Maria McKee – I Like To Use Traditional Elements And Mix Them Up In A Modern Way

II. I FINALLY MET SOMEBODY I CAN TRUST MY LIFE TO

ND: So at the end of that tour you kind of disappeared from the public eye, but you obviously kept writing, and met your future husband.

MM: I had a bass player at the time who had a drug problem. He’s fine now, but at the time he had a slip while we were touring, and it was hard because he was like a brother to me. So I was stuck for a bass player. I called a friend of mine and she said, “You’ve met my friend Jim [Akin] before and he’s a great bass player.” I never really believe that because everyone has a friend who can play an instrument. But we were in a pinch so I gave him the songs and he learned them that week. Doing the tour together we became best friends and before long we’d fallen in love. That was that — we knew that we were gonna end up getting married at some point.

I was starting to write and record my own stuff on four-track and I didn’t want any help from anybody. Then I started to realize that he was this brilliant producer. Then he started playing me his stuff that he was writing and working on down in the garage. It was hard for me because I thought I finally met somebody I can trust my life to, and I think it’s possible that this person may be the one person that I can trust my music to as well. And sure enough it worked. If we weren’t partners it would be hard because I’m always a bit fearful of anyone contributing too much to what I do, because I never think they understand me fully as a person; but the one person who does is my husband, so that’s why were able to make this music together.

So we were just demoing stuff forever. We went to Ireland. I did some writing there. And then it was all about planning our wedding. And that took some time because we decided the most important thing was our life together and having this beautiful experience of this wedding in Ireland.

ND: What year did you get married?

MM: We got married in 1999.

ND: Were you losing track of time?

MM: Yeah, and I’ll tell you why. Because the Dixie Chicks recorded one of my songs [“Am I The Only One (Who’s Ever Felt This Way)”, on their 1998 smash Wide Open Spaces], and they sold millions of albums. It was an absolute miracle. We were able to take our time and decide exactly what we wanted to do. We were so grateful for that. We started taking those demos that we made and Jim called up an old friend of his who plays drums and we brought him down. We wrote the string parts on the keyboards and we brought the string players down; only four guys so you end up tracking them fifteen times. We did fourteen songs in thirteen hours, budgeting ourselves the whole time.

ND: Do all the songs on High Dive date back four and five years?

MM: We started recording the album before we got married, so we’ve had the album done for a while. Jim engineered it and mastered it as well, so there was a learning curve to hurdle over, and that was really intense. That’s one thing that we love: Everyone told us we couldn’t do it, and we did. Now we have people telling us we can’t tour on our own dime, and we’re doing that. I’ve hired my friend’s daughter who just left Wesleyan. She’s the smartest person I’ve ever met and now she’s the vice president of the label. We were gonna intern her and now she’s running the label with my husband. We’re training people — getting them young and making them part of the family.

ND: So you started your own label, Viewfinder, but how did you come to get the distribution deal through Jimmy Buffett’s distribution company?

MM: [It turns out] our business manager handles Jimmy Buffett’s stuff. He gave him the album and I thought, “Jimmy Buffett? I don’t know if he would get it or even like it.” I don’t know much about that world, but I guess it’s kinda like a Deadhead thing where people follow him all over the world. The guy is a bazillionaire. Then I started finding out more about him, that he’s a novelist, a salty-dog, kinda Ernest Hemingway character, and he started to sound interesting to me. And then he loved the CD and said, “Let’s make a deal.”

Because it’s just a distribution deal, we’ve had to boutique everybody else out and get people to do promo and press out of our own pocket. But it seems like the right thing to do because I’m not looking to be this huge cover-of-the-Rolling-Stone famous person; I just want to get my music out there and make a living at it.

ND: Does that mean we can safely assume you won’t be disappearing again for years after this album?

MM: No, I don’t think I will disappear. We have songs left over from this album that we’ll probably record soon, within the next year and a half. I think we’ll make another record that’s similar to this one in its eclectic style and epic tone. And then after that, I really don’t know. I could make a country record. I could make a disco record. I could write an opera. I could make a movie with Jim.

III. I FIND I CAN MEET THAT CHALLENGE

ND: High Dive already has some operatic elements. Some of the songs sound like they were lifted right out of an unstaged musical.

MM: That’s funny because when we had the horn guys come, they said, “It was really fun. Let us know when it goes on Broadway.” They really literally thought we were recording something for a Broadway musical.

ND: I can almost picture your costume as you sing “My Friend Foe”.

MM: Those influences come by me pretty honestly. I was on my way to Juilliard when I left Beverly Hills High. I was planning to do that and I got waylaid by some X gig at the Whisky or something (laughs).