CostelloNews.com

Smarter Than You Think

by John Boonstra - August 12, 2004

AMY T. ZIELINKSKI PHOTO

Nellie McKay: The world doesn't change as much as I would like it to. And some of us already thought she was pretty darned smart.

Nellie McKay is standing on a sidewalk outside a midtown Manhattan recording studio on a muggy August evening. It's the only place where her cellphone will come through clearly for this interview. "It's not a problem--all in a day's work!"
McKay's first album, the double-CD Get Away from Me , was released in February and has accumulated enthusiastic reviews and steady sales. In its breadth of styles and its ambition, it's been favorably compared to the Beatles' White Album . Which, as it happens, was engineered by Get Away's producer, the estimable Geoff Emerick . I'll tell you right now: it's the year's best record, bar none, and the most impressive debut I've heard in a decade

Just 19, McKay was born in London, spent most of her first decade raised by a single mom in Harlem, then sojourned in Washington state and Pennsylvania. Dropping out of the Manhattan School of Music in 2002, she began a cabaret career at gay bars in the Village, building a reputation which soon found her courted by several major labels. "It's crazy," she says of that time. "Virgin wanted to have me as a rap artist. I could've had an album full of 'Sari's, gone a completely different way with it." She's what must be her album's biggest stumbling block for listeners drawn in by the piano-based balladry of several of her songs, which might've made her the next Norah Jones if only she'd toned down the biting wit and confined herself to a single musical genre. But "Sari" is an unapologetic angry-white-female rap, full of expletives which earn the CD its parental warning label. It's not the only conceptual leap she demands of her audience. She references The Wizard of Oz (on "Toto Dies"), playfully croons about the ethical issues raised by cloning ("Clonie," of course), engages in a feisty feminist dialogue with a symbolic male whom she kneecaps with the line, "Your arrogance is what makes you special" ("It's a Pose").

"I've got too many people coming up to me who really seem to enjoy the entire album, who can listen across the spectrum. But of course there'll always be people who have problems with one song. I skip over 'Yellow Submarine' every time I listen to Revolver . I don't really think that's a stumbling block. I think most albums--well, a lot of albums--have one or two good songs, and the rest is crap. A lot of albums are misrepresented by the single that sells them--some heavy metal with one sweet song. So if we have one single that hits it won't be any greater misrepresentation than all the other stuff that's out there. I think people actually hope for a surprise.

"For the Beatles it happened quite organically, and for me too. I'd hear a disco track, and I'd want to write a disco track, you know? All the time there's just so much good music which moves you. and you want to replicate it somehow. It informs what you do."

There's little doubt of McKay's political persuasion. The first song, "David," an upbeat ditty about unrequited romance, contains a verse targeted at the current president, in which "Mr. Bushie" shows up on TV, prompting the singer to click off the remote: "There you have my vote/Catchin' the next boat out of here." In another song, a disinterested narrator blithely notes, "Hey look, we're bombing Iraq."

"I do think the topicality [of the album] is underrated. I just feel politics are so important. But say there's a line about bombing Iraq. That was topical over 10 years ago. If you watch Bob Roberts , that movie hasn't aged a day. Unfortunately, things that are topical in anyone's day tend to stay relevant, because the world doesn't change as much as I would like it to."

It's no surprise that when she's not thinking about a songwriting assignment for NPR which is giving her far too much difficulty, or waxing enthusiastic about writing a musical based on the graphic novel The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom , or racing back into the studio for more work on her next album, due out early next year, she's consumed by the first presidential election where'll be able to cast a ballot.

"I vote in Pennsylvania, and as such I know who I gotta vote for. But I wish I wasn't living in a swing state. People who live in New York who are truly progressive, who think their gay friends should have equal rights, who truly believe that to stay in Iraq is to succumb to this militaristic ethic. We don't belong there, they don't want us there, we should get out--if I lived in a safe state, I'd vote for Nader. I'm voting in a state where it matters, so honestly I don't see how I can vote for him. But I really resent how the Democratic Party is trying to stop him. It's stupid: Kerry's trump card is Iraq, and he doesn't differentiate himself from Bush at all. We've got to get beyond this Republican Lite philosophy. It's just ridiculous."

A mention of Emerick's production of Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom prompts her musings on her own life as an artist. "It's interesting, because [Costello] has proven himself adept at getting publicity, and that's something that I hope to do. And he's gotten a good amount of critical praise, which I hope to sustain. Though I don't believe critics should be in the position that they are...And he has a certain amount of don't-push-me-around-ness about him, and I certainly think I have that. So I would like to have the artistic freedom and longevity he's had.

"I just try at every step of the process to do the right thing, and not the thing that will get me to a place where I can do more right things. Because it's easy to rationalize your whole career away on that basis."

Nellie McKay appears at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield on Friday, Aug. 13. <