Pages tagged “nellie mckay”

As Ben Gibbard ponders the meaning of life in our May issue, Brian Howe explores the nature of mother through the song lyrics of rap stars, indie rockers and, uh, Glen Danzig. Though the most important conclusion I drew from the piece is that I am really glad Danzig is not my son, it also reinforced for me the notion that, much like armpits, everybody has a mom—and like armpits, some people’s moms stink. Like, really stink—Ghostface Killah’s mom beat him for peeing the bed! Harsh, Mama Killah!

Quite unlike armpits, though, mothers are the subject of a few great songs. Iron & Wine’s “Upward Over the Mountain” and Smog’s “I Feel Like The Mother Of The World” are two of my favorites among the ones Howe mentions. Of course, it’s not just men that have immortalized and/or vilified their mothers in song. Plenty of female musicians have raised a musical glass to the women they came from (and may or may not, one day, become). Though lacking in Oedipal awkwardness, these songs still pack a punch.

Adorable songstress Nellie McKay will pay a visit to over a dozen U.S. cities to support her upcoming fall release Obligatory Villagers (September 25).

The wit-prone activist is receiving quite the praise for her shows, which the Washington Post says have “buckets of comedic moments.”

Get doused in giggles:

August
22 - New York, N.Y. @ Joe’s Pub

September
24 - Northampton, Mass. @ Iron Horse
25 - New York, N.Y. @ Williamsburg Music Hall
27 - Alexandria, Va. @ Birchmere
28 - Philadelphia, Pa. @ World Café Live

October
2 - Boston, Mass. @ Paradise Rock Club
4 - San Francisco, Calif. @ The Independent
6 - Seattle, Wash. @ Crocodile Café
7 - Portland, Ore. @ Aladdin Theater
8 - San Diego, Calif. @ Casbah
11 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ Largo
12 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ Largo
16 - Boulder, Colo. @ Trilogy Lounge
17 - Aspen, Colo. @ Belly Up
19 - Austin, Texas @ The Parish

Related links:
NellieMcKay.com
Nellie McKay announces Obligatory release
Nellie McKay: Princess of the Protest Ditty

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.

Songstress and closet comedian Nellie McKay is set to release Obligatory Villagers on September 25. Like its one-year-old, Broadway-tinted sibling Pretty Little Head, the songs were written, produced and arranged by McKay, and will come out via the activist’s own label Hungry Mouse imprint.

The British-born, States-raised pop jazz songwriter recruited jazz greats like Phil Woods and David Liebman to a recording studio nestled in the Pocono Mountains. McKay has also been known to contribute to The Onion and has appeared on Broadway.

Related links:
NellieMcKay.com
Nellie McKay: Princess of the Protest Ditty
Nellie McKay on AllMusic

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.

It seems strange to suggest that Atlanta's Variety Playhouse would be too big of a venue for a show. Most nights, audience members find themselves standing shoulder-to-shoulder, crammed by the force of the surrounding bodies closer and closer to the stage, faces nonetheless upturned with rapt attention toward the evening's performer.

Although the crowd at was no less engrossed on this night, when Manhattanite piano pixie Nellie McKay appeared at the Little Five Points venue (her first foray into the south), the house was considerably less packed. With café tables and chairs set up on the floor of the venue, McKay's audience was afforded something novel for such a hip locale - a little elbow room. While the relatively low turnout was a shame on a very basic level, since McKay is both a fantastic songwriter and performer, the small crowd actually made the night all the more special for the few proud attendees.

As always, McKay refused to limit herself to one genre, moving seamlessly from socially-aware pseudo-rap to sultry jazz numbers to upbeat piano-pop selections, each infused with her ebullient wit and preternatural, worldly insight. Often referring to songbooks of her own material, McKay found herself tongue-tied on a few of the more rap-heavy pieces, but blew it off with a smile and a toss of her Marilyn Monroe-esque coif.

It was impossible to hold such gaffes against her though, so stellar was the rest of the performance. McKay could make even a monstrous venue feel like a teeny East Village coffeehouse with her bitingly poignant lyrics and instrumental virtuosity - not to mention her often tangential between-song banter. On this night alone, her rants ranged from the importance of spaying and neutering pets to championing an Atlanta vegetarian restaurant, where she'd had lunch that afternoon.

Delivered in person, even the selections that seem infallible on CD took on new life on stage. "Clonie," a blithe ditty exploring the wonders of having a genetically identical life companion, and "Cupcake," a deceptively sweet ode to the battle for gay marriage in the United States, seemed especially right at home alongside kitschy classics like "Hey, Good Lookin'" and "It's A Long Way to Tipperary." Most of the set list came from her 2003 Columbia debut, Get Away From Me, with a few selections thrown in from her much-embattled second album, Pretty Little Head, a squabble over which prompted her split from Columbia in early 2006. (Officially unreleased at the time of the concert, McKay has since announced that she will be releasing the full 23-track version of the album on her own Hungry Mouse label in collaboration with spinART, on October 31.)

McKay ended the night with an encore, after re-emerging from backstage apparently wiping tears from her eyes, as the audience cheered and clapped. After launching into a seven-song medley of tunes new and old, originals and standards, she politely declined a shouted request to “Stay forever!”– though, for just a moment, it seemed like the Little Crowd That Could would be so lucky.

Nellie McKay’s Official Website

The über talent Nellie McKay is set to release the self-produced double album, Pretty Little Head , on Halloween, through her own label, Hungry Mouse. The two-CD set features duets with k.d. lang and Cyndi Lauper, and a color booklet of photos and lyrics.

In addition to producing and releasing her own album, McKay has been working on the score for the movie-musical, The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom, as well as supporting get-out-the-vote efforts and helping with the campaign to close Columbia's primate laboratories.

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.

Now, McKay seems exhausted by the press juggernaut which fueled Get Away From Me, and anxious to eschew the trappings of major-label servitude. “I just remember when I got that check, I thought ‘I’m never gonna write another song again.’ As soon as you’re legitimatized in any way, you feel like you’ve lost everything,” she sighs. “I like the way Ani DiFranco does things. I know how difficult I am. But once you’ve created even a small niche for yourself, you can get a distribution deal. It’s just the getting out [of the contract] … I don’t know why they won’t let me go, I’m such a surly cuss. Really, I just ask them to let me do my job, and for them to do theirs. Remember in the Bob Dylan film, how they talked about how they used to look for someone with something to say? And now it’s all about the money. It’s about the corporation,” she shrugs.

McKay may lament Columbia’s interference, but she maintains impressive control over both her work and her image: we snicker over a giant list-feature in another music magazine, in which nearly all the men are wearing shirts and pants while the women are squirming in tank tops and making sex-faces, an age-old machination McKay battles regularly (“They’ll take hundreds of pictures, and then use the one where you’ve accidentally got your mouth open,” she says. “I don’t want to be someone’s hot dog.”) Still, McKay’s most impressive bit of self-empowerment is having written, performed, and produced Pretty Little Head by herself: “I loved working with Geoff [Emerick, who produced McKay’s debut, and, perhaps more famously, engineered The Beatles’ Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road], but the way we did this one, it was just whenever we had a day, here and there. I couldn’t have worked with anyone on a regular basis. I know what I want, so this way I just argue with myself instead of someone else.” Still, Pretty Little Head, which was executive produced by McKay’s mother, is not all Nellie alone: the record features duets with k.d. lang (“We Had It Right”) and former tourmate Cyndi Lauper, who co-wrote the explosive duet “Bee Charmer,” which plays like a quasi-tortured phone conversation between two best friends. “With both Cyndi and k.d. you let them boss you around, and you enjoy it!” McKay giggles.

“We recorded mostly at night, just me and my mother. We have our shorthand. I love my mom,” McKay grins. (The one-woman clapping at the end of opener “Cupcake” gives a good idea of the intimacy of their studio teamwork.) “It takes so long to just finish. There’s such bureaucracy. It’s not like you can just write a song and record it and put it out. The recording, in itself, takes enough time. But then you wait and wait and wait. Everything has to have a big build up. I remember this thing Cameron Diaz said where she can’t wait to retire. Just get high on medication and drive a golf cart around. I’d really like to do that.” Unsurprisingly, retirement is not imminent for the songwriter. McKay is currently finishing the score to the musical adaptation of The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom, based on Katherine Arnoldi’s young-adult novel, and she’s set to star in Wallace Shawn’s Broadway adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, alongside The Sopranos’ Edie Falco and Tony-winner Alan Cumming.

As a songwriter, McKay’s sharp, theatrical flair is mostly unmatched by her peers, and she embraces politics and humor as wholly compatible aesthetics. Unsurprisingly, McKay refuses to temper her beliefs for fickle pop palettes (“Cupcake” is a fireworks-and-shimmies fight for gay marriage, “The Big One” lambastes gentrification and the lack of tenants’ rights in New York City). McKay campaigned hard for John Kerry in 2004, writing “Teresa,” a heretofore unreleased ode to Teresa Heinz-Kerry (which wisely cautions “Don’t you insult Ms. Kerry/ Don’t you dismiss Heinz/ Oh-ee, Teresa!”), and remains a staunch vegetarian and an active PETA member. Likewise, McKay regularly reps for ColumbiaCruelty.com, a PETA-sponsored website which offers up the grisly details of Columbia University’s increasingly contentious animal-research labs (located in McKay’s own Harlem neighborhood), behind a grim, stone-faced voiceover from Alec Baldwin. PETA claims Columbia researchers routinely employ insufficient anesthesia for unnecessarily cruel operations on baboons and puppies, and in 2003, the university was forced to pay USDA fines for documented offenses regarding their low or improper anesthesia habits. In response, PETA has been crashing Columbia alumni dinners and awards receptions, and sending letters to prominent alumni (including NBA commissioner David Stern).

Meanwhile, as a celebrity endorser, McKay pulls her weight well: Pretty Little Head features an indictment of the laboratories, aptly titled “Columbia Is Bleeding.” The song opens with faux giggles and pep-rally hollers, before McKay, breathless and livid, coos prettily: “Here comes the footsteps of the man who makes you dream / The tube is fitted in / And there you are / And then a scream / The surgeon is in town / And there you are / The clamp is coming down / And then a scream.” The rest of the verses detail, in rapid-fire, the relative obliviousness of the university population, who ignore protesters in favor of more banal collegiate concerns; the song closes with a pointed howl of “This is the Ivy League!” Vaguely embarrassed, I admit to McKay that I graduated from Columbia. She nods sympathetically. But civil disobedience is in her bones.

“Even when I was a kid, I was writing protest letters. And sometimes, you get a victory. Sometimes it feels like, I don’t know, like you’re in the New Orleans flood, and you’re just throwing back handfuls of water. And then someone comes along with a water bulldozer of celebrity, and you get more help, more attention.”

McKay is careful to avoid self-righteousness, but her conviction is still striking and thick. “If you took away all the violence in the world, there would still be suffering. Why do people, in so many ways, have to contribute to it? Any celebrity who wears fur…” McKay trails off. “Look, if I know that someone has a problem with something, I’m going to ask why they have that problem. I’m very strongly pro-choice but I know a lot of very anti-abortion people, and I understand their position. Whereas people who wear fur, they’re deliberately being assholes. They’re saying ‘I don’t care, period.’”

Dublin House continues to fill as we ease into 5 p.m., and conversation somehow slips circuitously back to Bob Dylan and No Direction Home: “The part with the press conference, where they ask him to suck his glasses?” She shakes her head, and softens. “It must be tough to write about someone and try to be honest. I just think that journalists can be kind of deceitful,” she muses delicately, in what might be a gentle attempt at reconciling the facts of her own twisted history, as written by reporters. “It’s like, why are you pretending?”

[Ed. Note - a month after this story was published, McKay's publicist informed us the artist had split with Sony Records. As a result, the release of Pretty Little Head has been postponed until further notice.]

Songstress Nellie McKay has split with Sony Records. This comes as no surprise—during a recent Paste interview, McKay told contributing editor Amanda Petrusich, “I’ve been trying to get my label to drop me but they won’t. I’m serious, I want out so bad.”

When asked the reason for the breakup, McKay responded, “It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why. They kept the coffee pot, I got the dog.” She added, “All that matters to me is that I can continue to make irritating music which will baffle and enrage.”

(Above: McKay gives away her album to fans who can answer her trivia questions. Photo by Kristina Feliciano.)

Nellie McKay did everything wrong at her show on Monday night in Manhattan, from forgetting lyrics to distributing an article from a vegetarian magazine. And the result was one of her finest performances yet. The only problem facing those lucky enough to witness it was figuring out how to describe it.

McKay has never been easy to classify, though many have tried. She’s a piano-playing singer/songwriter whose repertory includes torch songs, satire, rap, and sunny, socially conscious diatribes, all variously informed by jazz, bossa nova, the Beatles, show tunes, and Randy Newman, for starters. McKay is only 20 but dresses like a Sunday-school teacher. And her diction—round vowels and never a hard “er”—is in the practiced manner of an actress from yesteryear. She’s Sandra Dee, Fanny Brice, Patti Smith and Al Franken all rolled up in one, with a piano. Or something like that.

On Monday night at Makor, a subterranean space on the Upper West Side, McKay was promoting her new album, Pretty Little Head (which has since been temporarily shelved due to McKay’s split with Columbia Records), the follow-up to 2004’s Get Away From Me. Like that effort, Pretty is a fitful mix of styles and themes. And like Get Away, it’s distractingly—and, some might say, annoyingly—busy. Just a few years ago, when McKay was still playing small clubs with sticky tables, she built an avid following using only her piano and preternatural wit and wisdom. She still has all three, but the addition of a full band on her recordings actually blunts McKay’s edges. Tonight, she led a quartet featuring standup bass, drums, sax and guitar. But the best-received songs—in a set list that spanned both albums (including Get Away’s priceless ode to cloning, “Clonie”)—were the ones she performed on piano with only the bass backing her: an exquisite rendition of Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do” and the Pretty Little Head ballad “Gladd,” which McKay said she wrote for a friend who recently passed away.

That’s not to say McKay disappointed elsewhere. She’s that rare entertainer who can command a room under virtually any circumstance. Realizing she hadn’t brought the lyrics to one song, she breezily promised she’d “la-di-da” through any parts of it that she couldn’t remember. And when she paused early on to do a “raffle”—giving away CDs to people who could answer questions like ‘who can tell me the date civil partnerships between gay couples became legal in England [for the record, it’s Dec. 21]—it wasn’t disruptive; it was charming.

And lest this devoted animal-rights activist anger anyone by distributing copies of a Satya magazine article about the pets abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, McKay ended with a zing. She explained she’d wanted Bob Dylan to duet with her on “We Had It Right,” a song on the new album, but he turned her down, so she got k.d. lang instead. But, as she launched into the tune, she told us to imagine Dylan singing lang’s parts. And then she sang them herself, contrasting her own cotton-candy delivery with Dylan’s trademark wheezy, vowel-extending style. And when she left the stage and the lights came up, the crowd was still laughing. They may not have known exactly what they’d just seen. But they knew it was really something.