----- Original Message ----- From: "Josh Chasin" > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Stewart Mason" >> 1. Nellie McKay -- Get Away From Me (Columbia) ("Ding Dong") > > A friend of mine was just raving about this (in writing) the other > day. So now I'm curious. Tell us more? Nellie McKay is a 22-year-old Scots-American singer/songwriter who started in the cabaret scene in New York. Actually, the press kit for her album originally claimed that she was 19 -- I had a moderately public debate elsewhere with the journalist who "broke the story" that McKay was lying about her age a few months ago; she seemed to feel that this was a scandal on the level of Abu Ghraib, and literally said that it meant she couldn't enjoy McKay's album anymore because she thought it was now tainted by dishonesty. I gently broke it to her that Bob Dylan was really a middle-class Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota named Robert Zimmerman, and that Jack White's real name was John Gillis and that he wasn't really Meg White's brother, but her ex-husband. While I agree that it's slightly disturbing that a singer/songwriter who's already 13 years younger than me would shave three years off her age, pop music is filled with people who lie in their bios. GET AWAY FROM ME is her major-label debut, following a self-titled and self-released record that was #5 on my 2003 list. (Auditeer -- now former, I believe -- Deb Albericci is the person who hipped me to her early.) My fear when I found out that she was signed to a major had been that Columbia was going to try to mold her into being the new Norah Jones, but when the album came out with a title that -- despite McKay's protestations to the contrary -- clearly seems to be a parody of Jones' COME AWAY WITH ME, I relaxed on that. There are points of comparison to Norah Jones: Nellie McKay is young, and female, and she plays the piano, and she's really really cute, and there are jazz and cabaret influences in her music. BUT, while Jones' music is almost painfully earnest, Nellie McKay is a world-class smart-ass. A much better point of comparison would be Randy Newman, although McKay doesn't often sing "in character" the way Newman does. (Although she does on "Ding Dong," my favorite song on the album, where the singer is drawn into a lifelong downward spiral of alcoholism and depression because her cat died; this song pulls off the exceedingly difficult trick of being very funny and quite sad at the same time.) Even the relatively straightforward songs on the album, like the absolutely lovely "I Wanna Get Married," have a few snarky lines, and most of my favorites are downright cutting: the most Norah-like song on the album, "Really," is a gorgeous little ballad for jazz trio plus trumpet, and it sounds like the ultimate Starbucks music until you notice that the lyrics are a woman insincerely apologizing to someone, saying that while she knows she's supposed to care about him and his problems, she really just can't be arsed to. For my money, Nellie McKay might well be the best lyricist in pop music right now. Musically, besides the Jones and Newman references, there's a huge helping of IMPERIAL BEDROOM (as on that album, Geoff Emerick produced this, at Abbey Road) and the rest of Elvis Costello's catalogue, a lot of Kirsty MacColl (McKay has a similar fondness for Latin music, which shows up in songs like the slightly Brazilian "Suitcase Song" and "Respectable"), and a bit of the fondly-remembered (by me, anyway) Suddenly, Tammy! on the more indiepop-oriented songs like "Inner Peace" and "Toto Dies." Rather than point out any of these similarities, Columbia chose to promote the album with a line like "Doris Day meets Eminem," which only means that Nellie McKay favors '50s-inspired clothing (she looks a bit like Renee Zellweger in DOWN WITH LOVE -- have I mentioned that she's really really cute?) and likes to swear. So it's really no wonder that the album didn't really sell very well. > So I went to Amazon to check out Nellie McKay-- double album for > $8.99, hard to pass up-- and under the place where they tell you > what other albums customers of this one bought, what should I see > byut Franz Ferdinand? Stewart, just how many copies of these albums > have you bought? Can't be blamed for the FF, but as it happens, three different members of my family were given copies of GET AWAY FROM ME as part of their Christmas present, and I did get them from Amazon! S