Nellie McKay is blond (when she's not a brunette or redhead), somewhere between 20 and 25, and a unique singer-songwriter who's as brilliantly, uh, inventive about her biography as she is with her music.
Music first. McKay's 2004 album "Get Away From Me" was a sly, infectious inversion of Norah Jones' romantic "Come Away With Me."
Deftly set to sounds from lounge-jazz to hip hop, ironic McKay (pronounced mick-EYE) lyrics like "I want to get married/That's why I was born" triggered an avalanche of adoring press, from People and Elle to The Onion.
But McKay's album sold a fraction of Jones' megahit, and Columbia Records dropped the artist after she finished her (still unreleased) follow-up, "Pretty Little Head."
"They kept the coffee pot, I got the dog," she says. "All that matters to me is that I can continue to make irritating music, which will baffle and enrage."
Welcome to McKay's postmodern cabaret, where lyrics mix playful humor and serious satire in dizzying tonal shifts, where music evokes Kurt Weill, Bob Dylan and Doris Day with delicious artistic incongruity.
Born in London to a film director and an aspiring actress, McKay was whisked to Harlem when her mom left her dad, then to Washington State and then to the Poconos, where she learned the saxophone and honed her piano chops.
She tried stand-up comedy, then started polishing her eclectic tunes in New York clubs.
The word on her was so hot Columbia competed to sign her. When they dropped her, McKay was already committed to a new production of "Threepenny Opera," by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (it opens in April at Studio 54, with Cyndi Lauper and Alan Cumming).
Tomorrow night, she performs at the Allen Room, part of the American Songbook series.
"I'm playing solo and winging it with material," she says, "some of mine, some covers, depending on the mood I'm in." She pauses, then adds archly, "You know how women are."
And if you don't, she'll tell you.
Originally published on February 24, 2006
