Songs in the McKee of life

The key moment in Maria McKee’s new album Peddlin’ Dreams occurs during a song called ‘Everyone’s Got A Story’, a deceptively strident country rocker in which the singer describes going to see some friends play a gig in LA, finds a table in a public place and promptly descends into a psychic slump, feeling like a has-been in the place that was once her playground. “I never felt so lonely/I never felt so doomed,” she sings, an uncomfortable dose of reality in a business and a city that usually confuses dreams with delusion.
But McKee’s no Bette Davis. Breezing into Whelan’s in a black China girl tunic, long hair dyed dark, she’s easygoing and chatty. By her own admission she’s capable of extreme mood swings and diva-strops, but nobody who’s heard a note of her music – particularly the Blanche DuBois blues of ‘This Property Is Condemned’, right up to High Dive or the excellent Peddlin’ Dreams, would consider this any great revelation.
It’s been a long haul with little in the way of fiscal compensation, but McKee is now making the best music of her career. Fatalism doesn’t figure. My best guess is she’ll come to the attention of some enterprising filmmaker and end up clutching an Academy Award, if not a Grammy.
Mind you, she’s not hanging around waiting for it to happen. She’s already written a play roughly based on the relationship between her and her half brother Bryan MacLean (the co-founder of legendary LA band Love, who died of a heart attack in 1998), using The Glass Menagerie as her template, the monologues studded with High Dive tunes. (“Tennessee Williams is a big hero,” she admits, “I remember being 15 and walking round the house reciting him like my mantra.”)
The product of a volatile genetic history that includes Sicilian immigrants, cowboy film extras, vaudeville queens, half-breeds and loose canons, her background reads like Carnivale by way of Wonderland Avenue rewritten by Robert Towne. McKee was sneaking into Doors/Love double-headers in the Whiskey when still a kid. Currently an LA resident (she maintains the weather keeps her stable), she remains a regular Irish visitor, and in conversation displays a gob-dropping familiarity with this writer’s South Eastern turf, nursing a Gothic-Romantic infatuation with Loftus Hall on the Hook peninsula (Co. Wexford).
In 2003, after a seven-year hiatus, she released the astonishing High Dive, a musical bio-pic, work of mythological self-portraiture, west coast pop opera and bona fide masterpiece of sunshine noir, its dark centre masked by ornate arrangements and somersaulting melodies.
Now comes Peddlin’ Dreams, a relatively more rough-hewn but rewarding record that, if it were the work of a debutante, would be getting three-page spreads in Mojo or Rolling Stone. McKee has continued making ever more audacious records in the face of adversity.
“Audacious,” she laughs. “That’s what I get in trouble for. But somebody has to be audacious. It’s tough times. People, especially in America, they want only one kind of music, and if I deviate from that there’s hell to pay.
"Then I go to somewhere like Stockholm or London and there’s four or five hundred people who are just rapt, to the point where it’s almost too intimate."
Ask when McKee first realised the potential of her own extraordinarily versatile voice (from Patsy Cline to Patti Smith to Ronnie Spector in the space of a verse) and she says, “It wasn’t so much the voice as the passion to perform. I was just one of those kids who was always ‘on’. Bryan drew a picture of me when I was eight years old, and it was a huge mouth with little ringlets coming out the top and the epiglottis vibrating. I remember being at Sunday school, I was probably seven at the time, and for some reason the music teacher brought me up to the piano and made me sing over and over and he was just staring at me. And then another time I was in the car with my father and I started harmonising to the radio in perfect thirds and he practically crashed the car. I wanted to go to Julliard and study theatre but I don’t know if I would’ve been able to interpret a song in the same way if I hadn’t discovered punk rock.”
All of which is more than evident a few hours later in a packed Whelan’s. On a night when most of the city’s pop cognoscenti have gathered in Vicar St. to watch a shocked-looking Brian Wilson marshal his band through perfect recreations of summer-love confections, McKee and her band are telling the same story only in real-time, without the nostalgia, delivering searing versions of ‘People In The Way’, ‘The Worrybirds’ and ‘Life Is Sweet’ – bruised, beautiful and unbowed. Everyone’s got a story – McKee’s will pay off in the second act.