For those who thought they'd heard everything from 1988, here's the one that got away. Mary Margaret O'Hara's only major label album is a fractured gospel of free-jazz soul that sounds decades ahead of its time. It demands your full attention and repays it with every listen.
I didn't find Miss America. A friend slipped it to me on a burned CD-R with no track listing, just the year and a note: “This one’s for after the kids are in bed.” I dropped the needle (metaphorically) and by the third song I had stopped whatever else I was doing. The record had found me.
This is not background music. Mary Margaret O’Hara’s voice is a living wire — it arcs, splinters, swoons, and cracks open on lines you didn’t see coming. The album was recorded mostly in Toronto between 1986 and 1987, at Manta Sound and other rooms, with a shifting cast of session players who must have been as bewildered as they were inspired. The engineer was Mark Howard, later known for work with Bob Dylan and Daniel Lanois, and you can hear how he gave the microphones room to breathe. Nothing is compressed to death. Air leaks in.
How it was made
The sessions were famously unorthodox. O’Hara, who had been performing around Toronto’s Queen Street scene, brought in musicians like bassist David Piltch and violinist Hugh Marsh — players who could read a room, not just a chart. She would often scrap arrangements mid-session or ask for silence between verses. A lot of the takes are first or final ones, stitched together with tape splices that left a kind of documentary grain. Whatever the method, the result is an album that refuses to button up.
The title track — if you can call it that — “Miss America” is barely two minutes. It floats in on a piano figure that could be a child’s lullaby, then O’Hara begins to sing about “you and me / and all that jazz” with a fragility that feels almost accidental. She doesn’t resolve the song. She just stops, and the silence that follows is louder than any fade-out.
What to listen for
Listen for the spaces between the notes. On “Help Me Lift You Up,” the piano hangs in the air like dust in a shaft of light. The bass walks in from off-mic, and O’Hara’s voice doubles itself — two takes, slightly out of sync, as if she’s arguing with a ghost. It is the most intimate thing I have ever heard on a major label release.
The record sold poorly. Virgin dropped her soon after. She has released almost nothing since — a few soundtrack cuts, some live appearances. But Miss America has never gone away. It was reissued on vinyl in 2022, and if you listen on a decent system you can hear why. This is not a record for playlists or for company. It is for the moment when you need to hear someone search for a note, stumble, and keep going.
Put this on at midnight. Skip the streaming quality — get the vinyl or a lossless file. Close the door. Let it break you a little.