Mary Lee's Corvette
Mary Lee's Corvette is a New York-based band led by Michigan-born singer-songwriter Mary Lee Kortes. They have recorded five albums, notably 2002's song-for-song cover of Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, recorded live in New York.
Although Kortes was already writing songs and poetry when she moved to New York, she says she didn't expect a musical career to follow. However, she soon found work as a session singer, and her fourth completed song "Everywhere I Go" was recorded by Christian artist Amy Grant for her 1985 album Unguarded. Kortes later began recording her own songs and released her first EP, Mary Lee's Corvette, in 1997, produced by her husband Eric Ambel.
Rolling Stone critic David Fricke wrote that "the bright bite in Mary Lee Kortes' voice [has] the high-mountain sunshine of Dolly Parton, with a sweet-iron undercoat of Chrissie Hynde." MLC's work has also been championed by British radio presenter Bob Harris and Jim Bessman of Billboard Magazine, among others.
MLC's breakthrough recording was of a live performance of the classic Dylan album Blood on the Tracks. The album attracted attention from many quarters, not least Dylan himself, for whom MLC later opened in New York.
Kortes says of the title of the latest MLC album, Love, Loss & Lunacy: "If you don't love something, you can't lose it. When you lose something you love, it makes you crazy. And if you're crazy enough, you can fall back in love."
Mary Lee has been greatly involved with "Feel the Music", a non-profit music and healing organization. She runs songwriting workshops and leads seminars for this organization.
Discography
- Mary Lee's Corvette (1997)
- True Lovers of Adventure (1999)
- Blood on the Tracks (2002)
- 700 Miles (2003)
- Love, Loss & Lunacy (2006)