Arc of a diver

Maria McKee is a drama queen – and I don’t mean that derogatorily. Rather, her records exist on a hyper-theatrical plane, none more so than the current High Dive, one of this writer’s early contenders for album of the year. But also, she has a hard time dealing with tedium – so hard that she rings up hotpress to while away the dead moments spent passing through Swiss customs.

“Right now we’re on the road and we’re having a sort of blissful time,” she says, “driving around, playing gigs, beautiful weather, having lovely meals, we went to the beach today, and I’ve been sinking into this nihilistic hole on and off for the past three days. I’m trying to pull myself out of it, but I feel like I’m just alienating myself from everybody, and I don’t really know how to deal with it! Talking to you is actually helping.”

Hey, call this number for instantaneous head shrinkage and tell-me-about-your-childhood action. In fact, Maria McKee’s upbringing was far from dull. For a start, her maternal grandmother was a classically trained pianist debutante from an old Pittsburgh oil family who injured her finger, had to have it partially amputated and thereafter ran away to join a Civic Light Opera Workshop.

“I was her nemesis because I think she could sense that I was a burgeoning prima donna,” Maria recalls, “and she was very, very dramatic and very mystical, she was an intellectual, a writer, a Rosicrucian and converted to Catholicism, it was all very ritualistic for her. And she used to accuse me of stealing the pills out of her medicine cabinet. But although she hated me, she adored Bryan, she actually tried to kidnap him.”

That would be Bryan MacLean, Maria’s half brother and member of legendary LA trailblazers Love.

“I grew up in LA,” she says, “it was a paradoxical sort of upbringing because my parents were very bohemian at the start, they supported my brother in his career and were going to see the Love gigs in the Whiskey A Go-Go when The Doors used to open. My father ran this quaint little bar in West LA, and y’know, they had a sort of a hip social set.

“And my mother was a painter and flamenco dancer and knew all these displaced Europeans and gypsy guitarists and you can really hear that influence in the Love music, especially ‘Alone Again Or’ with the matador horns and everything. I grew up crawling around the floors of flamenco dancing studios and I was exposed to that style of singing very early, and I think it really had an influence on my vocal tone, it’s a very passionate tonal style of singing.”

Which is evident on any of Maria’s previous three solo albums or the two she recorded with alt-country pioneers Lone Justice in the late ’80s. But add to those Spanish inflections a Southern Baptist elementary school education before her mother got religion and the family joined a born again Charismatic fundamentalist cult (“It was all, like, running around speaking in tongues, casting demons out of people, all that stuff”), well, you’ve got some rather heightened social environments.

“Well, they would have to be,” Maria laughs, “my family wouldn’t settle for anything else.”

Nor, one suspects, would Maria herself. Hence High Dive, an epic record that, incredibly, Maria and her husband recorded at home.

“I think that when you’re at home you have the freedom to let your imagination run away with you at all hours of the day or night,” she explains, “and you’re sort of given over to it in a way that’s very pure and sort of momentary. But I really think my biggest challenge as an artist is finding my audience, because I continue to alienate the Maria McKee fans who have been in love with the Lone Justice records and You Gotta Sin To Get Saved. I started to kind of establish something with Life Is Sweet, reaching people who’d never heard of me before, so they find a way, people tell their friends and so on. It’s kind of a word of mouth thing I think.”