Nellie McKay

Prolific, provocative, and pithy, the British-born jazz singer puts the broad in Broadway and the muse back in musical

By Amy Oprean
Published: February 4th, 2008 | 1:28am

When it comes to protest disguised as comedy, few have a better routine than Nellie McKay. The genre-splicing singer-songwriter has more sugar to cover her sarcasm than she has vintage sweaters to cover her back. Take for instance, the song “Mother of Pearl,” where — with the polished cordialness of Doris Day — McKay croons: “Feminists don’t have a sense of humor / Feminists sell vicious lies and rumors / They have a tumor on their funny bone.”

It’s that prickly-meets-playful nature that is perhaps the most striking about McKay. Case in point: The cover of her 2004 debut featured McKay in a red raincoat with a gaping, childlike, positively gleeful expression hilariously placed below the title, Get Away from Me, a twist on Norah Jones’ Come Away with Me.

Recently, McKay has extended the humor and wit in her music to projects in theater and film. In 2006, she landed one of the main parts in the Broadway musical The Threepenny Opera (alongside Alan Cumming and tour buddy Cyndi Lauper). She also wrote the music for The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom, a musical film that is currently in pre-production.

Amid these endeavors, the British-born McKay began the U.S. leg of the tour for her latest album, Obligatory Villagers, (released September 25, 2007, on Vanguard Records) and is working on her next release. On the heels of Aimee Mann’s holiday comedy variety show, for which she was a guest performer, McKay talked to Venus Zine about her future plans, feminism, and why she sometimes forgets the words to her own songs.

Before you started your singing career, you performed as a stand up comic around Manhattan and in Greenwich Village gay bars. What were your routines about?
Everything from goldfish to our treatment of Muslim Americans. I think they were all united in not being funny enough. It was nice traveling on [Aimee Mann’s] tour with comedians; they've been very good at putting me in my place. But comedy is just the hardest. It takes a lot of balls to get up there in the first place, or a lot of ovaries.

You also recently starred in The Threepenny Opera with Cyndi Lauper and Alan Cumming. How did that happen?
I'd been working with the director on The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom, and he mentioned trying out for a reading. I did the reading, and then we did the show. You know, I think Bertolt Brecht was rolling in his grave.

With the musical film, are you doing the music for it or acting in it?
I did the music and lyrics, and that's it. I just wish they'd make the fucker [laughs]. I don't see how the movie could compete with the book, it's incredible. I think a lot of the best musicals and movies come out of adaptations of bad works of art as opposed to good ones, so perhaps we were doomed from the start. But it was a pleasure reading and working with the book.

Now you’re working on your own musical.
That may take many forms, but yeah. I've always looked at different things and written with different voices, and I love certain musicals so much. People respond to music. It's not just something they listen to; it reflects the story of their own life.

You’ve mentioned that you like some tracks on your latest album, Obligatory Villagers, but not all the tracks. What plans do you have for your next album?
This one will be really exciting, and yummy, and everything ... I don't know! Hopefully it will be a triple album, just bursting with good ideas. We can only hope.

Obligatory Villagers was dedicated to some of the lodges that have closed in the Poconos. What's the story behind that?
Incredible places have been torn down: the Swiftwater Inn [a Pennsylvania historic site] was built in the 1700s. The 1700s! Why would they tear that down? Not only do they not respect history, but they don’t respect quality. I would hope that as we go on, we’ll find better ways to adapt, and reuse, and recycle what we already have, as opposed to the tear-down, build-a-new, less-worthy-version mentality.

The song “Mother of Pearl” is just dripping with misogynistic stereotypes about feminists. Do you feel like you’ve been written off with stereotypes like that?
Sure, you hear those things all the time. As a feminist, you go after people's reaction, and that obviously makes a strong reaction. But if you care about anything in this world, you have to have a sense of humor, or you’re killing yourself.

I think one of the biggest problems with eradicating sexism is that there are positive sides to it. If you read Susan Brownmiller's Femininity or books like that … in the smallest ways you go into heightening the differences between the sexes, and I'm a part of that. I just think that in all forms of activism, the moral should be to do your best and keep trying to do better. But don't be too hard on yourself or other people if they're trying. If they're not trying, go right ahead.

Have you gotten sick of any of the songs so far on the tour?
Oh God, yeah! I’m sick of it all. People at shows … they can never understand how you can forget lyrics. I don’t want to listen to my own music. It’s just like staring at your own reflection all day. I don’t want to hear my own voice; I hear it in my head all the time. So I’m sorry if I forget things, but I don’t really want to go home and study this. That’s just far too much navel gazing.

Is there such a thing as the typical Nellie McKay fan?
It would be some strange, hybrid person. Like a 65-year-old, angry-young-woman-hipster-white-male intellectual.