Everybody

If one of the complaints about Life is Sweet is its lack of catchy tunes when compared to previous McKee efforts, the album’s fifth track Everybody at least goes some way to answering that grouse as McKee gives us the closest thing to out-and-out pop the album provides, an up-tempo track whose subject matter I couldn’t even guess at. Regardless of such lyrical obscurity, it zooms along with a musically straight and direct style while its refrain of, “Maybe tomorrow,” brings to mind the Pretenders’ Talk of the Town without ever imitating it.

Yet more cack-handed axe work from McKee and some highly appealing multi-part vocals carry us along, brisk and remorseless as a river, until we reach an ending that sounds like something the Beatles would’ve offered had they been making music in the mid-1990s. It’s easy to think of Life is Sweet as very much an album of its time, following in the wake of such singers as Alanis Morissette but, right here, the song’s (and presumably Maria’s) 1960s’ influences are impossible to ignore.

To my knowledge Everybody was never released as a single - baffling, as it’s easily the most radio friendly track on the disk.

I suppose it shows that Geffen’s men-in-suits really didn’t have a clue what they had on their hands with this album or what to do with it, and the failure to release Everybody as a single leaves you in no doubt that, when it came to the commercial failure of Life is Sweet, the fault was entirely theirs and the radio stations’ and not Maria’s.