{"id":147918,"date":"2013-06-13T13:58:57","date_gmt":"2013-06-13T13:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socancom100stg.wpenginepowered.com\/canadian-classics-metal-queen-1984\/"},"modified":"2013-06-13T13:58:57","modified_gmt":"2013-06-13T13:58:57","slug":"canadian-classics-metal-queen-1984","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/canadian-classics-metal-queen-1984\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadian Classics: Metal Queen (1984)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Les traductions pour les articles avant l\u2019automne 2013 ne sont pas disponibles pour le moment.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of all the Canadian heavy metal classics, none comes from such a surprising place as \u201cMetal Queen.\u201d Lee Aaron was not long out of high school jazz band when she co-wrote this hard-rocking ode to a female warrior. A music video featuring Aaron in a fur outfit and chains hit MuchMusic, the record took off in Europe, and suddenly the singer was a metal queen herself \u2013 during the genre\u2019s mainstream heyday. Since then, Aaron has focused on performing jazz and theatre, writing new material and dusting off her metal material for festivals. She spoke to SOCAN from her home in Vancouver.<\/p>\n

How did someone from a jazz background come to write a heavy metal anthem?<\/strong>
\nMy scene was musical theatre. I had played sax in my school jazz band and I was very involved in singing old Tin Pan Alley tunes. I was attracted to hard rock eventually because I loved the power. Female artists seemed to be relegated to the confines of folk and pop music. I was a fan of Anne and Nancy Wilson [of Heart] and felt they were charting new territory for women to have a powerful voice in rock music, and I wanted to take that one step further.<\/p>\n

How did you come up with \u201cMetal Queen\u201d with your guitarist?<\/strong>
\nGeorge and I had played together since I was 15 years old, and written a lot together. We were playing some dumpy hotel bar on the outskirts of Edmonton. It was a tough scene, but the nice thing was that this bar was not open during the day, so they let us go down and rehearse. We were trying to prepare material for our second album. I remember that George had come up with this riff and we were jamming on it. He kept singing \u201cMe-tal!\u201d And I\u2019m like, \u201cRight, that\u2019s so original.\u201d Eventually I came up with \u201cMe-tal que-en!\u201d and we both agreed \u2013 that\u2019s the chorus.<\/p>\n

Who was the Metal Queen? I heard you were inspired by the animated film\u00a0Heavy Metal<\/em>.<\/strong>
\nYeah. It\u2019s all about this female heroine character who destroys a war through self-sacrifice.<\/p>\n

Why did people think it was autobiographical?<\/strong>
\nWell, the outfit [in the music video] didn\u2019t help, let\u2019s be honest! The song was all about, \u201clet\u2019s be powerful, let\u2019s have equality.\u201d That was my intention. MuchMusic was in its infancy and looking for big production videos and ours went into heavy rotation. It was totally fun, I embraced it as theatre. But the public will cast you.<\/p>\n

You stopped performing the song for a long time? Why?<\/strong>
\nI had written many songs. I had had bigger hits. Yet bookers would ask me to play it and the fans would scream for it. I started to feel angry. I wanted to be recognized as a singer and a writer, not the girl in a fur bikini. So I felt I needed to go in a different direction. I stopped performing rock at all and went back to my roots.<\/p>\n

Looking back now how do you feel about having written heavy metal classic?<\/strong>
\nIt is a bit weird. I was such a young girl, 19 or 20 years old, I had no idea it would become such an iconic song and image in the hard rock world. The nice thing is that metal fans are very passionate and extremely loyal. Two years ago I played the Sweden Rock Festival and I was shocked to find that people were waiting 30 years for me to come there. Wow! I embrace it now, all the kitsch and the nostalgia. I\u2019m happy to get on stage and wear the metal queen crown. We\u2019re all in on the joke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by Lee Aaron and George Bernhardt.
\nPublished by Abovewater Publishing\/Pondwater Music<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":110026,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-non-categorise"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}