Theater
Nellie McKay
GEE WHIZ - Get Away from Me Demos
When Get Away From Me was released on February 10, 2004, Rolling Stone gave
the album ★★★★. McKay made her national TV debut on The Late Show with
David Letterman, and the record landed in the Billboard Top 200.
“But if older reviewers—mostly men—scoffed at her juvenile assessment of George
Bush and world politics, with twenty years of hindsight, we can now say that she
was a lot more astute than many of the scholars writing at the time,” says
Audiophix. “Nellie McKay—and her debut album—were not perfect. They were
better than that. They were real. And in a year that saw seminal punk from Green
Day (American Idiot) and seminal hip hop from Kanye (College Dropout), which
came out the same day as Get Away From Me, that was enough to make it the best
album of the year.”
Revisiting the album, Salon named it “one of the great pop albums of the early 21st
century.” Popmatters comments, “Two decades later, the circumstances and names
differ, but the anguish remains the same, as politicians, dictators, and other killers
make life hell for ordinary citizens.”
Sister Orchid is Nellie’s seventh album, starting with Get Away From Me (“a tour de force” – The New York Times), including Normal As Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day (“among the killer overhauls of American standards” – The New York Times) and My Weekly Reader, music of the ‘60s (“..kicks serious butt. The results are beautiful.” – PopMatters), her second collaboration with famed Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick. On Obligatory Villagers (“a brisk nine-song set that plays like the breathless first act of a stage musical decrying American fascism” – SPIN), local Poconos hometown jazz greats Bob Dorough, Phil Woods, and David Liebman contributed their exceptional talents.
She has won a Theatre World Award for her portrayal of Polly Peachum on Broadway in The Threepenny Opera, performed onscreen in the films PS I Love You and Downtown Express, and her music was used in Rumor
Sources: triblive
