UNDERRATED ALBUM # 10

‘It is a Rock record, but a very melodic one, given that it is dominated by a scorchingly intense guitar sound.’     

Life Is Sweet (1996)
by Maria McKee

Maria McKee will probably end up being best known for the song, ‘Show Me Heaven’ which featured in the film Days Of Thunder (1990)*1. The single, which only scraped into the US Top 30, topped the charts in several other countries including the UK (as had her earlier song, ‘A Good Heart’, covered by ex-Undertone, Feargal Sharkey in 1985).

A passable power ballad written by Eric Rackin and Jay Rifkin (McKee only agreed to sing ‘Show Me Heaven’ on the proviso that she rewrite the lyric), the song may, indeed, live longer in the memory than the film, which was a feeble star-vehicle for Tom Cruise and a box-office clunker. The vehicle in question was a stock car, raced by Cruise ‘around in circles getting nowhere’, according to Halliwell’s Film Guide; or as the Time Out Guide dismissed it, ‘stock cars and stock situations’. The single though, was bought by Cruise’s teenage admirers and subsequently became a stock song played at marriage ceremonies of that generation.

 Life Is Sweet is the third of only five studio sets released by McKee between 1989-2005 (as lead singer with US ‘Cowpunk’ outfit, Lone Justice, there had been two previous albums during 1985-6). Despite the odd performance on songs of Christian praise, she never seemed to much like ‘Show Me Heaven’, declining to sing it live for years. Life is Sweet, though, she declared to be her favourite piece of work.

That is interesting because Life Is Sweet is a very different proposition to most of her   catalogue which has a Country emphasis, as well as excursions into Folk, Gospel and Soul territory. It is a Rock record, but a very melodic one, given that it is dominated by a scorchingly intense guitar sound.

And the lead guitarist is McKee herself.

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Life Is Sweet, then is a Guitar Record. You won’t find many of those in this era, which feature a woman heading up a rock band - not only writing and singing the songs, but playing lead guitar too*2.

The album has been said to have been influenced by Prog Rock and Grunge, and more particularly, by a record released a year earlier, Jagged Little Pill (1995) by Alanis Morisette. These elements are evident in Life Is Sweet, as well as that part of David Bowie’s career that might be termed ‘the Mick Ronson years’ (1970-73), during which the Ziggy Stardust persona first propelled its maker to enduring stardom.

McKee was apparently interested in Nirvana*3 and it’s possible to hear some of the then recently deceased Kurt Cobain’s self-loathing on the album along with traces of the barely contained chaos of his band’s recordings. McKee may also have been inspired by the caterwauling confessional style of Jagged Little Pill’s songs, but is far too good a singer and musician herself to have been much influenced by the rather repetitive grunge-pop of Morissette. In any case, McKee, around thirty-two at the time, seemed to be wrestling with problems rather more complex than the romantic tribulations of the twenty-one years old Morisette. Not that I mean to trivialise Jagged Little Pill*4 – Morissette was perfectly entitled to dramatise her angst and a powerful job she makes of it too, as testified by the well over thirty million sales of her album; but Life Is Sweet comes from a more mature and interesting place. That said, it almost torpedoed McKee’s career and is an experiment she has never repeated.    

As for Prog Rock, well, there are some unusual song-structures and strings involved, but I’m more inclined to think that McKee had become fascinated by the overall sound of early 1970s Glam Rock by the likes of Alice Cooper, Bowie, Mott The Hoople and T. Rex (whose ‘bang a gong’ from ‘Get It On’*5 she quotes in the title-track).  On Life Is Sweet, her guitar-playing, though less virtuosic and more distorted, certainly brings to mind the heroic style of Cooper’s Glen Buxton, Mott’s Mick Ralphs and Ariel Bender and, most of all Bowie’s Mick Ronson. Marc Bolan, an underrated guitarist in my estimation, though less accomplished than those above, is also stirred into the McKee mix.

The record starts uncompromisingly with ‘Scarlover’, her guitar slashing and clanging around a wordy lyric about a ‘painful, truthful boy’ who ‘fell across my body like a shroud…ugly inside me taught me of beauty’. Her voice, plaintive on the choruses, becomes more and more distraught and the sado-masochistic imagery and barrelling four-piece band would immediately have convinced McKee’s fan-base that they were a long way from home. ‘Show Me Heaven’ this ain’t.

‘This Perfect Dress’*6 which follows, is another intensely physical song swept along by billowing strings and an enormous guitar sound drenched in tremolo and echo. The sexual union she describes is so close that she appears to be wearing her lover in a punning, paradoxical scenario: ‘this perfect room, this little death, birth without womb’. 

‘Absolutely Barking Stars’, the only track to have its lyric printed on the sleeve*7, introduces the theme of the narrator’s identity-crisis with an altar-ego ‘twin’ who ‘plays Pandora’ with her soul. This theme dominates the rest of the album and you may, dear reader, at this point feel yourself backing away a little – but please do hang in there because Life Is Sweet is a record which can easily be listened to as sound and vocals without too much attention on the words. Having said that, I do believe McKee’s rather messy poetics do actually enhance the overall proceedings: listen to how (at 0.52) she sings ‘I’ve tried to trap her in my head but she knows where the light comes in’ and how she blasts out the mighty riff which follows, not to mention the other great riff in a higher key (at 3.20) which leads the song out…

…but only so far as ‘I’m Not Listening’, in which the love-hate combat with her bullying ‘twin’ continues apace, the narrator fighting, it seems, for her sanity, if not her very life. Beginning with solo piano, the strings crash in on the chorus and never let up. When McKee cries out: ‘You’ve nearly killed me once!’ you begin to think that maybe she needs an exorcist rather than a psychoanalyst. Grimly inexorable cellos and viola advance in a coda that might be out of a Michael Nyman score for a Horror film. Fading over this, double-tracked and still locked in battle, two voices (both McKee’s) scream at each other in the distance.    

You might be in need of a breather after all this – if so, fear not, for there is an intermission of sorts in the shape of ‘Everybody’, a slight little pop song which, despite some spirited singing, could be about well, almost anybody, as opposed to the demonically possessed twins with whom we’ve so far been acquainted. The next track, ‘Smarter’ also feels like filler in the overall context despite its Nirvana-like noise-rock and lyrical encounters with a father-figure, a brother and Jesus. The pretty ‘What Else You Wanna Know?’ with its key declaration, ‘I love what we are, but I hate what I am’ is better, but still sounds a little too much like the sort of thing that Morissette or Sheryl Crowe were doing at the time – until that is, McKee’s guitar really starts to kick in about half-way through, pulling the record out of its mid-album slump.

‘I’m Awake’, a song more about making love than having sex – although a not altogether untroubled take on the situation, begins gently, picking up soulful strings along the way until McKee, again using a dramatic paradox: ‘It slays me - I die to live again in your arms’. At which point and out of nowhere, another vast guitar solo turns the song – and the listener – upside-down, roiling around and wrenched from some deep emotional core. It’s one of the most affecting of the many highlights on this record.

As ‘I’m Awake’ drifts away with the strings, McKee repeats the title-phrase whilst playing a guitar-figure eerily reminiscent of ‘The Red Telephone’ by the legendary Love from their masterpiece Forever Changes (1967). I say ‘eerily’ because McKee’s older half-brother, Bryan Maclean was Arthur Lee’s flaxen-haired second-in-command, singer-songwriter in Love – and the next song on Life Is Sweet appears to be about him.

In ‘Human’, McKee refers to being ‘in awe’ of a ‘golden boy’ and struggling with the temptation to ‘mythologise this bond’ and make of him ‘a demigod’ who would ‘never die’. Not long after, MacLean died of a heart-attack, aged fifty-two on Christmas Day, 1998.

Notwithstanding the inherent curiosity of its subject matter, ‘Human’ is not the best song on the album, although it is, as usual, lifted by the guitar-playing – as is ‘Carried’ which features perhaps McKee’s most Ronsonesque riff. This time, the narrator is trying to find spiritual salvation: ‘Jesus, I know you’re out there, in here, out there, somewhere, in here, everywhere’*8 in order to rescue her from that ‘evil little twin’ who has been haunting her ‘since my mother carried me.’

Life Is Sweet borrows its title from a 1991 film by the innovative British director, Mike Leigh (whose name appears in the acknowledgements on the inner sleeve). It is amongst, other things, about the warring relationship between twin teenage girls, played by Claire Skinner and Jane Horrocks (aaha…) As with several of the songs, ‘Life Is Sweet / Afterlife’*9 begins with McKee singing unaccompanied over her strummed electric guitar. It’s a song of hope for outsider kids who feel neglected, bullied, unlucky or unloved (including a girl who hears ‘voices in her head’). ‘Life is sweet, bittersweet / And the days keep rollin’ along’ McKee sings until the simple tune is overtaken in the ‘Afterlife’ coda as the strings take off and a tambourine keeps time before a tumult of drums crash in and the album fades out like a glorious vapour trail in the sky.

A meticulously sequenced album with the songs all thematically linked, Life Is Sweet is an emotionally demanding, but rewarding experience. On ‘Human’, she may admit to being ‘desperate-drained from all those tantrums’ but, as with much great pop and rock music, the portrayal of psychosis and heartbreak can be an exciting and uplifting experience for the listener. That word ‘bittersweet’ is the keynote to this record and its connotations are conveyed with tremendous power by the band, with its leader’s singing and playing always to the fore. This album not only underlined her status as a fine singer, but took her out on an edge where she found greatness. Similarly, her playing, as ferocious and distorted as the material frequently demanded, transcended whatever technical limitations she may have had and marked her out as a guitarist of considerable distinction.

N. B.             

McKee wrote nine of the album’s twelve tracks, co-writing the other three as well as co-arranging and co-producing with keyboardist Bruce Brody (who, incidentally also produced ‘Show Me Heaven’, as well as working with Patti Smith and U2, and on films like Diner (1982) and Pulp Fiction (1994). He also wrote Sam Brown’s 1988 global smash hit single, ‘Stop’).

*1 – The Days Of Thunder OST also featured the dread Guns ‘N’ Roses demonstrating their appetite for destruction by murdering Bob Dylan’s ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’.

*2 - Answers on a postcard – although the back of a stamp would do - and no, the great Joni Mitchell won’t count because she’s predominantly an acoustic player with little interest in Rock music. I’ll wager you won’t get much further than  Bonnie Raitt and Joan Jett…

*3 – Nirvana are one of my musical blind spots. I can understand when critics mention them in the same breath as Black Sabbath (another blind spot…), but I’m mystified when they also compare them to The Beatles. I mean, I know there’s tunes in there, but apart from the odd track and the MTV Unplugged In New York (1994) album, I just hear them as a racket, I’m afraid – and, no, I’m not even moved by ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Give me the psychedelic mini-masterpiece, ‘Rainbow Chaser’ (1967) by the original English art-rock Nirvana anytime!   

*4 – I quite like Jagged Little Pill, especially the raging, hell hath no fury angst of ‘You Oughta Know’, but many (predominantly male) critics dismissed it as mere girly whining – which is a bit rich when you consider some of the casual blokeish sexism and downright misogyny hailed as classic rock down through the ages.

*5 – ‘Get It On’ by T. Rex was re-titled ‘Bang A Gong’ in the US to avoid confusion with another song by a band called Chase.

*6 – I can’t help but smile at the title ‘This Perfect Dress’ because whenever I’ve seen clips of McKee, she always seems to be wearing some godawful knee-length tent with heavy-looking boots… 

*7 – The album cover features an uncredited fold-out B/W shot of a circus troupe, probably from around the turn of the 20^th century – and for no particular reason that I can discern.

*8 – MacLean, who, in musical terms, seems to have been something of a chronic underachiever following the handful of his songs which appeared on the remarkable first three albums by Love, became a born-again Christian, for a while attending the same Vineyard church as Bob Dylan. As well as Bryan, both Maria and their mother, Elizabeth - originally a catholic family - all ‘found Jesus’. ‘Lizzie & Bryan’ appear in the album’s acknowledgements.

*9 – McKee revisited the song ‘Life Is Sweet / Afterlife’ on her next album, High Dive (2003), according it a more restrained, conventional treatment…

c. 2013 IGR