![]() ![]() She flouted them anyway, and has since released more than 30 albums, most recently Ever Since You Never Heard of Me in 2010.Īs for that flower child label? “I never even felt like I was a hippie, I didn’t like the term. When she left Buddha Records and set up her own label, Neighborhood Records, in 1971, “it was like a slap in the face to the industry” – which came as a surprise to her at the time, but as she later says, “there was a whole slew of conditions being a woman”. Thinking back to those early days, she muses: “I kind of wished I didn’t have a body.” Her uncompromising appetite for independence got in the way, too. “I have this desire to be understood,” she says. I ask Melanie what she hoped to achieve as a 24-year-old songwriter recording Gather Me in New York’s Allegro Sound Studio. But a girl? How could she possibly have any social significance?” Randy Newman can sing Short People and that’s OK because he’s a guy, he’s got something to say. It had to be much more broody and I was way too cherubic. Refusal to conform … Melanie performing at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in 2007. In the reviews, journalists enthusiastically hoisted her into the pantheon of female singer-songwriters regardless of genre – Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin – as if she had not occupied that upper stratum previously. In 2007, Jarvis Cocker – another notable fan – introduced her on to the stage for a rare gig at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. I knew that I wasn’t being presented in the way that I am.” Her non-conformity hasn’t always made things easy for her, in an industry where “a girl was just a ‘chick singer’, you know?” She mentions a notable fan, Nirvana’s bass player Krist Novoselic, and a comment he once made that she’d been airbrushed out of history. “I was an introvert and all of a sudden I’m a celebrity. “There was a big gap between my reality and the reality of how I was being perceived,” she says when I ask about that song’s narrative. Subversive lyrics which go some way towards highlighting Gather Me’s often dark and radical beauty. “Some have tried to sell me / all kinds of things to save me / from hurting like a woman,” she sings with an intoxicating mixture of desire and weariness. “That’s Morrissey’s favourite, he did a version of it recently,” Melanie says. Not so, however, with her counter-offering Some Say (I Got Devil) from side two of Gather Me, a subversive response to the bubblegum pop hit everyone is familiar with. She had production ideas, she tells me, but with little familiarity with the language of music, she had a hard time articulating them. “I’m not a trained musician and my husband was the producer, he was mostly the person who communicated to the band, who were all guys,” Melanie recalls. More in keeping with Gather Me as a whole, Brand New Key was originally composed as a blues song, she says – it was subsequently sped up in the studio to attract a broader audience. “It was the bane of my existence for a few years,” she admits. It rocketed to No 1 in the US singles chart in December 1971, before becoming a novelty hit in the UK when the Wurzels’ The Combine Harvester parodied it in 1976, and has come to define Gather Me in ways that Melanie hasn’t always enjoyed. Take her most recognisable song, Brand New Key – on first listen it sounds like a naive ditty about brand new roller skates, but its twinkling demeanour belies a song about a determined loss of innocence. It’s not clear how much she has let this go. But there is also an astute perception that, despite her complexities, she was often misunderstood as an artist, regularly made to feel like “a piece of Woodstock fluff” in the press. There is an endearing innocence to Melanie, even now, alongside a mellow acceptance of the many twists and turns in her career. I don’t have any hit records, nobody knows who I am.’ I had no musicians with me, no roadie – I even brought my mom!” I had no idea! I walked into the lobby and there was Janis Joplin.” Aged 22, Melanie had never seen a famous person before. I pictured families with picnic blankets, and arts and crafts. “I just thought it was a weekend of singing. “It was an unbelievably frightening day,” she says. In 1969, she was helicoptered on to the stage at Woodstock festival where she was, in her own words, “an industry buzz” without a clue. Born Melanie Safka, she was raised in Queens, New York, and her vagabond journey as a musician began in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s. ![]() This year marks the 50th anniversary of her kaleidoscopic classic 1971 album Gather Me.
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