Nellie McKay - "Get Away From Me!"

Nellie McKay - Get Away From Me!, 2004 - Sony

Somebody's cat dying is about the saddest thing I can think of, yet on the song "Ding Dong", Nellie McKay manages to find the humor.

Screeching out from the middle of nowhere, England in 2004, songstress Nellie McKay left all in her wake confused as fuck. Between the gorgeous George Martin production, the goofy songs about dogs, porn and waiters, people didn't exactly know what to think. How do you sell a record based on a young woman whose musical tastes run the gamut from Tin Pan Alley pop songs to Rap?

The album art says it all, the Doris Day meets Laverne and Shirley pose juxtaposed with the album's title creates the first pun, before you even hear it.

Ms. McKay is a quick wit, a great lyricist and one heck of a piano player. She imbues songs like "David" and "I Wanna Get Married" with a tenderness that the subjects of the songs don't deserve.

Her lyrical wit is often biting and satirical, as exemplified in "Sari", her rap track, where she throws complicated verbal fits over a beautiful bed of music. Sample lyric :

I may listen to Enya's greatest hits
And try to control my hissy fits with pride
Won't get my hair dyed
But oh the onus of lyin' all the time
I don't wanna say, "diiiie motherfucker!"
But I wouldn't mind if you did
Sometimes even the nice girl's ego has to override the id
And so before I flip my lid my crib
And get myself out of this bind
You can hear what's on my lips but you don't know
What's in my mind (pizza!)

Nellie McKay is a firebrand : a true musical revolutionary that takes the piss out of weaker souls like Nora Jones (who she lampoons quite well on several tracks, including the laconic "I Wanna Get Married", where she proclaims that getting hitched is "...why I was born.")

She managed to get her record label to put out a 2-disc set for her first album (and to piss off the PMRC enough to get an EXPLICIT LYRICS sticker). At 21, she was the first Sony artist to get signed and then request absurd things, like getting Beatles producer George Martin for her first album, just to see if they would give them to her. They did, but the follow-up, "Pretty Little Head" was a critical darling, but a sales bomb. Sony dumped her after that and she found herself a nice new label, Vanguard to release her latest album "Obligatory Villagers."

But this first peek at an emerging artist is truly amazing : not only for what the label did for her or how George Martin fleshed out the sound, but for the fact that the songs are fantastic, beautiful, hilarious and sad all at the same time. It's for this reason and many others, that "Get Away From Me!" gets listed as a Desert Island Record.