Maria McKee’s last album High Dive was one of the most grievously ignored records of the last 20 years, a bona fide masterpiece dripping pearls of songs overlooked by swine and swineherds alike distracted by more easily rooted-out truffles. In its wake, the singer could have gone to ground for another seven years, but the irony would have been acute – High Dive was, among many other things, a devastating elegy to thwarted ambition.
So instead of stewing her creative juices in an almighty vat of sulk, McKee has put the blinkers on. Peddlin’ Dreams isn’t, like its predecessor, a do or die shot at painting the roof of the Sistine Chapel with sound, but its relatively rough hewn cut is every bit as potent.
Tunes like ‘Season Of The Fair’, ‘My One True Love’ and the Twain-ian ‘The Horse Life’ (McKee as a sort of flannel clad Ronnie Spector) may lean on southern conventions, but they also come with blurred hallucinatory edges, as though these bucolic airs are recalled from a childhood obscured by fever dreams.
The piano and vocal reading of Neil Young's Zuma nugget ‘Barstool Blues’ is a fair barometer. Like Young, Maria McKee’s rusticity has a dark taint (there’s always ghosts in them woods). The Dreams peddled here are shadowed with suicidal tendencies and the gut-knot feeling of being unaccountably doomed, a woman out of time in a time out of joint. To that end, ‘People In The Way’ is hardnosed and bleak (this is someone who once observed of her species, “We’re all just collecting dust”), and ‘Everyone’s Got A Story’ is a dismal snapshot of sitting in some dive, disconnected and down in the mouth, struck by that unwelcome fifth beer bottle beatitude: what the fuck am I doing here?
Then there’s the closing ‘(You Don’t Know) How Glad I Am’, a crossbreeding of Memphis soul, show tune and carnival tent testimonial. Certainly McKee, with her vaudeville blood and maverick disposition, would appreciate Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, a tale of proud freaks who wilfully tampered with their bloodline in order to perpetuate their kind.
Peddlin’ Dreams isn’t illegal. But it is narcotic.