Her death was announced on social media by her children, Leilah, and Beau Jarred. Neither the cause nor the location was cited.
Melanie, born Melanie Safka, was only 22 but already a presence on the New York folk scene when she appeared at Woodstock. She was one of only two women who performed unaccompanied at the festival (Joan Baez was the other) — and as a singer used to the snug confines of Greenwich Village coffee houses, she was, she later recalled, petrified at the thought of strumming her music in front of a sea of some 400,000 people.
It started to rain before she took the stage, and she would later say that the sight of people in the crowd lighting candles inspired her to write “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain),” which she recorded with gospel-style backing from the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Released in 1970, it became her first hit, reaching No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Melanie’s biggest hit, “Brand New Key,” might not have happened without an impromptu stop at a McDonald’s.
A vegetarian at the time, Ms. Melanie had just been through a cleansing fast in which she consumed nothing but distilled water for 27 days, she said in 2021 in an interview with the newspaper The Tennessean in Nashville, where she was living at the time.
She was so weakened by hunger that she was almost hallucinating, and a doctor recommended that she eat meat to build strength. One day, on a trip to a flea market with her husband, Peter Schekeryk, she found herself unable to resist the lure of the Golden Arches.
“No sooner than had I finished the last bite of burger,” she told the newspaper, “I wrote ‘Brand New Key.’ It just came into my head. I had one of those little practice guitars in the van with me, and when my husband, who was a record producer, heard me singing, he said, ‘What’s that?’ And I said, ‘Oh, some silly song. I’m just playing around.’ He said, ‘No, no — do that part again!’ And I did, and he said, ‘Melanie, that’s a hit!’”
He was not wrong. With its sunny vocals and a percolating beat, “Brand New Key” set heads bobbing around the country. The song was No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks starting on Christmas Day, 1971. Billboard later ranked the infectious ditty the No. 9 song of 1972.
But not everything about the song was rainbow happy.
“Brand New Key,” seemingly written from the point of view of a girl hoping to win the favor of an elusive boy, includes the freighted line “I’m OK alone, but you’ve got something I need,” and then takes an apparent Freudian turn, with many listeners gleaning a sexual undertone in these lyrics:
Well, I’ve got a brand-new pair of roller skates
You’ve got a brand-new key
I think that we should get together
And try them on to see
In a time when the guardians of mainstream popular culture fought to keep radio and television output squeaky-clean, controversy soon followed. “I guess I can see why it was banned by some radio stations all across America,” she said in an interview with the website Where Music Meets the Soul.
The clamor recalled other “hidden meaning” kerfuffles, including speculation over the Beatles’ Technicolor odyssey “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” which John Lennon always denied was a song about LSD.
“It was a time when people were reading things into lyrics,” Melanie said in the website interview. “Some said it was sexual innuendo or that it related to drugs, and ‘key’ a code for kilo.” But, she added, “I was just having a romp through my memory of learning how to ride my bike and roller skating,” along with the thrill of first love.
Melanie Anne Safka was born on Feb. 3, 1947, in Astoria, Queens, to Frederick and Pauline (Altomare) Safka. Her mother was a jazz singer, and Melanie turned to music at an early age, making her public singing appearance on the talent show “Live Like a Millionaire” at 4.
By the time she was in high school in Long Branch, N.J., she was already singing in local coffee houses, and eventually moved her act to the folk dens of New York while studying acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
She earned a contract with Columbia Records and released two singles on the label before moving to Buddah. She initially found particular success in Europe, where she appeared frequently on television; her 1969 single “Bobo’s Party” reached No. 1 in France.
Regardless of her intentions, “Brand New Key” would live on in popular culture as a musical time capsule of the 1970s, capturing the decade’s colorful kitschiness as well as its love-the-one-you’re-with carnality.
Little wonder the song popped up in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 film, “Boogie Nights,” a survey of the cocaine-fueled pornography industry in Los Angeles in its more smog-choked days. In a key scene, Rollergirl (played by Heather Graham), a featured performer who wears roller skates seemingly everywhere, including bed, slaps the record on the turntable before giving an X-rated audition to a new prospect, Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg).
While she never again scaled the heights of “Brand New Key” and “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain),” Melanie was not a two-hit wonder. “Ring the Living Bell,” the follow-up single to “Brand New Key,” made it to No. 31 on the Hot 100 in March 1972, sharing the chart with another of her songs, “The Nickel Song,” at No. 54.
Among her other compositions was “What Have They Done to My Song, Ma,” which, as “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma,” was a Top 20 hit for the New Seekers in 1970.
She was not long for the pop charts, however. Her double album “At Carnegie Hall,” released in 1973, failed to crack the Top 100. Subsequent recordings made little impact.
Still, Melanie continued to record at a prolific pace, even into her later years. According to Variety, she had recently recorded covers of songs by Radiohead, Depeche Mode and Morrissey, who had covered her composition “Some Say (I Got Devil)” on his 2019 album, “California Sun.”
Mr. Schekeryk, Melanie’s husband and producer, died in 2010. Complete information about survivors was not immediately available.
Despite her success during a period of singer-songwriter ascendence, Melanie was rarely mentioned in the same breath as Woodstock-era contemporaries like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. “It wasn’t the age of smiling women,” she said in a 2021 interview with The Guardian. “It had to be much more broody, and I was way too cherubic.”
She also seemed weary of her famous song celebrating steel-wheeled locomotion, and perhaps joys more libidinous; she had even expressed reservations about the success of the song when it was at its peak.
“I had already been battling this beatific image of, ‘Isn’t she ever so precious, every bit of Woodstock fluff person?’” Melanie told The Tennessean. “I wanted to be perceived as someone with some social commentary and relevance.”
She was even more pointed in her interview with Where Music Meets the Soul, saying, “It was the song that doomed me to be cute for the rest of my life.”
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