Maria McKee: Seasons will change

Interpreting a Maria McKee album as a harbinger of the musical direction she’ll take next is futile. The Los Angeles native’s stylistic shape-shifting between 2005’s Peddlin’ Dreams and her most recent studio album, Late December, is a case in point: basically, it’s the difference between acoustic roots-pop and a rock opera, with her clarion vibrato as the only constant. “I don’t do it on purpose,” says McKee. “It’s just [that] I’m sort of mercurial. I guess I have ... ADD creatively, where it’s like a shiny penny is in my face and I have to follow it.”

Late December’s 12, drama-laden tracks burst with layered vocals, flaring Mick Ronson-esque guitar riffs and dramatic choruses, emotional nuances attentively captured by McKee’s husband/producer/collaborator, Jim Akin (their apartment doubles as a studio). “I have a very broad spectrum of moods and each one is quite intense,” she laughs. “Clinically, I guess you’d call it ‘rapid-cycling bipolar disorder.’ It’s treated, but yet it’s still not completely ironed out, and that’s probably why I’m a creative person. There are those times when [Jim] has to get away and then there are times when [he’s] like, ‘OK, what can I do with this? I think maybe we should go into the studio.’”

McKee’s career could be divided into three seasons — she fronted mid-’80s cowpunk outfit Lone Justice and had a similarly rootsy major-label solo stint before escaping to artistic independence with the biting progressive rock of Life Is Sweet. “I always felt a little bit confined by the roots thing, because it’s not really my personality,” she reflects. “I’m not like some hayseed; I never really was. Lone Justice was a passion for me because I was searching for white soul music that I could sing without feeling guilty.”

“Life Is Sweet is where I really wanted to just wipe the slate clean and do something that was a dividing line for followers of Maria McKee,” she adds. “It was either you’re on board or lost forever. It was an interesting move, because it was, in a way, like critical and commercial suicide.”

For the past half decade, McKee has averaged one stylistically unfettered album a year (including live recordings), and Akin has had a lot to do with it. “I really don’t think the albums could be made or sound the way they are if we weren’t married and we weren’t working together, because there is that intimacy,” she says. “We hardly ever argue over the music — it’s kind of miraculous. I mean, I’ve fought with some of the most important men in the music industry my whole entire career.”

Perhaps it’s more accurate to view the distance traveled between her alt.country-informed albums (Lone Justice, You Gotta Sin To Get Saved and Peddlin’ Dreams) and glam epics (Life Is Sweet, High Dive and Late December) less as schizophrenic drifting than artistic eruptions, harnessing McKee’s multi-octave vocal power (well-suited as it is for theatrical fare) and her clearly defined tastes. “In some ways, my work has not been widely accepted — not so much in Europe, but in America — by the media or by the record-buying public. I think it’s caused me to be bolder and braver about what I actually love and what I really want to do musically, and I haven’t had to adhere to any formula, because I don’t have critical immunity and I don’t have a mass audience. It’s almost as if I’m creating the music solely for myself and my peers and my friends and fellow musicians.”