Singer-songwriter of ‘Brand New Key,’ other ’70s hits dies at 76
Melanie, the singer-songwriter who rose through the New York folk scene, performed at Woodstock and had a series of 1970s hits including the enduring cultural phenomenon “Brand New Key,” has died.
Her publicist Billy James told The Associated Press that Melanie died Tuesday. She was
76 and lived in central Tennessee. The cause was not immediately revealed.
“Our world is much dimmer, the colors of a dreary, rainy Tennessee pale with her absence today,” her children Leilah, Jeordie and Beau Jarred, said in a post on her Facebook page announcing her death.
With a voice that could shift from high-pitched and coy to a deep soulful rasp, Melanie wrote and sang hits including “Look What They’ve Done to My Song Ma” and “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain).”
She was best known for “Brand New Key,” a song from her 1971 album “Gather Me” that she wrote about about a girl who bikes and skates past the house of a boy she longs for. It became a No. 1 hit in the U.S. and several other countries.
With echoes of the popular songs of the ‘20s and ’30s, it combines a youthful simplicity with a winking adult sophistication in its chorus:
“Well, I’ve got a brandnew pair of roller skates, you’ve got a brand-new key, I think that we should get together, and try them on to see.”
She would say in later interviews that she didn’t necessarily intend sexual innuendo in the song, but those who heard it weren’t necessarily wrong.
“I probably have a quirky way of writing, and I think I was misunderstood,” she told the Tennessean newspaper in 2014. “I had this smiling, cherubic thing, and I think that worked against me. Girls with guitars who were relevant were angst-filled and angular.”
By the mid-1970s her popularity waned, but she would maintain a following and keep recording and playing live into the 2010s.
Melanie was married to her manager and producer Peter Schekeryk from 1968 until his death in 2010. They had three kids together.