Though she has a devoted audience, and at least early on received a lot of music-press attention, Maria McKee has 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 trooper and a seeker all at once. For most of her subsequent career, she’s been not so much underrated as ignored, 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 under-appreciated 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 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 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. From: https://nofencesreview.substack.com/p/maria-mckee-a-love-letter-in-16-songs
