Nellie McKay

[Guest Chaney]

Just ran across an article in the Times (below) on this young lady and visited her (?) website. (Check out the free mp3s! VERY generous, considering she has but one album out, even though it's 2 CDs. Also check out the video section; the Letterman appearance really made me smile.)

Nellie McKay

January 2, 2005

An Alt-Cabaret Diva

By DANIEL MENAKER

Renee Fleming, Tony Bennett, Celine Dion and the Throat Singers of Tuva have at least one thing in common: they are among the dwindling number of singers with whom the beguiling young pop-rebel singer-songwriter Nellie McKay has not yet been compared. In the reviews of her first CD, ''Get Away From Me'' -- a titular needle at Norah Jones's ''Come Away With Me'' -- and in feature articles about her, references to birds of a not-obvious feather fly numerously. So far, there's Randy Newman, Tom Lehrer, Tom Waits, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Doris Day (McKay's hero), Joe Strummer, Cole Porter, Billy Strayhorn, Johnny Cash, Carol Channing, Eminem, Liberace, Ani DiFranco, Tori Amos, Stephen Sondheim, Dinah Shore, Stephin Merritt, the McGarrigle sisters, Bill Clinton, Frank Sinatra, Bette Midler, Elvis Costello, Rosemary Clooney, Peggy Lee and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. (Doris Day, if only because of her gumption, emerges most clearly from this comparative pack.) Even music journalists' phonetic renditions of McKay's name are numerous -- ''Mick-Eye,'' ''mc-KYE,'' ''mc-KIE,'' ''mc-AYE.''

This wide range of musical models and pronunciation guides suits a performer who is also in many other ways elusive. She is 19, 20, 22 or some other age, depending on who's talking or on which article you're reading. (Bet on early 20's.) Her name is Eleanor McKay or Eleanora Miramontes. (Bet on the birth certificate indicating the former. Miramontes is her mother's maiden name.) She is at emotional odds with her biological father, Malcolm McKay, a British filmmaker. ''My biological father is a jerk, and a hypocrite and a lech,'' McKay told USA Today -- or he has ''kept in touch with, often visited and financially supported his daughter through the years,'' as he asserted during an e-mail interview with The Buffalo News. (Stay with ''at odds.'' It takes only one to estrange.) She is related to Dylan Thomas -- as some press releases say -- or, according to Thomas's daughter, Aeronwy Thomas, she isn't. (Well, we're all descended from one guy in the Caucasus 50,000 years ago.) She and her mother-defender-manager, Robin Pappas, a smoky-voiced, cigarette-behind-the-ear ex-actress who married Malcolm McKay in England and left him when Nellie was 2, moved from Harlem to Washington State because of street violence -- specifically the at-the-time-notorious and still-unsolved murder of their housing-rights lawyer, Bruce Bailey -- or because Pappas's mother lived out there. (Bet on both.) McKay wants ''to be a hermit,'' by her own account, or she wants to be ''rich and famous,'' also by her own account. (Both again.) Her hair is brown, red or blond. (Bet on all three, serially.)

At some point, everyone agrees, McKay and her mother moved back East, to Swiftwater, Pa., in the Poconos, in part because they found an affordable place there that had enough outdoor space for all the animals they keep. (They're now down to three cats.) McKay went to junior high and high school there and played the saxophone and was often in boisterous conflict with her music teachers. After that she attended the Manhattan School of Music for a couple of years, until -- ''$73,000 later,'' she says bitterly -- finding the instruction too restrictive, she left in 2002. All sources seem to agree that after a brief try at stand-up comedy, she took the eclectic, ironic songs that she had been writing for some years and began performing them in various clubs around New York -- especially clubs with a large gay clientele, where, she says, if the performer is any good, ''the audience listens closely and is very demanding.''

It's also unanimous that as her underground reputation grew, various labels competed to sign her -- a competition that Columbia Records won in 2003 -- and that the artist subsequently insisted, over the company's objections, that her first release be a double CD. ''Get Away From Me'' was produced, apparently rancorously (and with a large array of instruments and special effects to supplement her piano playing), by McKay and Geoff Emerick, who was the engineer for the Beatles' ''Revolver,'' ''Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'' and ''Abbey Road.'' The album was released last February and has so far sold about 100,000 copies.

And, finally, no one -- from The New Republic to Time Out New York to Variety to The Washington Post to New York magazine to Entertainment Weekly to concert reviewers around the nation -- seems to have much uncertainty about McKay's talent and originality or her personal appeal. ''Invigorating . . . bracing,'' said People magazine; ''supremely gifted, charming and darkly funny,'' said The Washington Post; a ''rich mix of purity and pathos,'' said The Onion. The CD and her performances consist of very different kinds of melodies and styles -- pop and jazz and blues, as if she were a young artist experimenting with colors from a remarkably wide palette -- but almost none of the songs turn out to be what their melodies and arrangements might suggest. ''I Wanna Get Married,'' rendered in a wistful cabaret ballad style, contains lyrics like ''I wanna pack cute little lunches/for my Brady Bunches/then read Danielle Steel.'' A jaunty, almost rollicking number called ''It's a Pose'' belies its tuneful jollity with a casually vicious indictment of the entire male sex: ''Every sentence is a pretext for sex, sex, sex, sex/God you went to Oxford/head still in your boxers/but you're male so what should I expect?'' A ditty called ''Clonie'' (which echoes the 1967 hit ''Windy,'' by the Association), with a subtext about human interference with nature, expresses the perfect love of the singer for her clone: ''Who's the apple of my eye?/Why it's my very own/Clonie.''

Right now, Nellie McKay lives a lot of her life on the road. At one point last summer she performed in 30 different places -- including a benefit for Chinese children at the Great Wall of China -- in 60 days. When she's not touring and not retreating to the house in the Poconos that she shares with her mother and her mother's partner, Jack Young -- the man McKay calls Dad -- McKay lives out of an apartment on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan, north of Columbia University. It's a small first-floor studio crammed with books and nearly toppling towers of CD's and two robin's-egg-blue hard-shell suitcases and clothes and a piano with musical composition paper on which composition seemed, during a visit in the fall, to have temporarily given way to doodles of a happy kind. This all sounds messy (to be fair, on another visit the place was much neater), but it spoke of a coherently romantic existence -- the old-fashioned archetype of a young artist's life, heedless of appearances, with creativity disdaining order, volcanic energy scattering debris all around it.

Like an electric current, this reckless (and touchingly defiant) creativity runs through ''Get Away From Me.'' It's an increasingly above-ground underground hit, in which McKay's flexible voice, which can be soft or loud or wistful or angry or high or throaty, sings her ironic-to-polemical lyrics camouflaged by her various compositional styles.

Giving an introductory guided tour of the 300 square feet of her apartment, McKay -- about 5-foot-7 with blond hair, a truly porcelain complexion, wide brown eyes and a generous mouth -- had time to hit only the high points. She was dressed, as always, in vintage clothes, a more predictable mode than you might expect from this extravagantly eccentric person but part of her general hankering for the old days. One of the highest points, for her, was her certificate of life membership in the American Anti-Vivisection Society, which hung on a wall near the sink in the counter-bound short corridor of the apartment's kitchenette. McKay is a passionate, almost possessed animal rights activist, and she says she wants to be successful largely so that she can donate money to this cause.

Other highlights: one of those old manual-typewriter-case-like record players spinning a Donovan LP, with its typically wheezy, hurdy-gurdy sound. A refrigerator whose freezer contained Worthington Stakelets -- a vegetarian substitute for steak. ''I'm a vegan as of a few months ago,'' McKay said. ''The only thing I really miss from being just a vegetarian is pizza.'' A bookshelf containing titles like ''The Feminist Dollar: The Wise Woman's Buying Guide,'' by Phyllis Katz, and another heavily underlined and annotated book about the connection between male oppression and meat-eating, which serves up such chewy mouthfuls as ''Paralleling the elided relationship between metaphor and referent is the unacknowledged role of fragmentation in eating flesh,'' but which also, based on a very quick survey, appears to make a good deal of disturbing sense. A lampshade nearby sported a large button that read ''Osama $; your S.U.V.''

The tour over, McKay sat down on the edge of the bed. ''Do you think terrorism ever works?'' she asked. ''I mean against objects, like breaking windows, nothing about killing people, of course,'' she added. ''I mean, that's what the Boston Tea Party was, and it worked.'' She looked skeptical when told that the tea dumping and the revolution it began had more to do with burghers wanting to keep more of their money than with any radical ideology. But she listened carefully. ''I want to know everything,'' she said in reply. ''I want to go on a TV talk show and talk about anything!'' (She had been on ''Late Night With David Letterman'' and has since appeared on Conan O'Brien.)

For the time being, McKay had to make do with no cameras and an audience of one. Over the next half-hour the topics she covered ranged from the superiority of all-cotton sleepwear to old movies to the beautiful lighting in publicity shots for old-time movie stars versus the ''cheesy'' lighting in Halle Berry's publicity shots to the World Trade Organization to Ralph Nader (''At least he keeps shaking it up,'' she said) to her anxiety about avid fans to her impatience with her teachers at the Manhattan School of Music to the arguments with her record label over the idea of a two-disc CD to her hope to record a CD live in a women's prison.

On the aggressiveness of some of her followers: ''There's not that much difference between putting your hand in your pocket and pulling out a pen for me to sign something with and pulling out a gun.'' On her teachers at the Manhattan conservatory (except for one named David, on whom she had a crush and from whom she sadly asks for attention on the demi-hit single and music video that bear his name): ''They told me to take it slow, that careers are built slowly, but I mean Doris Day was 16 when she started singing. There's nothing unusual about what I'm trying to do -- it's an old story.'' (As if to prove the point, McKay, in late December, read the part of Polly Peachum, opposite Alan Cumming as Macheath, in a workshop of Wallace Shawn's powerful new translation of ''Threepenny Opera,'' set to open in New York next fall. During an intermission at one of these readings, Shawn said of McKay, with a beatific smile, ''She's beyond the beyond.'') On the definition of her music: ''What I sing is pop! Any music that becomes popular is pop. I don't even like cabaret.'' On her aversion to new movies: ''Too often they're about bad people doing bad things.'' On practice: ''I don't like to practice. For me, composing is practice.'' On the ways of record companies: ''They want me to be 'feminine,' to wear more 'form-fitting' clothes. That's what this stylist told me. And she was a lesbian. Can you believe it? And then there's all the schmoozing and wining and dining -- why can't they just do their jobs?'' On young men's reactions to her song ''It's a Pose'' -- the above-quoted catchy number about male oppression, violence and boorishness: ''Some guys come up to me and lean in with their eyes like this and say: 'You know it isn't true -- right? It's just a song -- right? We're not all like that. You know that -- right?' '' On the time of day, preceded by a string of expletives: ''I am so late. I'm supposed to be meeting this other journalist at the Plaza Hotel right now. But please, take this and read it.'' She offered a copy of Peter Singer's landmark book, ''Animal Liberation,'' and inscribed it with a friendly sketch of its sexagenarian recipient with the dialogue balloon ''Well, I don't know'' floating above his head.

In the taxi, McKay took a small stack of thin red sticky strips out of her purse, peeled one off and affixed it to the back of the front seat, just below the plastic money hopper. In black letters it said columbiacruelty.com -- the Internet address for a group opposed to animal experimentation at the university. This was McKay's own Tea Party terrorism against objects. Well, at least petty vandalism. And then she handed over a sheet of paper calling on the residents of the Upper West Side to petition the Landmarks Preservation Commission to save the interior of the old Metro movie theater on Broadway. ''It was built the same time Radio City was built,'' the circular stated at the bottom. (The theater has since been saved and it has reopened.) On the way downtown the cab passed some carriage horses. Take a guess what she had to say about them.

At the Plaza, a writer for a Berkeley jazz magazine who had seen McKay perform in Brooklyn the night before was waiting for her just outside the entrance. He was middle-aged, his eyes burned with an odd intensity and he was pretty creased and rumpled. When he walked into the Plaza with McKay, he said, ''This place is a dump.'' He sat with her at a table in the Oak Bar and set out a pocket tape recorder on the table between them and said to her, among many other things, that he loved an adjective that The New York Times used about her in a review: ''This adjective was perfect for your music.''

''What was it?'' McKay asked, seemingly all ears, and it was apparent what strange sights a young performer sees as she climbs the ladder of success, and it was also suddenly clear that if full-fledged stardom awaits her, she will not continue to have the time or energy to go on being this accommodating to the press and the public or the liberty to be as unguarded as she is now.

'''Overstuffed,''' the writer said.

'''Overstuffed,''' McKay said. ''Well, I might have preferred 'revolutionary.' ''

''If you want to be revolutionary, you have to set fire to yourself.''

Onstage at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park last August, as part of a series called Joe's Pub in the Park (sponsored by the Public Theater, which also finances the park's Shakespeare festival), McKay gave a winning one-hour solo performance that consisted of most of the songs on ''Get Away From Me'' and a playful new tribute to Teresa Heinz Kerry, ''Teresa,'' which seemed to owe about $1.95 to Paul Anka's ''Diana.'' She was wearing a pair of blue bib overalls and a red flowered peasant blouse and looked as if she might have just stopped by after harvesting hay in Sheep Meadow, south of the theater. Before she started singing, she did a bit of stand-up based on what the stage is most famously used for -- Shakespeare in the Park. She looked around and said: ''You are so kind, grand sir. My lady. My liege.'' The audience was with her immediately. ''The thing about Shakespeare,'' she said. ''Shakespeare.'' She paused and then said, as if confessing a cardinal sin, ''I always hated him.''

During the show, McKay temporarily lost her set list to a light breeze, forgot some lyrics, started over again and told herself with mock paranoia that she had to watch it because ''there are reporters here.'' She took a few seconds every now and then to gently swat some light-drunk bugs away -- she did not want to hurt them. One landed on a piano key. ''Ooooohhh,'' she said as if she were cooing over a kitten. She leaned over and inspected the bug. ''I can't tell if it's having a baby or dying,'' she said. She picked up the formerly errant set list -- a small white card -- pushed it under the bug that was in the throes of either death or labor, got up and walked across the stage and fanned the creature back to freedom.

In conversation or in concert, it's often unclear whether McKay's texts are texts or meta-texts, whether her self-consciousness is self-conscious or un-self-conscious, what her balance of ambition and idealism is. There can be little doubt that she is concerned about many of the issues she talks and sings about, and that she is extremely open to every kind of musical influence. She is like a reverse prism that takes light from everywhere, musically and socially and politically, and coalesces it into a single unique sensibility. (It's no wonder that the musical comparisons are so numerous.) But her words and her songs and her piano playing often tumble out as if under such great hydraulic pressure that they threaten to overwhelm not only the spectators but the player herself.

Backstage at the Delacorte after her performance, McKay sat in a windowless room greeting visitors and well-wishers, two of them claiming connections to her and her career, about which she looked uncertain. When she was finally left (almost) alone, she said: ''I don't like playing in New York so much. I think I'm boring everyone. They all know me. I like Omaha. I'm new there.'' Now she looked like nothing more than a stage waif. ''I've been on the road for two years singing the songs on this record,'' she went on. ''I'm very tired. I'm going to quit.''

Yeah, right.

Daniel Menaker is executive editor in chief of Random House.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Back before the world heard of her (November 3, 2002) she sang some Gigi Gryce tunes at Smalls in NYC with the Chris Byars Octet, who are good friends of hers. It was a celebration kind of thing after the book was published.

Mike

[jlhoots]

I have the 2 CD set.

I like it.

[ghost of miles]

I really like several of the sides on her new CD, NORMAL AS BLUEBERRY PIE (a Doris Day tribute). Her version of Jobim's "Meditation" in particular. She skirts preciousness at times but for the most part avoids it.