In her 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That”, Joan Didion wrote that young adults always have the curse of “conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before”. All bouts of loneliness and heartbreak are catastrophised to a cosmic scale with no end in sight. It is inherently isolating to be so young, and Maria McKee’s song ‘Am I The Only One (Who’s Ever Felt This Way?)’ succinctly understood this.
A prolific hero of americana, McKee burst onto the LA music scene in 1985 with cowpunk band Lone Justice when she was 21 years old. Three years later, her debut, self-titled album was released and met with critical acclaim. Being in the industry so young, McKee was blessed with the insightfulness and proximity to emotions many artists shed too early in an effort to mellow their lyricism. ‘Am I The Only One’ eschews any notions of arrogance a young rockstar might have and instead indulges in the delicious self-pity of a first heartbreak.
The song begins without an intro, McKee immediately complaining, “There is no damn reason I should have to be so alone”. Rather than the rite of passage this chapter inevitably becomes for us as we age, McKee digs into the plaintiveness and positions her heartbreak as a moral failing or a miscarriage of justice. The lost love results from naivety – “a heart that’s worn and weathered would know better than to fight / But I wore mine like a weapon” – yet it eventually prematurely ages her, “and it hung years on my face”.
While the cover made more famous by The Chicks is wonderful, Maria McKee’s original recording retains the perfect level of emotion to the point that she howls the lyrics as though she is genuinely in tears, especially with the deliberate crack at “God help me” in the chorus.
The other stroke of genius in this song is that the paroxysms of grief are visually linked to the tide. Even while the narrator can see land on the horizon and feels an inkling of hope, the imagined sensations of the sea come back to haunt her; “another night surrounds me and it pounds me like a wave”. In real life, we might call that dock rock after a long voyage at sea, but for McKee, it was a biblical flood.
