Send "Nellie McKay " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 In one way or another, Nellie McKay has spent a decent chunk of her fruitful career paying tribute to Doris Day. Openly embracing the jazz and vocal standards of the Tin Pan Alley era, McKay, like Day, projects unaltered exuberance, shameless optimism, and brisk and effortless confidence. McKay is certainly more of an eccentric, but both singers carved out careers with a sense of control and precociousness that belied their ages. Each is also a polyglot in a way, working with a range of styles and sounds-- their understated, commanding vocals easily adaptable to a variety of sounds.All the more ironic then that most people know Day's career only from the playfully innocent films she made in the late 1950s and early 60s, particularly a trio of bedroom comedies co-starring Rock Hudson and Tony Randall. During that run of movies, Day usually portrayed a brash, independent, accomplished career woman (a union boss, a leading advertising executive, a journalism professor) who nevertheless projected both a lack of street smarts and a wholesome attitude toward sex-- she was essentially the original 40-year-old virgin. On her full-length tribute to the film and music star, Normal as Blueberry Pie, McKay redresses some of these misgivings, covering a wide range of Day's work, from her earliest hit, "Sentimental Journey", to "Send Me No Flowers", a Burt Bacharach/Hal David song that served as the title track to one of those bedroom comedies. For the most part though, McKay skips the hits, choosing instead lesser-known album and film tracks closely associated with Day along with selections from the Great American Songbook that Day tackled. Irony-free, McKay channels Day's elegance and liveliness on not only swing, Dixieland, and showtunes, but also makes detours into bossa nova and western-inspired songs....full text |
| Pastemagazine. |
| Nellie McKay’s gorgeously understated new album, Normal As Blueberry Pie, is everything a tribute record should be. McKay shows a genuine love and respect for her subject, not to mention a seemingly intuitive understanding of the long-forgotten appeal of singer/actress Doris Day—who, over the years, has become synonymous with the stodgy, overly sentimental schmaltz of the irony-free era from which she came, an era that seems to lie across the chasm of history, out of our reach. Backed by some fantastically talented jazz musicians, McKay bridges this gap, breathing life into Day’s out-of-vogue material; giving old standards a new sense of purpose that transcends nostalgia and makes them feel at home in the modern world. She tackles both popular and obscure Day-delivered numbers—written by legends like George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Johnny Mercer, and Antonio Carlos Jobim—with an endearing earnestness, a hushed grace, and a blustery voice that’s like a crisp autumn wind rustling the last brightly colored leaves from the trees in Central Park. It’s the freshest these songs have sounded in years...full text |
| Npr |
| October 6, 2009 - What could notoriously eccentric young New York singer-songwriter Nellie McKay have in common with notoriously normal Hollywood icon Doris Day? The comparison only begins with McKay's new album, Normal as Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day. McKay first declared her love of Doris Day in a 2007 book review she wrote for The New York Times. McKay wrote of the exemplary pop singer, whose wholesome persona made her Hollywood's biggest female draw: "Her music is uncluttered, sensual and free, driven by an irrepressible will to live." Normal As Blueberry Pie McKay's Normal as Blueberry Pie is the fourth album of a contentious career that has also included an award-winning role in Brecht-Weill's Threepenny Opera and much outspoken animal-welfare activism, a cause she shares with Doris Day. McKay is a feminist who isn't shy about using that particular F-word, a wisenheimer who's done stand-up, a prima donna who fought her label to squeeze 23 new songs onto a CD instead of just 16. In 2005, I saw her perform half a dozen non-English titles she'd composed, including "Me Gusta Manana," about trying to go vegan in Spain. So it seems strange that her first album in two years comprises 12 Doris Day covers plus one original, and that it's jazzier than either her history or Day's would lead listeners to expect. But while Normal as Blueberry Pie wouldn't be a Nellie McKay album if it weren't a little kooky, McKay's arrangements find a graceful midpoint between her postmodern cabaret and Day's popped-up big-band singer with chops for miles. It emphasizes the purity McKay's voice shares with Day's. It, too, is uncluttered, sensual and free....full text |
Nellie McKay lyrics
|
| |||||||||||||
