A Week With Nellie McKay's "Pretty Little Head": Day 4
23 January 2007
tell your friends...
Words by Tony Conte // Illustration Amanda Walker
She finds a soulmate, then they part ways. She creates a dream of the life they might have lived, then she cannot maintain its reality and it too goes. There are lovers to enjoy, though the love escapes. The beats stomp in, the piano crescendos, her voice peaks and quivers, melting down to a sigh. Then just like that, the song is gone too. Nellie McKay has lost something and she wants to tell you all about it.
Loss is the key word. Most of the album tackles relationships, which almost always end in loss. Those songs that don’t end in loss have most likely started there. And if you think that there’s a song which has nothing to do with loss, then check the title because it’s either the song “Food,” which is a clever little song that They Might Be Giants should have written, or the title is “Lali Est Paresseux” and the entire song is sung in French…so…um, you have no idea what it means. Unless you speak French, of course. Which I don’t. But hey, if you do, good for you, right?
Both discs are consistent and the music itself, to make a vast generalization, can accurately be described as upbeat when it’s not being wistful or cheeky. Were it not for Nellie’s smooth, almost naive delivery, some of the weightier topics she tackles would fall short of their intended mark and strand the helpless listener in the middle of the vast corn-field between Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World” and Justin Timberlake’s “Losing My Way.”
For example, “The Big One” seems to be a song about gentrification and the pain of displacement. The loss of the things you’ve come to know. The loss of human dignity. Put a song like that against a piano backdrop, cut with a sleek hip-hop beat and you should have a total corn-fest. But Nellie applies her elastic vocals and inventive lyrics (“Grief’s the mother of invention/Pain’s the midwife to your labor/Turn it/Burn it/Cure it/Endure it/If you are able sucker”) and the song deftly maneuvers around the many pitfalls that lesser artists always succumb to when trying to tackle big ideas.
One song laments the death of peace activist Gladd Patterson. In another song, Nellie rails against animal cruelty. Flash forward through some more love-weary, loss-jaded songs, and you’re listening to “Food.” Which, it turns out, is about…well…eating food. The only logical excuse to why any of these songs work so damn well is that they are written and executed by a master of the craft.
She takes a lot of risks with this album, and she does it all with the class of a seasoned pro. By the end of the final song, you begin to understand why, with so many things to lose on this album, Nellie McKay has kept at least one thing: your rapt attention.
commenting closed for this article
Recent Progressive Reviews
all content © 2006-2008, daytrotter®, all rights reserved. | Free MP3s for your iPod. | Contact Us | p3p privacy policy | For information about Advertising, send a message to: advertising@daytrotter.com
All songs posted at Daytrotter.com are the exclusive property of the respective recording artists and Daytrotter. Please do not post these songs on other websites/weblogs, etc. We encourage you to link directly to our songs page or the specific free songs page for a particular band/artist.
Daytrotter is a registered trademark of Daytrotter Media, LLC.
