Maria McKee Biography
17 August 1964, Los Angeles, California, USA. Before her solo career McKee was the singer with Lone Justice, a band formed by her half-brother, Bryan MacLean, the former Love guitarist and vocalist. Both Lone Justice albums, 1985's Lone Justice and 1987's Shelter, were critically acclaimed. After the break-up of the band McKee took time to compose herself, and her debut solo album for Geffen Records provided a good platform for her impressive songwriting. Her powerful voice and distinctive register (similar to a more cultured Janis Joplin) were allied to more pop-orientated hooks by producer Mitchell Froom. Predominantly concerned with romance and heartbreak, it was boosted commercially by 1990's unrepresentative UK number 1 single, "Show Me Heaven", taken from the soundtrack to the Tom Cruise movie, Days Of Thunder.
Touring extensively in support of the album, McKee eventually decided to move to Ireland. This period also saw the singer collaborate with a variety of Irish musicians, including Gavin Friday, at a series of gigs for the Dublin AIDS Alliance. She also recorded the UK club hit "Sweetest Child", with the help of noted producer Youth. She eventually returned to Los Angeles in 1992 to begin work on a follow-up set. This time she recruited producer George Drakoulias, veteran of successful albums by Black Crowes and the Jayhawks. You Gotta Sin To Get Saved, released in 1993, reunited three-quarters of the original line-up of Lone Justice: Marvin Etzioni (bass), Don Heffington (drums) and Bruce Brody (keyboards), alongside Gary Louris and Mark Olson (guitar/vocals) both of the Jayhawks. Bob Fisher provided guitar on live dates, with McKee seemingly much more comfortable with the return to rootsy material. Three years later McKee released the hardest rocking album of her career, but the commercial failure of the excellent Life Is Sweet precipitated a protracted hiatus from the recording scene. The singer returned in 2003 with a new album, High Dive, released on her own Viewfinder label. McKee's refusal to stick with one genre surfaced again on this beautiful, neo-psychedelic pop collection, which included a dramatic re-reading of the title track of her previous album. The 2005 follow-up, Peddlin' Dreams, dipped back into roots rock and provided further shining examples of McKee's increasingly impressive songwriting. The album was bookended by two live sets; the first a full band show recorded in Hamburg in May 2003, and the second an acoustic performance recorded in America and featuring a cover version of her late brother's Love classic, "Orange Skies". The 2007 studio recording "Late December" was a bold, ambitious pop album, and was notable for featuring McKee's version of "A Good Heart", a song she had written over 20 years earlier for Feargal Sharkey.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin. Licensed from Muze.
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