Brand New Key

Album

Monkees, The

Label

Neighborhood Records

Genre

Soft Rock

Composer(s)

Melanie Safka

Entered Chart

Oct 30, 1971

Peak Date

Dec 25, 1971

Released

October 1971

Recorded

Studio Allegro Sound Studios, New York City

Catalog #

Neighborhood 4201

B-Side

Some Say (I Got Devil)

In this song, Melanie has new pair of roller skates, which she uses to skate over to a boy's house because he's "got something I need." She's quite persistent but it seems he's never home. Finally, his mom answers the door and tells her he's with another girl. This is when it dawns on her that he might be avoiding her. The "key" Melanie sings about is a skate key. At the time, roller skates were metal contraptions that required an adjustment tool (the skate key) to fit them to the foot. The story about the girl looking for the boy so he could use his brand new key had plenty of connotation, which was striking because it was placed in such an innocent setting. Melanie claimed she wrote the lyrics in a stream-of-conscious style in just minutes, and any deeper meaning was unintentional. "It was not anything that I thought about or even worried about making sense," she said. This song has a very unusual origin story. Melanie's search for enlightenment inspired her to go on a 27-day fast, during which she drank nothing but distilled water. Coming off the fast, she was eating transitional food like carrots when she felt an overwhelming urge to get a McDonald's hamburger and fries. Figuring it was some kind of spirit voice guiding her, she gave in. On the way back to her house from McDonald's, she started to write the song. >> After Melanie wrote this song, she figured it would make a nice interlude on the album and could be a lighthearted novelty to perform between her more earnest material. Her husband, Peter Schekeryk, who was also her producer, had other ideas. After she recorded the song at Allegro Studios in New York City, she left for California. When she returned, Schekeryk had put jaunty doo-wop backing vocals on the song and it was super catchy. "I'm sure if 'Brand New Key' had lived its life before my husband recorded it, it would have come out as a blues, swampy thing and nobody would have ever heard it," Melanie said in a Songfacts interview. "That would have been that. But he'd say, 'Melanie, that's a hit.' I'd say, 'No, it can't be.'" In 1976, the English West Country comic folk band The Wurzels took their rewritten version, "Combine Harvester (Brand New Key)" to the top of the UK charts. Melanie (last name: Safka) is a folk singer who wrote passionate songs about peace and unity during the Vietnam War. She played Woodstock and had charted with "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" and "Peace Will Come (According To Plan)." She had some reservations about releasing "Brand New Key" as a single, fearing she would no longer be taken seriously ("I was sure I was doomed to be cute for the rest of my life," he told Songfacts). She had further success with songs in her folk style like "Ring The Living Bell" and "Some Day I'll be A Farmer," but she is overwhelming known for "Brand New Key." "Brand New Key" went to #1 in the US on the chart dated December 25, 1971, where it stayed for three weeks. No word on if the song helped boost sales of roller skates for Christmas. Some believed this song was about trying to score drugs, with the key representing a "kilo" of marijuana. This Songfact has nothing to do with music, but here's a brief history anyway of roller-skating. Roller-skates made their first recorded appearance at a party in Carlisle House, London in 1760. A young Belgian musician who rolled into a London party while playing the violin wore these first roller skates. It was not a successful introduction as the violinist crashed into a mirror causing nearly a thousand dollars worth of damage. In 1866 former civil war arms producer Everett Barney patented the all-metal screw clamp skate. They clamped on to the edges of the soles of shoes and were tightened with a key. However, with the advent of athletic shoes, there was no place to secure the skates so they eventually disappeared. Around the same time New Yorker James Plimpton came up with the four-wheeled turning roller skate, or quad skate. It was a huge success, so much that the first public skating rink was opened in 1866 in Newport, Rhode Island with the support of Plimpton. The quad skate remained the dominant roller skate design until Minnesotans Scott Olson and Brennan Olson came up with idea of roller blades in 1979. They were inspired after coming across a pair of inline skates created in the 1960s by the Chicago Roller Skate Company and, seeing the potential for off-ice hockey training, set about redesigning the skates using modern materials and attaching ice hockey boots. Within a few years the Rollerblade-branded skates were more popular than the traditional quads. Want some more songs inspired by roller skating? Here are some: 1. London-based singer-songwriter Eliza Doolittle's "Rollerblades" is "about quitting worrying, getting up off your butt and getting on your rollerblades 'and rolling on.'" 2. North Eastern England band Maximo Park's Roller Disco Dreams is about, yep, a roller disco. 3. Jim Croce's Roller Derby Queen is about a roller-skating woman that Jim met doing a gig at a country and western bar. 4. De La Soul's 1991 tribute to roller skating and weekends, is titled, A Roller Skating Jam Named "Saturdays." Olivia Newton-John recorded a dance version of this song for the 2011 movie soundtrack A Few Best Men. She also had a supporting role in the film as Barbara, the mother of the bride. >>

I rode my bicycle past your window last night
I roller skated to your door at daylight
It almost seems like you're avoiding me
I'm okay alone, but you got something I need

Well, I got a brand new pair of roller skates
You got a brand new key
I think that we should get together and try them out, you see
I been looking around a while, you got something for me
Oh, I got a brand new pair of roller skates
You got a brand new key

I asked your mother if you were at home
She said, "Yes", but you weren't alone
Oh, sometimes I think that you're avoiding me
I'm okay alone, but you got something I need

Well, I got a brand new pair of roller skates
You got a brand new key
I think that we should get together and try them out, you see
I been looking around a while, you got something for me
Oh, I got a brand new pair of roller skates
You got a brand new key

I ride my bike, I roller skate, don't drive no car
Don't go too fast, but I go pretty far
For somebody who don't drive I been all around the world
Some people say she done alright for a girl

Oh yeah, oh yeah
Oh yeah yeah yeah
Oh yeah yeah

I got a brand new pair of roller skates
You got a brand new key
I got a brand new pair of roller skates
You got a brand new key
I got a brand new pair of roller skates
You got a brand new key