NELLIE MCKAY hadn’t made it a block from her Upper West Side apartment when
she stopped abruptly, leash in hand, halfway across Central Park West. “Oh,” she
said, eyes widening. “I forgot Hank’s ‘Adopt Me’ vest. Can we go back and get
it?”
Hank is a rescued pit bull, one of two in Ms. McKay’s care. (The other one,
Bessie, looks to be staying for a while.) Both dogs appear in costume pearls on
the cover of her fourth album, “Normal as Blueberry Pie” (Verve). Their
inclusion isn’t arbitrary: the album, out on Tuesday, pays homage to Doris
Day, the perennially fresh-faced singer and actress, now 87, who followed
her record-breaking postwar music and movie career with a leading role in animal
welfare advocacy.
Ms. McKay, 27, has long been drawn both to the cause and artistic example of
Ms. Day, who is famously reclusive (they have never met in person). Though a
songwriter often given to whiz-bang topicality and fanciful digression, Ms.
McKay also projects the coy decorum of a Hitchcock heroine. Known for her
willful independence and daffy onstage charm, she has always chased her whims
heedless of commercial consequences, which is one reason for her cult following.
Less a departure than the embrace of an affinity that has always lurked near
the surface of her wry persona, “Normal as Blueberry Pie” is her most accessible
and straightforward album yet. It’s a knowing tribute, bright-eyed and sharp,
suffused with humor but mostly devoid of camp.
Given that standards continue to be a bankable approach (See Streisand,
Barbra), it may prove to be a good move for her. “As soon as I heard that was
her next record,” said Bill Bragin, the director of public programming for Lincoln
Center, “I thought: ‘Of course. That totally makes sense.’ ”
On a recent afternoon, once the neon-orange vest had been retrieved from her
shabby-chic ground-floor apartment, Ms. McKay, in a vintage red blazer, began to
walk the dogs toward the Arthur Ross Pinetum in Central Park. She took Bessie,
entrusting Hank to a reporter. Before reaching the park, there was an adoption
inquiry from a passer-by, and phone numbers were exchanged.
“At first I wanted everything to sound just like Doris,” Ms. McKay said of
the album.
“What I really want to do is go on tour with the Les Brown Band,” she
quipped, name-checking the orchestra with which Ms. Day scored her first hit,
“Sentimental Journey,” in 1945.
Born in London but raised alone by her mother in Harlem (through childhood)
and the Poconos (during high school), Ms. McKay — pronounced Mc-EYE — got the
Doris Day bug almost on a lark. “It was during a field trip. Or it might have
been a protest down at the Baltimore Aquarium. Anyway, it was in Baltimore. I
got a record of hers, ‘It’s Magic,’ ” a compilation of early singles, “and I
listened to it on the way back, and that was it for me. I was just listening to
her all the time after that.”
Without question, animal welfare is a bond between Ms. Day and Ms. McKay. In
2005 the Humane Society gave Ms. McKay the Doris Day Music Award for “The Dog
Song,” an ode to canine companionship from her widely acclaimed 2004 debut, “Get
Away From Me” (Sony/Columbia). “Nellie is carrying that torch,” said Michael
Markarian, the chief operating officer of the Humane
Society of the United States, which merged with the Doris Day Animal League
in 2006. “Even with her schedule, she finds the time to really dig in and do
boots-on-the-ground work, whether it’s phone banking or lobbying Congress.”
But the thing about Ms. Day that reached Ms. McKay most deeply was the
singing. Two years ago, reviewing a biography for The New York Times Book
Review, Ms. McKay appraised her role model this way: “What she possessed, beyond
her beauty, physical grace and natural acting ability, was a resplendent voice
that conveyed enormous warmth and feeling.” That aspect of Doris Day had been
overshadowed, Ms. McKay said, by her perky image in films like “Pillow Talk,”
with Rock
Hudson. “The hardest part about this was narrowing down her catalog, because
she just recorded so much.” The album — named after a phrase in “A Wonderful
Guy,” from “South Pacific” — reflects that variety, incorporating a Gershwin
toe-tapper (“Do, Do, Do”), a Jobim bossa nova (“Meditation”), wistful standards
and themes from Ms. Day’s movie career.
Ms. McKay produced “Normal as Blueberry Pie” with her mother and manager,
Robin Pappas. Writing most of the arrangements and playing a mess of instruments
— not just piano but also ukulele, organ, bells and timpani — she makes each
song a discrete episode. On “Sentimental Journey” she coos contentedly over a
blend of saxophone, oboe, bass and steel pans. “Crazy Rhythm” assumes a
Gypsy-swing bounce. A French horn turns up on “Send Me No Flowers,” a Burt
Bacharach-Hal David song from the 1964 film.
And yet, somehow, the album conveys a breezy continuity. Opening with “The
Very Thought of You,” arranged to suggest a music-box twirl, and closing with an
“I Remember You” announced by foghorns, it takes a nonstandard approach to the
standard songbook. And in that sense it’s a neat inversion of Ms. McKay’s own
work.
Early this decade, as a Manhattan
School of Music dropout, Ms. McKay made the downtown rounds with her clever
songs. Mr. Bragin saw her at the Sidewalk Café in the East Village and began
booking her at Joe’s Pub, his post at the time. “Her wordplay is brilliant, her
lyric writing is extremely smart, she’s got a great way with a turn of phrase,
she writes a great melody,” he said. “She literally was the first artist I
called for Midsummer Night Swing,” he added, referring to the series he took
over last year.
Ms. McKay has also appeared twice on Lincoln Center’s American Songbook
series and will perform next month at a gala for the new David Rubinstein
Atrium. “Right from her first demo,” said Charles Cermele, producer of
contemporary programming, “I heard that she was working within established
musical forms but finding new ways of placing them in our time period. Some of
these songs sounded like they could have come from the late ’40s to the early
’60s, but they were about the life of a young woman in current, urban America:
what it’s like to walk her dog, or all the other things that seem to be a part
of who Nellie is.”
“Get Away From Me,” produced by the Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick and released, at her insistence, as a double CD, included
songs not only about dog-walking but also about male chauvinism, genetic cloning
and assorted hypocrisies. (A pit bull in pearls: not a random image for her.)
Stylistically the album was all over the map, brushing up against cocktail jazz,
light reggae and even her version of hip-hop. Two self-produced follow-ups,
“Pretty Little Head” and “Obligatory Villagers,” were similarly eclectic. And
along the way Ms. McKay made strides as an actress: she was one of the best
things about a 2006 Broadway production of “The Threepenny Opera,” also starring
Alan
Cumming and Cyndi
Lauper.
An antique poster from a different production of “Threepenny” hangs in the
front parlor of Ms. McKay’s apartment, above an old, out-of-tune piano that she
said must have belonged to Irving
Berlin. (She admitted this was based on nothing more than a hunch.) Strewn
about were her hand-scored arrangements for some of the album’s songs. Ms.
McKay, whose performances can give the impression of harried creativity,
apologized profusely for the clutter without exactly disowning it.
Perched in an overstuffed chair, Ms. McKay reflected on the movie legacy of
Ms. Day, an issue more complicated than her vocal legacy. In movies ranging from
“Tea for Two” to “Calamity Jane” to those swoony Rock Hudson comedies, Ms. Day
presented a blithely wholesome demeanor that was ripe for satire even in its
time. “It’s pushy, all that romantic gusto,” Ms. McKay said, with just a hint of
grudging respect.
“Romance on the High Seas,” from 1948, is the first Doris Day movie she
recalls seeing. “But I especially remember ‘Young Man With a Horn,’ because I
love that soundtrack so much.”
“I think in those movies, I identified mostly with Hoagie Carmichael or Oscar
Levant,” she chuckled. “But I think that some Doris seeped out of that, too.”
And yet the pose of the ingénue — epitomized both by Ms. Day and by Polly
Peachum, the character Ms. McKay played to the hilt in “Threepenny” — has long
been a useful strategy for her. Earlier in the day, she admitted as much while
discussing “If I Ever Had a Dream,” the album’s lone original, composed in her
teens. A lilting confection, it allows for a knowing wink but no pucker of
irony:
If I ever had a wish
Butterflies and bumblebees at play
Purple moonbeams on the mist
Crowds of calla lilies show the way
“It’s wonderful: when you’re happy all the time, you drive other people
crazy,” Ms. McKay said over a Caesar salad, French fries and a shake at Blossom,
a vegan restaurant. (Printed along the bottom of the menu was a creed: “Blossom
Is First and Foremost Animal Caring.”)
The title of the new album is, as you might suspect, meant as commentary. “I
mean, what is normal?” Ms. McKay said. “Those movies, they were a giant
cover-up.” From Ms. Day’s personal travails to Mr. Hudson’s closeted
homosexuality, things were never as idyllic as they appeared on-screen.
But did she ever detect a note of critical self-awareness in Ms. Day’s movie
presence? Ms. McKay waited 17 seconds before forming a reply. “No, not so much,”
she finally said with a laugh. But then she also made a tiny confession. “I
really would love to just live in La-La Land,” she sighed, “and have everything
be the ideal.”