Brand New Key

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.