A Week With Nellie McKay's "Pretty Little Head": Day 2
21 January 2007
tell your friends...
Words by Tony Conte // Illustration by Amanda Walker
Nellie McKay is back. It’s true. She’s still trying to bring back the 30’s, but with a new twist. When bellbottoms made their short-lived comeback they weren’t quite the same as their 60’s counterpart, they came back reimagined to suit the late 90’s. The difference is that McKay is clearly not trying bring back a style ripe for resurgence, rather she’s doing what she knows. What she loves. It shows.
This time around McKay uses her unique voice to better effect than she has in the past. In the lower registers, she toys with more emotion in only the first few songs than she had managed to instill in her vocals throughout the entire first album. “We Had It Right” could be a different artist entirely for the space that she takes within the song to relax into the words that she sings. “Rumor had it wrong/And we had it right” she sings and it’s not lackadaisical, and it matters to her, and she makes it matter to you. Whether her fingers traipse over the keyboard, or a synthesizer rolls in unsteady waves, or afro-cuban rhythms weave in and xylophones tap dance around her angelic yodeling, you can tell that more of her heart is in this album.
Nellie is not going to star in any well-funded Gap commercials sporting a fresh pair of jeans and with a team of models dancing behind her in unison because she’s not going to fit so easily into a form that can be packaged for most American audiences. Maybe that’s her appeal. Listening to this album, you feel like you’re being let in on a secret: this is only a stage in the maturation of an important American songwriter/artist whose relevance has yet to be understood. She is not cheap and tawdry, not Fantasia Barrino aping the luscious soul that only the inimitable Billie Holiday can do justice. McKay is finding her voice, and the lucky few of us still paying attention are being treated to a snapshot of what musical brilliance will do in its attempt to gain its balance and take its first unsteady steps into the world.
From the first listen it’s clear that Pretty Little Head is doing something wholly unique, with its basis in another time, yet still deeply rooted in today. In a musical, they’d call it a reprise, or in a classical piece it’d be a variation on a theme. The difference is that when Nellie brings to life her nouveau easy-listening/caberet/swing-lounge, she does it with sincerity. Sometimes it’s the kind of irritating sincerity you’d get from the loud-mouthed passenger sitting next to you on a long flight, but more often than not it’s an endearing sort of playful ambition. Desi Arnez and Lucille Ball in one charming package.
More than her debut, Nellie boasts a newfound focus. It’s very self-conscious and opts not to settle on any particular style, careening across the spectrum of music and using all of the ingredients from her first album (piano, sing-songy melodies that will stick to you like the film of a soda spill still on your forearm, hip-hop beats and sensibility) and imbuing them with a depth she hadn’t approached until now. Still, it seems, there’s not enough focus to knead the depth from each song that it requires. Only a few songs are allowed to play themselves to their logical end. Most end abruptly, without reaching their peak which leaves you stunned at the amount of unfulfilled melodies and musical ideas that Nellie is happy to simply touch upon. Does her well of talent run so deep that she can tip her hat to melodies that other artists would kill to build an entire album around? So it seems.
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