Nellie McKay...!

[chiburb]

Has she been discussed here while I was asleep? Wow! I heard her on Morning Edition today and she blows me away. Funny, intelligent, jazzy-rappy, ballady, jeez...she's the real deal.

Listen for yourselves...

Especially "Sari"...

http://www.npr.org/display_pages/features/feature_1700688.html

[Bertha Venation]

1. You beat me to it, Chiburb.

When I heard she is 19 years old, I confess my first thought was, "big deal, let's not get swept up in another child prodigy." Then I listened and realized Bob Edwards was right: this young woman is 19 going on 40.

An instant must-have CD. She is indeed the real deal.

[chiburb]

3. I just ordered it via NPR....

They get a cut.
Thanks for confirming my ears, I haven't been this excited about a composer/singer since Shawn Phillips in the early '70s !

2. I just bought her CD a few days ago

& can't stop listening to it.
Incredible stuff.

it's so infectious.
I really think we might have a new Cole Porter.
Strong words, I know

[chiburb]

4. Thanks, I'm thinking the same thing... n/t

.

[chiburb]

5. Even MORE reason to dig her!

She is a member of a growing list of organizations which include PETA, the Doris Day Animal League, Amnesty International, the American Anti-Vivisection Society, and NOW. Her dream is to one day have enough income - "oh boy," she says, "do I have plans" - to shower such organizations with income "that should be coming from the government." Lack of money for social services "keeps me awake at night. Everything from CPS , and how they manipulate the courts to meet their quotas, to welfare 'reform', that hideous misnomer, to the incredibly dangerous electronic voting machines slated to take over in 2004, to carriage horses, swamped in traffic in the middle of Times Square - SO MUCH has to change. People have to realize how what they support often hurts them - that by supporting vivisection you're setting back the AIDS fight by
decades - that by waving the flag at a Bush rally you're actually encouraging a much worse way of life for you and your family, a life of pollution and plummeting wages and cultural stagnancy and fear - that by shopping at Wal-Mart because they have lower prices you're actually planting the seeds for inflation and unemployment in the future - that by overstating crimes committed against yourselves you mock and deride those who've suffered even worse. I want to be Marlene but more, I want to be Malcolm X. I want to DO something, and art is only a small piece of it. Narcissism - celebrity - by itself is poison; narcissism coupled with social service can be world-changing. By serving others you serve yourself, and I plan to serve as many as I can."
http://www.nelliemckay.net/bio.html

6. seeing as how I've got the CD right here, selected song lyrics

which have a very interesting mix of pathos, quotidian and surreal---

"oh waiter bring my check soon
I have a hectic schedule
I'm saddened by the news
that we won
I wonder what I'd say to the bomb
where are you now
where are you going
do you mind
and do you care
that you will die
do you despair
and do you allow
for what you are choking
do you know
just what you do
the fickle snow
it's cuz of you
waiter
I need my change
I need it now sooner
not later
it may seem strange
but have you seen the paper
maybe it's victory
maybe it's history
maybe it's you
the scuds drop down like butterflies
they're loved and round and very wise
they're just like you and me
as they tend
their incandescent need for a friend
where are they now
where are they headed
do they see
the little ones
and do they flee
or do they run
and do they feel proud
as they are embedded
do they ask
or do they tell
to mask the fact
they're going to hell" ---- by Nellie McKay

[bif]

Here's a question for ya

I bought her cd last weekend. While it's a double disc, each one is 30 minutes long! This could easily fit on one disc. What's the point? It was on sale for $9.99 at Borders, so it wasn't the price of a double disc.

[FunBobbyMucha]

8. She wants to re-create the old feeling

of flipping your vinyl album over to hear Side Two. She mentioned it somewhere.

To give full props, Tom Petty did something similar when CD's overtook the market--one of his discs has a long space of dead air, in which Petty intones something to the extent of "This is where you would normally have to flip over your album."

[FunBobbyMucha]

7. I enjoy being able to say

that "I knew (band name) when they were just comin' out." I'm so glad I caught her on some talk show in the dead of night, and ran out at 10am the next morning to get the CD as soon as the store opened! She is amazing. It's so rare to have someone come out with a sound that can't be easily shoehorned--as I describe her to others, they all invariably say "Oh, like Norah Jones!" or "Tori Amos," and I reply "No, there's five times as much going on here!"

I love that the CD title is a dig at Norah Jones. Ha!

9. Kick for the sake of new artists

:)