Within the wistful romantic reverie of the folkish, album-opening "Season Of The Fair", the first words from Maria McKee are "Will you remember me?" She sings the song to a former lover, yet she could just as easily be addressing the question to the audience that first hailed McKee two decades ago, when Lone Justice was the most heavily hyped band in hype-heavy Los Angeles, and her prospects for arena-rock superstardom seemed all but assured.
With the third song on the album, "Turn Away", McKee answers her own question, as her soaring upper register climbs to an emotional peak that other singers just can't reach. It's a voice that carries a tremulous thrill, and once you've experienced it, you'll never forget it. Though Lone Justice sank beneath the weight of industry expectations and McKee's subsequent solo work has been eclectically erratic, she remains a singer of singular range and resources.
Where some of her previous releases seemed to try too hard, the production here by multi-instrumentalist Jim Akin (McKee's husband) has a musical directness to match the emotional directness. The stripped-down simplicity of the arrangements finds McKee extending her range beyond her penchant for melancholy and melodrama, from the sing-song sweetness and reclaimed innocence of "The Horse Life" to the hard-won lessons of "Everyone's Got A Story".
On Akin's "Sullen Soul", she sounds like she's fronting Neil Young's Crazy Horse; her solo-piano rendition of Young's "Barstool Blues" extends the homage. For all the album's homespun charm, she still has some surprises in her, closing with a revelatory revival of "(You Don't Know) How Glad I Am", a jazzy, mid-'60s hit for Nancy Wilson that dazzles as a display of McKee's vocal virtuosity. The performance evokes the title of another pop standard -- unforgettable.
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