In the 13 years since her last album, major changes altered Maria McKee’s approach to making music, along with her sense of self. Biggest among them was coming out as queer. She has become an advocate for queer and trans rights, and she has had to reassess and redefine many relationships, in particular her marriage to filmmaker Jim Akin. There were smaller changes, too: She began splitting her time between Los Angeles and London. She renewed her obsession with the Romantic poets, especially Keats and Swinburne, whose work had inspired her as a teenager. She read a lot of Dante, studied the occult and Western esotericism, and listened to a lot of English folk music.
Taking its title from Dante’s 13th century meditation on unrequited love, La Vita Nuova depicts the profound upheaval as McKee embraces her new life and ponders what to do with the old one. Her past is the stuff of great rock memoirs. The daughter of California evangelists, she went to high school in Beverly Hills and mingled with future actors and rock stars. She started a band with her older brother Bryan MacLean, whose tenure with the ’60s band Love endeared his sister to aging hippies and record execs. In the mid ’80s, her band Lone Justice, labeled “cowpunk” at the time, scored a hit with “Ways to Be Wicked,” a song written by Tom Petty and Mike Campbell that cast her in an overly sexualized light. As a solo artist she notched a No. 1 hit in the UK with “Show Me Heaven” and stepped into a new role as an alt-country heroine in the early ’90s.
But she exploded that persona on 1996’s Life Is Sweet, a pivotal record that traded twang for glam guitars, towering vocals, and more artfully oblique songwriting. It ought to have redefined McKee as an art-rock auteur, but her label did little to promote it, more willing to let it flop than try to market her outside the country-rock market. Soured by such treatment, she was not nearly as prolific in the 21st century, recording only a handful of albums and acting in two of Akin’s films. But 2005’s Peddlin’ Dreams and 2007’s Late December sound weirdly distant and unengaged, as though she made them out of obligation rather than inspiration.
Instead of a memoir, McKee has written an epic Romantic poem, although La Vita Nuova is less concerned with such professional travails and more interested in the person who endured them. Using Dante as her own Dylan, Blake as her Bowie, McKee adjusts her songwriting and singing to reflect these more recent changes, favoring a florid lyrical style and a dramatic vocal delivery that often verges on the operatic. This is her most commanding performance since Life Is Sweet, not to mention her most resourceful. On “Page of Cups,” which imports her older brother’s folk-rock philosophizing to the British countryside, she rattles off lines that on the page might appear anachronistic: “And I wonder, is it kind?” she chimes, her voice like a bell. “And will it understand that its provision as a practicality gave mechanism to a stunning bit of alchemy?” It’s bracing, even thrilling, to hear her fit all those syllables into such short melodic lines, rushing her phrasing and savoring the jamb of consonants in words like “practicality” and “mechanism.”
Her lyrics as well as her performance may strike some listeners as overly literary, but there is method in these mannerisms. That unwieldiness becomes one of the album’s most appealing traits, especially considering that unwieldy desire is one of the primary themes of La Vita Nuova. “Courage,” the album’s seven-minute centerpiece, conjures a woman whom McKee calls Beatrice, after Dante’s beloved, and describes her as “so winsomely arranged” and “rooted to the earth in such an arresting way.” If the verses evoke the rush of sexual thrall, the chorus is all aching uncertainty: “And I will never have the courage to tell her.” McKee doesn’t belt that confession, although we know that she can. Instead, she turns it into a forceful sigh, which gives more power to her next line: “I must love suffering!” The physical sensation of unrequited desire can be just as powerful as its consummation.
There is excitement over new possibilities in these songs, but there is also something like grief for those left behind. La Vita Nuova is an album full of goodbyes: to her brother on “I Just Want to Know That You’re Okay,” the song most rooted in the bright, generous melodies he brought to Love, and ostensibly to her husband (who co-produced the album with her) on the conflicted closer “However Worn.” But the biggest, if not the fondest, farewell is to her old self, to those parts of herself that weren’t compatible with what she calls her new “fanaticism of a daring kind.” McKee’s vita nuova is sweet, but contains just as many puzzles as her old life.
Buy: Rough Trade
