Music
McKee was a founding member of the cowpunk/country rock band, Lone Justice, in 1982, with whom she released two albums. Several compilations of both previously released and unreleased material and a BBC Live In Concert album have been released since their demise. Her band opened for such acts as U2.
When she was 19, she wrote Feargal Sharkey's 1985 UK number one hit "A Good Heart", a song she has since recorded herself and released on her album Late December. The song was originally written about her failed relationship with musician Benmont Tench. Sharkey would later go on to also cover "To Miss Someone" from her self-titled solo debut, on his third solo album "Songs From The Mardi Gras".
In 1987 she was featured in the Robbie Robertson video "Somewhere Down the Crazy River", and contributed back-up vocals to his debut solo album, which included the song. She released her first solo, self-titled album in 1989. Her song "Show Me Heaven", which appeared on the soundtrack to the film Days of Thunder, was a number one single in the United Kingdom for four weeks in 1990. She refused to perform this song in public up until recently, when she sang it for the first time in eighteen years, at Dublin Gay Pride.
Following her debut, McKee has released five studio (and two live) albums. The later three, High Dive, Peddlin' Dreams and Late December, were released independently via her own Viewfinder Records label (distributed in the UK via Cooking Vinyl).
In 1995, Bette Midler recorded Mckee's tracks, "To Deserve You" and "The Last Time" for her platinum album Bette of Roses.
In 1998, The Dixie Chicks recorded McKee's track "Am I the Only One (Who's Ever Felt This Way?)" and included it on their Grammy nominated album Wide Open Spaces.
Read more about this topic: Maria McKee
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“To know whether you are enjoying a piece of music or not you must see whether you find yourself looking at the advertisements of Pears’ soap at the end of the libretto.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“As if, as if, as if the disparate halves
Of things were waiting in a betrothal known
To none, awaiting espousal to the sound
Of right joining, a music of ideas, the burning
And breeding and bearing birth of harmony,
The final relation, the marriage of the rest.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)