Two decades and a couple years ago, a much-younger version of singer-songwriter Nellie McKay showed up for a New York recording session with the late sound engineer and producer Geoff Emerick. McKay was a little known 21-year-old who performed to small audiences in Manhattan night clubs. Emerick’s resume already included work on such Beatles albums as Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road.
The 18 cuts recorded in that session would become Get Away from Me, McKay’s sardonically titled debut CD, which suddenly put her on the musical map. Critics swooned, or at least some of them did. The New York Times called Get Away from Me “a tour de force.” The Guardian said it was “dizzying in its scope and ambition, fizzing with energy as McKay hurtles from one instrument to another, one genre to the next.” Rolling Stone gave the album four stars, and the next thing she knew, McKay was being hosted on Late Night With David Letterman and NPR’s Morning Edition.
Cut ahead to the present, and McKay is revisiting that breakout moment with a national tour promoting her most recent album, Gee Whiz: The Get Away From Me Demos, a double LP — yes, she’s embraced vinyl — that consists of raw material from those recordings. She’ll perform at The Shedd Institute at 7:30 Wednesday, Sept. 10.
McKay is an artist whose genius lives outside the bonds of genre or history. Over the past two decades she’s channeled Doris Day, embraced jazz standards such as “Sentimental Journey,” flirted with hip hop, covered ’60s bubble-gum pop numbers, done an entire show about a woman convicted of murder and executed in California, and churned out quirky tunes on the ukelele about everything from her love of animals to the challenges of romance.
If she’s had trouble staying in the limelight in recent years, it may be because no one can quite figure out who she is. McKay shifts genres like some people change clothes. She’s booked to sing in an off-Broadway premiere Oct. 15 of Let’s Love!, a trio of one-acts written by filmmaker Ethan Coen. There’s even some dispute about her actual birthdate. By some accounts, that recording session with Emerick took place when she was 19, not 21.
Get Away From Me has adorable songs about dogs, (“The Dog Song,”), but also lyrics on “Toto Dies,” like “Yeah I’ll have my coffee black/ Hey look we’re bombing Iraq.”
In a wide-ranging hour-long phone call with McKay last month, I asked what it was like for her to listen again to those 18 tracks from her youth, love songs, hate songs and all.
“Yeah,” she said. “You know, you got a lot of energy, so it’s great! I guess it’s for anyone looking at old pictures, it’s nice not to know anything and go out in the world. I mean, really, you know more things then, and you’ve gotta spend the rest of your life unlearning everything that’s pushed on you.”
I also wondered whether it was intimidating for her to work with someone like Geoff Emerick. Not at all, she insisted.
“Oh, he just became Geoff,” she said. “He just — he just always wanted scraps. He just said, ‘We’ll put some food together, and I’ll just have the scraps.’”
I also asked her how she deals with the challenge all artists face, to maintain creativity over the long haul.
“I think just life is so frenetic if you can try to stay away from all the noise, but that’s, that’s very hard. You know, I think it’s tricky if you love life, you know? So I don’t have any good answer. What makes creativity, I don’t know. But there’s inspiration everywhere. I mean, there’s, there’s so much. Wow! There’s just not enough time.”
At last, she segues into ideas about art and memory.
“Anyone can look back at their life and, whatever it was, make something of that. And so this whole thing of, you know, always live your life for the future, and where are you headed? I disagree with that. I think to inspire you, almost anyone could stop right now and just, you know, look at their life so far. And that would keep ‘em going for the rest of their life.”
Nellie McKay performs at 7:30 pm Wednesday, Sept. 10, at The Shedd Institute. Tickets and more info at TheShedd.org.