Well the guy from the Post loved her; and go figure, no April Lavine references.
Nellie McKay: What a Pleasant Surprise
By Joe Heim
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, February 27, 2004; Page C02
Let Nellie McKay become a huge star. Let her find fame and fortune and fantabulous success. Because at just 19, this supremely gifted, charming and darkly funny New York oddball has all the makings of the first great singer-songwriter of the young century.
For a majestic 90 minutes at the Barns at Wolf Trap on Wednesday night, McKay sat alone at a grand piano and thoroughly entertained the audience -- many of whom, it can be assumed, had no idea what was about to occur. There's no anticipating a force this tornadic or inspired. She is like Tori Amos if Amos had a sense of humor, or Ani DiFranco if DiFranco had an ounce of cleverness. So she is nothing like them at all.
She is a wordplaying fiend who can rhyme "Attila the Hun" with "cinnamon bun" and make it sound brilliant instead of ridiculous. She is simply a great original with a voice so remarkably expressive and lyrics so strange, funny, cutting and sublime, you wonder what universe spawned her.
"Liberace is a hero of mine," said McKay (rhymes with "rye") as she sat down at the piano. It was perhaps an explanation for her attire, a simple black dress topped by a spangly emerald bolero that might have been stolen from the late pianist's attic. With that, she played the first of many songs from her major label debut, "Get Away From Me" (the title's a cheeky jab at Norah Jones's "Come Away With Me").
On her hilarious stalker anthem, "Won't U Please B Nice," she declaims:
If you would sit
Oh so close to me
That would be nice
Like it's supposed to be
If you don't
I'll slit your throat
So won't you please be nice.
And from the mordant "Toto Dies":
Yeah, I'll have my coffee black
Hey look, we're bombing Iraq
I guess that's the only way
Oh, did I tell you we got Fifi spayed?
Categorizing McKay's bouncy and exuberant musical style is almost impossible: It's cabaret, it's Broadway, it's rap, it's Beat, it's folk, it's Tin Pan Alley, it's jazz, it's rock. It reminds you of everything, and it's like nothing you've ever heard. She sang songs in Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish and, yes, "American." ("Well, it really is its own language," she explained.) She sang in German and somehow made even that sound beautiful.
She's also a topical wiz with a twinkle in her eye. After the Japanese song, she explained that it was "about gay marriage," pause, "oh, and Jesus Christ's last days."
McKay's songs and patter are peppered with profanities (her album is stamped with a parental-advisory sticker), yet they are so cleverly used they sound less like gratuitous expletives than delightfully spicy bon mots. Though composed and self-assured, she fumbles about a bit as well. She even apologized in advance for the teenageyness of one her songs and told the crowd to blame it on the "youth and arrogance and inexperience of me."
But McKay isn't just simply funny or racy or peculiar. She combines bathos and humor, and can take a song like "I Wanna Get Married" and a line like "I wanna pack lunches for my Brady Bunches" and make them sound both tongue-in-cheek and sweetly heartfelt. Her channeling of Billie Holiday on a beautiful rendition of the jazz standard "Body and Soul" was more evidence of her wide-ranging gifts. Let her become a star.
