SPILL NEW MUSIC: TWO YEARS ON… REMEMBERING MELANIE WITH THE SONG THAT EVERYONE REMEMBERS

TWO YEARS ON… REMEMBERING MELANIE WITH THE SONG THAT EVERYONE REMEMBERS

CLEOPATRA RECORDS

Los Angeles, California: She was, Melanie’s best known hit record insisted, the woman who rode her bicycle past your window last night. She was also, if you dig deeper into her catalog of hits, the one who described the Woodstock festival as being so crowded that “we bled inside each other’s wounds,” and who was once so dispirited by how the studio treated her music that she demanded “look what they’ve done to my song, ma.”

Across the six decades that separated her first recordings, in 1963, from her last, in 2023, Melanie was responsible for a host of truly memorable songs, singles and albums, and the last two years have seen many of them remastered and reissued (and, in some cases, given a first ever release) by Cleopatra Records.

Some, it might be said, were even greater ear worms than “Brand New Key.” But, as we remember her on the second anniversary of her death, on January 23, 2024, few songs in her vast repertoire seem more appropriate.

An international chart-topper, an era-defining smash and an almost perpetual presence in Melanie’s live show, “Brand New Key” was also a song that she never tired of playing with, rearranging it seemingly spontaneously on stage, according to her mood at that moment, and both prefacing and interrupting it with stories that were occasionally longer than the song itself – you can hear one such diversion on the Cleopatra album United Kingdom Live, a momentous concert recording from 2008 and a heartfelt performance of the many songs she gifted the world in her brilliant career!

PURCHASE MELANIE – UNITED KINGDOM LIVE

Or you can spin back to 1972’s Maiden In Japan, and hear Melanie performing it before a Tokyo audience that knows every word.

PURCHASE MELANIE – MAIDEN IN JAPAN

Or fall back a year more, to for a fabulous version recorded live even as the single soared up the chart, alongside out-takes and demos for Melanie’s 1971 gold album Gather Me.

PURCHASE THE 1971 GATHER ME SESSIONS

There’s a terrific, and so buoyant fresh approach to be found on the Imaginings compilation of 1990s re-recordings and remixes.

And there’s a stunning update with Melanie joined by the Burrito Brothers!

The version here, however, might well be the purest because it was, she said in 2023, the closest to how she heard it when she first wrote it “in about 15 minutes, on the day I broke a 27-day fast.

“All I’d had was water for 27 days and we went out to a flea market and then, on the way home, we passed a McDonalds. The aroma just hit me, I’d been a vegetarian before the fast but, this morning, I got everything. Burger, fries, shake, and the moment I had that last bite of burger, the song was in my head, Because the aroma reminded me of being a kid, learning to roller skate, learning to ride a bike….”

In her mind, the song was dark, swampy, “an old 30s tune,” she mused, “but more Bertholt Brecht than Busby Berkeley, if you know what I mean. Of course, by the time they’d finished with it in the studio, I didn’t know what to think – I barely even recognized it.”

Of course, she quickly came to know and love the new arrangement, but she never forgot her original vision and in 1978, she set about recreating it during sessions at Suntreader Studios in Vermont. Both longer and slower than its hit predecessor, it also packs a knowing sultriness that might – although she never admitted it – have finally been Melanie’s acknowledgment of the rumors that flew around the song when it was first released.

“There was no deep serious expression behind the song, but people read things into it. I guess a key and a lock have always been Freudian symbols, and pretty obvious ones at that. But people made up incredible stories as to what the lyrics said and what the song meant – it was about sex, it was about contraception, it was about drugs, it was about having sex when you’re on drugs. All manner of things. It even got banned from the radio in some places, because of what people thought I could be singing about. Yet the only message I put into the song, which most people missed at the time, was in the final verse… ‘some people say I’ve done alright for a girl.’

“Because they really did say that, and it made me so mad.”

SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: MELANIE – THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN A RAINBOW: THE NY FOLK SESSIONS 1963-1965

Melanie
[Single]
(Cleopatra Records)
Release Date: January 23, 2026

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