Nellie McKay

Did you see the Bob Dylan thing?” Nellie McKay inquires, eyes flickering, face curious. I presume McKay is referring to Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, the mesmerizing PBS biopic which aired in September, and nod vigorously. “My mom TiVo’d it,” McKay smiles. “I really like his style. I like his whole approach.”

McKay may be praising Dylan’s big black sunglasses and his squinty swagger, but since the release of her 2004 debut, Get Away From Me, she’s certainly emulated Dylan’s squirrelly relationship with the press, launching a series of in-print performance pieces: in 2003, McKay was 19 or 22, depending on who asked and when. Her father may or may not have been incarcerated for a violent crime, and they may or may not be on speaking terms. She insisted she only wore flats and shoulder pads, and unapologetically song-stalked men (see Get Away From Me’s “David”) who supposedly lived in her apartment building. She spouted zany, eccentric anecdotes like clockwork, living up to the Doris Day-meets-Eminem captions slapped beneath publicity shots of her in red lipstick, arms tossed up with wild-eyed glee, a wacky, big-mouthed, teenage ingénue. NPR adored her. But the real hee-haw? McKay is actually a remarkably sweet, forthcoming and humble person, a practicing feminist and animal rights activist who loves her manager-mother and doesn’t own a television set. She’s disarmingly quiet, keeping her head down.

On a damp Friday afternoon, McKay and I meet at Dublin House, a dark and crusty Irish pub on Manhattan’s Upper West Side (a subway hop from her West Harlem apartment). At 3 p.m., Dublin House already boasts plenty of grey-haired stool-warmers placing Coors Light orders with a blonde, brogue-heavy bartender and eating stale potato chips from wooden bowls. We find a table in the back, where we sip pint glasses of warm Coke. McKay, tiny and blonde in a navy skirt-suit, inquires earnestly about my pet cat, my writing and if I like living in Brooklyn, purring and smiling with genuine concern. We talk about American roots music and houses with backyards and the Village Voice. She’s not crazy, or cartwheeling, or spewing ridiculous anecdotes. She’s only uncomfortable when pressed to discuss her new record, the addictively weird, gorgeously irreverent Pretty Little Head.

“I’m not at peace with it,” McKay sighs. “Did you get the 16-track promo? Or the 23-track promo?” I sense what’s coming and grimace, dutifully clawing through my backpack and handing over the disc Columbia Records sent to my apartment that morning. “So this is what the advance copies look like? Oh, this is very interesting,” McKay seethes. “Well, that’s wrong. I can’t believe people go to school and they get the salaries they get… this is very interesting. I’ve been trying to get my label to drop me but they won’t. I’m serious, I want out so bad. Here, I’ll give you all 23 tracks,” McKay insists, digging through her purse and handing me a CD-R. “Each track, they’re all something different.”

“Different” is certainly an apt description of McKay’s work and trajectory. After dropping out of the Manhattan College of Music, where she studied jazz-voice for two years, McKay began her professional singing career by touring the gay cabaret clubs of Greenwich Village; major-label interest followed, and Columbia Records ultimately won an intense bidding war, signing McKay to a seven-record deal. The first double-disc debut ever released by a woman, Get Away From Me, inadvertently cast McKay as the anti-Norah, the foul-mouthed, leg-kicking antidote to Jones’ smooth, coffee-table jazz-pop. The record collected glowing reviews, each emphasizing its anachronistic, non-mainstream appeal: McKay was smirking and wry, alternately skewering and celebrating venerated American institutions over unforgettable piano melodies—each rolled out with Tin Pan Alley-meets-Def Jam aplomb. As a contemporary artist, McKay is remarkably, wonderfully difficult to define, even beyond the press-kit confusion, the backstory rife with alarming contradictions, the magazine feature hijinks—both Get Away From Me and Pretty Little Head are stylistic tornadoes, as modern as they are old-fashioned. Ultimately, McKay is so compelling because she’s defiant and unmarketable, strange but eminently lovable: pop critics and talk show hosts finally settled on “eccentric” as the word that best summed her up.