Nellie McKay turns to '60s for new album, Old Town shows

Nellie McKay is best known as a sharp-minded revivalist of Tin Pan Alley music from the 1940s and '50s, both in her original songs and inspired alterations of the originals. Adding to that vibe: her vintage cocktail dresses and throwback hairdos.

But on her new album, "My Weekly Reader," McKay, 32, has turned her attention to a very different decade - the 1960s, represented by songs from the Beatles, Paul Simon, the Small Faces and more.

She plays the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago at 7 and 10 p.m. Saturday, April 25.

It isn't as much of a left turn as it might seem. McKay (pronounced mick-eye) has often used the insouciant tunefulness of pre-Beatles pop to ease the way for her subversive lyrics about sexism, hypocrisy and cruelty. When she remade such standards as Doris Day's "Mean to Me" and "Send Me No Flowers," she uncovered the acerbic tension lying just below the surface. And the songwriters she selected from the rock era were similarly rooted in '40s and '50s pop and wrapped their challenges to convention in singalong melodies.

Listen, for example, to McKay's version of the Kinks' 1966 single "Sunny Afternoon," which opens her new album. The bouncy, catchy music seems to support the song's celebration of "lazin' on a sunny afternoon." McKay's piano and soprano have replaced Ray Davies' electric guitar and tenor, but the tune is as alluring as ever. Once you've been lured in, however, you realize that the narrator is a British tax dodger who has been deserted by his girlfriend and had his belongings seized by the government. It's not so different from McKay's own satirical vaudeville songs.

"There is a similarity there," McKay says by phone from her home in New York. "That song has a little of everything: It's jaunty and insolent at the same time. I love when people complain; that's how you cope. I've wanted to do an album of '60s music for a long time, because that decade was such a mixture of the old and the new. There was a reaction against consumerism and hypocrisy, yet there was still an old-world artistry to it. 'Sunny Afternoon' is a song I discovered late in life. We were listening to the Kinks in regard to this album, and my mother suggested this one."

Her mother, actress Robin Pappas, was a single mom for most of McKay's childhood, and the two are still very close. Pappas, says McKay, is her "editor and so much more."

"We used to listen to eight-tracks in our Volkswagen Bug," McKay recalls. "My mother would listen to Blood, Sweat and Tears, and I would listen to Tommy Dorsey. ... Most of the kids rebelled by listening to what was new. I rebelled by listening to what was old."

McKay was the weird girl in high school; when everyone else was listening to Nirvana, she was listening to Dinah Shore and Jo Stafford and dressing like Rosalind Russell and Greta Garbo. But her odd tastes paid off in the early 2000s when she started playing her retro songs with skewering lyrics around New York. An original such as "Sari" built a bridge between rap and Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs, while the languid lounge number "I Wanna Get Married" paid tribute to '50s celebrations of matrimony while slyly satirizing such songs.

McKay sounded like no one else in New York at the time, and a bidding war broke out for the right to record the 19-year-old prodigy. Columbia Records won, releasing McKay's debut, "Get Away From Me," in 2004. The album title was an obvious riposte to Norah Jones' 2003 breakthrough album, "Come Away With Me," and McKay proved the provocative Randy Newman counterpart to Jones' comforting James Taylor. But McKay proved as challenging to her record company as to her listeners and soon parted acrimoniously from Columbia.

She kept busy, however, releasing three more albums of original songs and a tribute album to Doris Day. She wrote and starred in two stage musicals about real-life female outlaws: transvestite jazz musician Billy Tipton and convicted killer Barbara Graham. McKay also appeared in the 2006 New York stage revival of "The Threepenny Opera" and in the 2007 movie "P.S. I Love You." She got involved in protest movements on behalf of women's and animal rights, which led to an interest in the golden era of protest movements: the 1960s.

"There was an innocence and hope in the '60s," McKay says, "whereas now we're almost born cynical. There's a self-awareness and irony today that leads to jadedness and a lack of imagination; it gets in the way of being able to see a better world. Protest should be joyful. You need to be outraged, but you also have to laugh. As Emma Goldman said, 'If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.' Ray Davies understood that. The civil rights movement understood that, because it had all that wonderful music."

McKay understands that as well, creating her own pop songs that are as joyful as they are subversive.