin is ingratitude. Wasn’t it enough to have “little worry and loads of time”? “Some people want, want, want what they don’t have…,” and by “some people” she seems very pointedly to mean Maria McKee. “Some people just never stop bitchin’.” And now, with rousing “amens” from the Memphis Horns and Jayhawks guitarist Gary Louris, here she is bitching about that. Life is sweet. Why couldn’t she see it?

10. “Absolutely Barking Stars” (from Life Is Sweet, 1996)

You Gotta Sin… left McKee well-positioned to shine in that moment’s burgeoning alt.country scene, so of course she shifted directions yet again. Life Is Sweet finds McKee playing with more self-consciously poetic songwriting, as well as with noisier guitar sounds and unconventional melodies. “Absolutely Barking Stars” starts quietly, just McKee’s electric guitar and her hushed lead, but her volume grows with each line, the arrangement becomes more crowded, and she’s shouting about some doppelganger poking darkly in her head, about everything she hates about herself, everything she wants to cage and deny: “I try to trap her in my head but she knows where the light comes in.” Her blistered guitar lines borrow from Mick Ronson when they’re not leaning grunge. “She plays Pandora with my soul,” McKee gulps as the bad thoughts rise. It’s crazy and scary but beautiful, too, irresistible. “We know what we are.”

11 and 12. “Life Is Sweet” / “Afterlife” (from Life Is Sweet, 1996)

A musical arm-around-the-shoulder, “Life Is Sweet” finds McKee comforting a girl who’s unlucky in love and encouraging another, a budding artist, who’s teacher calls her crazy: “Paint a picture, write a song, tell your story, bang a gong.” She hugs a boy whose father neglected him and maybe worse: “I wish I could build you a little house… to hide in.” And in the final verse, her voice a whisper so tender you can almost feel her lips against your ear, she shares a secret of life with another broken-hearted young man: “Eat your breakfast, read a book, open up your window, be alone.” “Life Is Sweet,” she reminds each of these children, each of us. “Bittersweet.” Most of the song is just her and her electric guitar. But then, in “Afterlife,” McKee’s and Bruce Brody’s arrangement explodes via guitar, orchestra and drums into beautiful, heart-swelling noise. Technically, “Afterlife” is numbered as a separate track, so this goes down as two songs for accounting purposes. But it’s one creation, and the tender “Life Is Sweet” demands its roiling “Afterlife” climax/coda the way “Love Lies Bleeding” relies upon its “Funeral for a Friend” prologue. (McKee reprised “Life Is Sweet” / “Afterlife” on her next album, High Dive, in a more fleshed out, full-band version. It’s nice. But this is the one you need.)

13. “High Dive” (from High Dive, 2003)

After more than twenty years with Geffen Records, McKee released her next album on indie Viewfinder. Sounding as if it were from some lost Bacharach and David musical, “High Dive” is a variety of an “I Am” song, I think, and it’s always hit me as being about her major label shot at stardom: “I could have mauled it straight to the top if I’d kept my fangs out!” A showy arrangement with plenty of horns and strings, bass and drums, but with previous efforts’ prominent guitars barely present and not missed. No longer fighting off commercial expectations, McKee recasts her failure as a beautiful piece of art that sounds like a hit.

14. “People in the Way” (from Peddlin’ Dreams, 2005)

A “beaten down and pimped around” McKee sings a weary, fragile little ditty that, like the chronic depression I’m saying it’s about, will get in your head on a loop you can’t shake. “I'm deafened by the dark /And the cryin' of my face / I'm looking for a day job / In a town that wished me fame.” A grim rebuttal to her great it-gets-better ballad “Life Is Sweet,” she’s advising moms to teach their children well the song’s title. No sweet life here, just bitterness. She sings the verses with uncharacteristic flatness but that doesn’t mean she’s not persuasive.

15. “Late December” (from Late December, 2007)

Sung huskily at the bottom of McKee’s range, with spoken lines dropped in like beat poetry, backed by finger snaps, piano and a street-corner choir, “Late December” has become one of my favorite Christmas songs—albeit one as eager to get the season and this hard world over with as it is brimming with a sense of wintry, urban wonder. “When can we start over?”

16. “Effigy of Salt” (from La Vita Nuova, 2020)

As has been par for her course this century, McKee’s next album, La Vita Nuova, should’ve received more attention than it did. You can download or stream it in all the usual places but I’m unclear if it was even officially released in the U.S.   (Reading recommendations: Stephen Deusner wrote an admiring review at Pitchfork; Holly Gleason spoke with McKee, and wrote smartly and sympathetically about the new album, for American Songwriter.) A song cycle that McKee says burst forth after her coming out, the album’s about accepting a new life and mourning the life she now must let go. The title is on loan from Dante, and you can hear that and later romantics in her lyrics throughout. But the first line of album opener “Effigy of Salt,” the music of it, put me in mind of Sondheim. McKee straining at the top of her adult range, or seeming to, from note one; discovering a new voice for herself, wild yet tightly controlled; melodic lines clipped except when they stretch impossibly out and up and down: “What a way / What a way to go / What a fine and inexplicable way of going, this.” The music’s new too—baroque, orchestral, choral, densely layered... “Effigy of Salt,” which I only chose because it’s track one and I hope you’ll pull up the album and then just let it keep playing, is like nothing McKee’s done before, honestly like nothing I’ve ever heard, and I can’t stop listening. The world no longer fit, so Maria McKee created a new one.

[Want more 16-Song Love Letters? This was David’s first, but Charles has written musical mash notes to Ronnie Lane, Swamp Dogg, The Roots, and Nanci Grifith.]

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