Maria McKee's Personal Best
Lone Justice photographed by Dennis Keeley
With a new collection of unearthed and polished up Lone Justice recordings out today, Maria McKee looks back with Alan Pedder on a career full of poetic twists and intentional turns.
When Maria McKee looks back at photographs of herself from her time in Lone Justice, the roots-rock quartet she fronted from 1982 to 1987, it’s not necessarily a country singer that she sees but an actress playing a role.
Growing up in Los Angeles as a member of “a very baroque household,” McKee originally planned to work in theatre but, through the encouragement of her older brother Bryan MacLean (already world famous as one-fifth of psychedelic rock band Love), it was music that turned out to be her calling. Starting out playing shows with her brother and other musicians in and around LA, her path eventually crossed that of guitarist Ryan Hedgecock, at a drive-in jam spot over in Orange County. Sensing some potential in uniting their efforts, Lone Justice was born, expanding by the end of 1983 into the classic line-up of Hedgecock, McKee, by bassist Marvin Etzioni and drummer Don Heffington.
With this new rhythm section in place, the Lone Justice sound began to shift away from its more simplistic rockabilly and country origins, swirling the band’s diverse influences into an arresting roots-rock tempest that blazed a trail and breathed new life into what we now recognise as the fully revitalised umbrella scene of Americana. The early buzz around the band was enough for Tom Petty and Bob Dylan to gift them songs, and McKee’s uncanny ability to sell herself as some kind of cowpunk avatar won her the admiration of major-league artists like Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton, Annie Lennox (an uncredited backing vocalist on their debut album) and U2, who took Lone Justice out on the road as openers on their Unforgettable Fire and Joshua Tree tours.
“I was this theatre kid from Beverly Hills High who thought I was going to go to Juilliard,” McKee says, laughing at the improbability of it all. “Some of those songs are pure hillbilly gospel, and that was not my background at all.” It's not that she didn’t have a deep abiding love for the music. Her passion for it was real. But McKee’s artistic vision, rich with cinematic and literary references, extended far beyond the box she found herself confined to. When the self-titled Lone Justice debut failed to make the commercial impact expected of it and the rhythm section quit, the band survived just one more album (1986’s Shelter) before McKee embarked on a solo career.
A critical reappraisal of the band’s work didn’t really come until almost 30 years later, when LA-based Omnivore Records issued a collection of demos that reminded people what all the fuss was about in the first place. Still, there was no question in anyone’s mind of reforming or putting out anything new. It wasn’t until Heffington’s death from leukaemia in 2021 that McKee and Etzioni began to seriously consider adding to their legacy.
“Marvin and I were hanging out quite a bit, to try and process everything, and he happened to have these tapes lying around of songs that we’d recorded at his home in the ‘90s with Tammy Rodgers on fiddle,” she explains. “We were just horsing around, recording things just for fun, and I never expected to release them. That was Marvin’s idea, and at first he suggested that I put them out under my own name, but I had the idea of bringing in Ryan to overdub some guitars and vocals that we could then release as Lone Justice, so that’s what we did. We added some stuff into the mix that Ryan and I had made together about a decade ago, and I think we pulled together what is really a nice little album.”
It’s not strictly a new Lone Justice album, then, nor is it strictly a collection of outtakes, but somewhere in between and fruitful all the same. Adorned by a Dennis Keeley photograph of the band in their youth, with McKee’s right arm draped over Heffington’s shoulder, Viva Lone Justice pays tribute to their punk roots with covers of The Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks” and MC5’s “Sister Anne”, captures the charged energy of their early live shows with a stomping take on country classic “Nothing Can Stop My Loving You”, and imaginatively rearranges a clutch of traditional folk and gospel songs like “Jenny Jenkins”, “Rattlesnake Mama” and “Wade in the Water”.
Perhaps the most ambitious of the songs, though, is a cover of Dolly Parton’s iconic “I Will Always Love You”, which McKee says she has no memory of recording. “Marvin played me the record when it was done and I almost fell off my chair,” she says, laughing. “Imagine having the audacity to do that? I can’t believe that we’re actually going to release it. It seems very bratty but, ultimately, the only opinion I care about is hers, and I know she’ll love it.”
Out today, Viva Lone Justice is issued via Afar, an imprint of Fire Records, who have been instrumental in bringing much of McKee’s solo catalogue out of semi-obscurity since releasing her seventh album and chamber-pop masterpiece La Vita Nuova in 2020 – just ten days before the UK locked down for the first time during the pandemic. McKee was living in London at the time, having come out as queer and wholeheartedly embracing the city's LGBTQ+ community. Her friendship with trans artist and “spiritual daughter” Lauren Auder is particularly touching, and the two recently spent her 60th birthday together in LA. “It has been wonderful to experience a sort of mothering role in her life,” McKee says warmly. “She’s so wise beyond her years, so there’s a lot of mothering on her end as well. I’m like a big kid in a lot of ways, so we both are very maternal at times. I’m just very, very grateful to have her in my life.”
If you’ve heard only one Maria McKee solo song, it's most likely to be the power ballad “Show Me Heaven”. Recorded for the soundtrack of the Tom Cruise movie Days of Thunder, it achieved the possibly unique feat of somehow being both an NME Single of the Week in September 1990 and a staple of mass-marketed Mother’s Day compilations for decades to come. Spending six weeks as the UK’s biggest-selling single, the blockbuster is another great example of McKee acting out a role that, by all accounts, was never a comfortable fit. Her best work has been done largely out of the spotlight, starting with 1996’s Life is Sweet, an album so monumentally un-Americana that it blew up her label deal and set the tone for what was to come.
McKee, naturally, has no – or few – regrets. “I figured out what I wanted at a young age and I stuck with it,” she says. “There was a lot of luck involved, but a lot of it was hard work and I’m proud of myself for that. It was a hard time to be in the music business as a young woman who wasn’t always taken seriously because I was conventionally pretty. But ultimately I’m glad that I came up in a time when, however complicated things were, we at least had people at the big corporate labels who were willing to put the time in and invest in the work. I think it’s a lot harder for young people now in the music business to have any sort of longevity. They’re not fostered well by labels, who just want a quick turnover. The work is not valued. Creativity is not valued. The only thing that’s valued is how many follows you have, and I think that’s really sad.”
“Absolutely Barking Stars” (1996)
MARIA McKEE: This is one of my favourite songs off of one of my favourite albums, Life Is Sweet. That record was an interesting turning point for me. I had been touring behind my second album You Gotta Sin to Get Saved and doing a lot of those songs and a lot of Lone Justice songs each night, and I started to feel a little bit frustrated. I started to feel like the only songs that I could put any sort of real emotion into were some of the more esoteric songs from my first solo album, like “Breathe” and “Has He Got a Friend for Me”. When I was playing songs that were sort of Americana, it felt like I was just going through the motions a little bit. I felt like I wasn’t being challenged, particularly, as an artist at that point.
At the same time, on that tour I was working with a guitar player, Ben, who became a very close friend, and who later died of a brain tumour when he was only 35. He was such an interesting guy and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, in particular glam rock, and he was also a music writer. He idolised Mick Ronson, so we spent a lot of time on that tour staying up late at night and listening to Mick Ronson records and the Bowie demos and outtakes. Then Mick died while we were on that tour, and when we got back Ben ended up writing a cover story for Mojo about him, and I just continued to really immerse myself in that kind of music. I mean, I had been a Bowie fan since I was in my teens, but I was going back and revisiting all of his records. Especially Hunky Dory, which was my favourite of his. I was obsessed with that album when I was around 18.
Then, in 1994, Kurt Cobain passed away and that had a really tremendous impact on a lot of the people I knew. I just felt like I couldn’t make another Americana record. I was listening to a lot of the sort of glam-rock music coming out of the UK at the time, like Suede and The Auteurs – I was very influenced by that first Suede record – and that’s kind of how I started writing Life is Sweet. I picked up the guitar and started to play leads, and that was really because of Mick Ronson, and I think the song that struck me as being the closest homage to him was “Absolutely Barking Stars”, because it has a sort of Ronson riff.
I have varying mental health challenges, some of which is inherited and some of it is PTSD from a really complex, intense childhood. I was a highly sensitive child and was exposed to a lot of dramatic incidents, which was very confusing and complicated, and at the time I was not being treated with any sort of psychiatric medication. Also, I was drinking and having mood swings, and I think “Absolutely Barking Stars” was just me trying to make sense of all that. It’s like I was having a conversation with a part of my brain that I didn’t fully understand. It felt like that part almost had a mind of its own and it was set on getting away from me. The song is really about trying to understand my mental health complexities, before I started being treated for them and became sober, eventually.
BEST FIT: I noticed that you use some of the lyrics from the chorus in your Instagram bio, so there’s clearly a strong attachment still.
Yeah, there is. And it's interesting, because there are a lot of fans of Life is Sweet. It's an important record for a lot of my fanbase, I think. Some of them are confused by it, but the ones who got it really got it hard, and it's kind of a big one for them.
Maybe it’s a bit like The Dreaming. It’s the people who love The Dreaming who really love Kate Bush.
Yeah, exactly [laughs].
What do you remember of the writing and recording process?
It was about a year after the Viper Room had opened in West Hollywood and there was a lot of just hanging out going on. I was a member of Johnny Depp’s entourage at the time. One day we were hanging around at one of the hotels near the Viper Room and there was a guitar there, and I remember telling one of his friends that there was a song that I was working on and played it for him. I already had the phrase “absolutely barking stars,” and I was kind of toying around with it. I played it for him and I remember him going, “Wow, that’s really good. That’s gonna be a good one,” but I actually don’t remember much else about writing it.
We recorded the Life is Sweet album at Jackson Browne’s Groove Masters studio here in Santa Monica, and I remember that it took me a minute to get the very specific guitar sound that I was going for. I needed to find the right Les Paul, which was the TV Special for me, and we had a Groove Tubes amp and some kind of pedal that I don’t remember. But I do remember my friend, who was a guitar player, saying “You know, you’ve got really good bone tone,” which I thought was really so interesting. I also remember that when touring that album I was working so incredibly hard to sing and play lead guitar at the same time. It was one of the most challenging periods of my life, and maybe the hardest I’ve ever worked. Funnily enough, I don’t play guitar anymore. I rarely pick up an instrument these days. But back then I set a challenge for myself and I did it, and I’m proud of that.
You also challenged a lot of other people in the process, including your record label Geffen, who didn’t really know what to do with it, or so I read.
Yeah, they basically put it out long enough for it to get reviews and stuff and then they just put it away and sat on it for a long time. It’s only recently come onto streaming platforms, in the past couple of years. But the album did get some good reviews. It was Mojo’s number two album of the year, or something, and it made some other lists like that all over Europe. But the whole thing was just demoralising and I left the label soon after.
That was hard, because I’d been with them for 15 years, but I came to realise that they weren’t going to support anything that I was choosing to do because it was not what they expected of me. They wanted me to be the next Bonnie Raitt, you know? But I didn’t want that. I tried to get them to release Life is Sweet on [Geffen subsidiary label] DGC Records. I thought it would be a good rebrand, because all the indie bands were on DGC, but they wouldn’t do it. They just couldn’t see me as an alternative entity. They only saw me as an Americana artist and that was it, so we parted ways.
“Life is Sweet” (1996)
BEST FIT: Your next pick is the title track from that album, but there are two other versions of the song that sort of had lives of their own. There’s an alternative version that you released as a single, and then there’s the version from your 2003 album High Dive, which you completely re-recorded. Which one are we focusing on here?
MARIA McKEE: I think the first album version. Maybe it was an odd choice to put out that alternative version as a single, and I’m actually not quite sure why we did that. I think we wanted to give the song another chance because the album was nowhere to be found. We just thought that this was such a great song and that people should hear it, you know?
Absolutely, and honestly it’s just great to have all three. So, let’s talk about why you’ve chosen this song as one of your Personal Best, and what it means to you now, nearly 30 years later.
Well, I still think it’s one of the best songs I’ve ever written. What’s interesting to me about this song it that it really wrote itself, which was quite unusual. I’ve said this before, but honestly, the time it took me to play the song for the first time was as long as it too me to write it. It just came out of nowhere and was done the same day. It was quite incredible.
Yeah, you’ve said before that a lot of the songs for Life is Sweet kind of exploded out of you. Where do you think the origins of the song lie?
I don’t know, really. It’s sort of talking about a way that a broken person can self-heal and about having a deep empathy for somebody like me who has had some brokenness in their lives. I think the song wanted to express the sentiment to people that they are not alone, and that they can still find beauty and joy despite all the pain and fear and loneliness of living.
It was really fun to record and co-produce together with Mark Freegard and Bruce Brody, and I think it’s a song that the fans have taken to heart. I think people also enjoyed the version from High Dive, which has a more accessible sound, I think, which is kind of comprehensive with the rest of that album.
“In Your Constellation” (2003)
BEST FIT: Speaking of High Dive, you’ve chosen “In Your Constellation” from that album as your next pick. What’s your reason for including this one?
MARIA McKEE: This is the only song I chose that’s kind of an Americana song, but I really do love it. It’s one of my favourites. I just love the recording of it. I think it’s really powerful. I love the backing vocals and the horns. I like my guitar work on it, too, and I think the song just has this really great hook. I was very influenced by Neil Young on this song, and I think the lyrics are about my husband. I feel like it’s one of my best songs, and it’s one of the ones I like to listen to.
You only think it’s about your husband? Was that a feeling you had from the beginning or something that you only came to realise later?
Well, I feel like I never know with lyrics. They just come, and sometimes they’re about something and sometimes they’re not. A lot of the lyrics on my last record, La Vita Nuova, were written in a very determined style and using a very specific structure. It was like an artistic study, almost like painting a portrait of someone, whereas some of my other songs are sort of cobbled together from words that just came to me. High Dive is that way, in that the songs are not specifically designed. They started more from a stream of consciousness kind of place.
High Dive is the first album that you co-produced with your husband, Jim Akin, and you were so hands-on with everything, from the paintings and collages in the booklet to writing the horn and string arrangements. Did it feel good to be coming back from what was quite a long hiatus?
What was it, like 6 or 7 years? Yeah, it was a long time, but I think it was time well spent: leaving Geffen, getting sober and meeting Jim. He and I travelled a lot together and took some time just to live. We even moved to Ireland for a little while. There was a lot of change going on behind the scenes.
“I Should Have Looked Away” (2020)
BEST FIT: This is one of two tracks that you’ve chosen from La Vita Nuova. It’s funny, because you write in the liner notes that this album could not have been made without London, where it was recorded, but this song in particular has such a strong sense of the golden era of Laurel Canyon to it. It could almost be a Joni Mitchell song, in a way.
MARIA McKEE: Oh, that's nice to hear! This song sort of surprised me when I wrote it, and that's why I had to include it. I was like, ‘Whoa, what just happened?’ – it was a little bit of a jolt for me. I’m not even sure how songs like this happen sometimes. It’s similar to “Life is Sweet” in that it just came out, and I think there was something sort of magical about this one. Like there was a kind of conjuring that brought it.
You’ve mentioned before that Life is Sweet and La Vita Nuova are kind of sisterly records, partly because they are more conceptual than your other works. How does “I Should Have Looked Away” fit into the overarching concept of La Vita Nuova?
Well, you know, La Vita Nuova is sort of my Death in Venice, in a way. It’s really about seeing a vision of youth and it killing you. It was extraordinarily painful to write. This is very frank, but it came about when I reached the point in my life where I no longer had any fertility at all, and also had this realisation that I am extraordinarily motherly. I had not had a kid, and I knew that I’d never have a kid, and there was a lot of looking back on my life and on things I’d experienced. There were a lot of different and sort of painful visions of youth and missed spiritual opportunities.
Coming to terms with never having had a child was very, very painful. It almost got me, and that’s really why I started writing. As difficult as it was to face up to all that pain and longing, writing songs is the only thing that could have helped me through it. So, yeah, there’s some mixed feelings going on in this song, where I’m really facing that longing and writing about it. And, you know, wishing I’d never looked back.
It comes across very powerfully in the song. I read in an interview that there was a very specific moment in your life when you felt your perspective shift, and you happened to be on a flight at the time, which, for me at least, is often something that provokes a different outlook.
It’s funny. I don’t really like to talk about this sort of stuff because people tend to think you’re insane if you do, but there were all these eclipses occurring in a lot of my houses and that moment when the plane landed was really just the first of many psychic awakenings that happened over the next couple of years. As a result, I dove back deeply into spiritual practices. I reorganised my marriage, came out as queer, spent time in London and fell in love a couple of times. And then the pandemic hit, the album came out and I moved back here, and now it feels almost like it never happened. It feels like another lifetime.
You started writing La Vita Nuova in early 2017, and I understand that you were sort of reacquainting yourself with the classics at the time. What would you say were some of your main influences for these two songs that you’ve chosen?
Stephen Sondheim has always been a big influence. He’s one of my favourite songwriters, so there’s always some Sondheim in there. I was also listening to quite of bit of Scott Walker, who I’ve always loved. Kate [Bush], too, obviously. I was listening to Sandy Denny and to a lot of other English stuff that I don’t remember now. One thing that I was listening to a lot during that period was an album by Billy Mackenzie [of The Associates], called Transmission Impossible, which was sort of acoustic versions of some of his songs. That album was really important to me.
I was also reading a lot of high romantic poetry when I was writing. I always have, but I really got back into it. I was reading Dante, obviously, but there was also Swinburne and Keats and Tennyson. I kind of set myself a task with this album – and I think that’s really how we go into the next song in this list – and it was really a kind of academic task, to write rhyme poetry about the muse.
“I Never Asked” (2020)
MARIA McKEE: I think this song is quite lovely. I like the string arrangement, the melodies. I love the complexity of the high arcing poetry and lyrics. It’s ambitious, and I enjoy things that are ambitious.
I remember being in Ireland when I wrote this song, staying with friends who had a piano so I spent a lot of time playing that. I started writing “Right Down to the Heart of London” there, and then this one was written. “I Never Asked” is another one of those songs that just flowed out of me, and it took just a couple of days to write. It’s always a surprise to me when a rash of lyrics comes to me like that, lyrics that are really quite rhythmic and rhyming. It always surprises me a little bit that it can happen so fast sometimes.
This song is all about poetry and the muse, inspired by Dante’s concept that you could achieve high levels of gnosis and spiritual transformation by extolling the virtues of the beloved. That was his religion, really, and it’s the religion of a lot of poets. It’s so dramatic and interesting to me, and immersing myself into that was sort of like going to church.
BEST FIT: It's a fascinating song, and that first line – “It has occurred to me, my love, I never asked if you would sit for me” – is so attention grabbing.
Yeah, I love it. It’s a recognition of the muse not really having, you know, agency. It’s almost like asking for consent, as a writer, to extol someone’s beauty after the fact. Like, I’ve been writing lines about you. You’ve inspired me to create. But I never told you, and I never asked if I could write about you.
Have you ever been someone's muse or had a muse yourself?
Oh, yeahhhh. Of course. All poets have them!
Maybe one of them was your lovely greyhound.
Yeah, that’s interesting, because when I lost her in April of last year, I really did feel like I had lost the love of my life. She lived in London with me, she travelled to Ireland. She was with me when I was recording and she was there when I performed. She was on stage with me with I played a couple of gigs in London, including the album release show. She was my guardian angel and I thought that when she died that event would break my non-writing streak. I thought I would write about her and dedicate an entire album to her. But then a month later I had another dog, a new girl, and I was healing from the loss in a different way.
I’ve never seen a dog onstage during a show, but I fully support that. Last question then, because I want to know how it felt to get such a great response to La Vita Nuova after having put so many years of work into it. What are your feelings on that time now?
To be honest with you, I put so much of myself into that album that I kind of felt that if people didn’t appreciate the album then that was gonna be it for me. Like, I was not gonna be coming back from that. So really there was a big sense of relief that people appreciated it as much as they did. It was like, ‘Okay, I’m not crazy. This is peak work.’
I mean, the work was really so intense. I’d lock myself in a room, just writing and rewriting. Also, writing the string and horn parts alone was such a tremendous challenge, because I don’t read music. I had to write it all on the keyboard before bringing it to my string arranger, who then put it all into charts. And then Jim was there, challenging me to play guitar in ways that I never knew were possible. He’d be like, ‘Think of Jimmy Page on this one, think of Richard Thompson on that one,’ and I’d never really played like that before. I was using a lot of different tunings, so the work, for me, was mind-blowing in many ways.
The album did well in Europe but it got very little attention over here in the States, and that’s really been the story arc of my whole career. I mean, I had a nice review from Pitchfork, but not much else. The same thing has happened every time, since my first solo album, so it was kind of par for the course for me. I’m just relieved and grateful that it got such a nice response in the UK, in France, in Scandinavia and all those places.
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