Nellie McKay - "Home Sweet Mobile Home"

When I first heard that Nellie McKay's new album would be titled Home Sweet Mobile Home, I laughed to myself. Her first album title, Get Away From Me, was a riff on Norah Jones' Come Away With Me and her second album title Pretty Little Head was an ironic take on the defining persona of Nellie McKay: the perky happy-faced blonde girl who is so much smarter than you that one look or line delivery will reaffirm your deepest suspicions of the possibility that you are, in fact, a dick. Could an artist who came into prominence playing watering holes in New York City like Joe's Pub and the dear, departed Fez - singing comedic songs about male condescension, corporate oppression, and the abuses of science – mean the title to be anything else but a dig at those in the flyover states that seem to be living in a different America than those who live where Nellie spends most of her time?

So I was pleasantly surprised when she broke my heart this August at the Highline Ballroom, the first time I heard her perform the song ‘Coosada Blues’, a mournful southern-style R&B number where she plays a Fats Domino-style bee-bop piano against a slow saxophone leading into a song named for one of the many towns anonymously devastated by the waters of Katrina in 2005:

In the southland of my memory
'Neath and ivy-covered dome,
Every day's a long, lonely century
Calling me home, sweet mobile home...

Paired that night with a gorgeous rendering of ‘Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans’, she managed to make that phrase very sad. When thinking about the music of Nellie McKay, I tend to make more comparisons to other artists than I normally would like to, and the most unlikely comparison I'd make would be to Patti Smith. Both care deeply and publicly about the way reality positions itself against those who aren't prepared to defend themselves (Nellie was a Nader campaigner too), both planted their roots in New York City at a young age, and both followed the muses they admired and spent time with. But while Patti was following Jimi and Janis and Harry Smith, Nellie's inspirations included Doris Day, Anita O'Day, Blossom Dearie, and Bob Dorough. And that's fantastic. My peers and I are of a generation where there's an automatic assumption that the only musical genre where revolutionaries can lift their voices are the ones which brought us such cutting-edge performers as Jon Bon Jovi and 2 Live Crew. Meanwhile, the piano bar singers who sing the great American songbook in lounges across America seem to find nostalgia that waters down the power of the songs they sing. The works of Hoagie Carmichael, Dorothy Fields, and Harold Arlen were shaded by the times in which they were written: times of the Depression and war. The songs touch on addiction, alcoholism, and desperation. So why should an important artistic tradition be neutered when supposed rebels like Rod Stewart and Queen Latifah do take a crack at them?

With just a ukulele and a sighing pixie-voice, McKay skewers the moblike calls for mass deportment by portraying a departing undefined immigrant. "Goodbye old false paradise," she sings in ‘Adios’. "Goodbye old rinkydink Eden. And may you lie yourself to sleep tonight." With a full-out mariachi band, she giddily calls out for battle against the NYC real estate interests in ‘¡Bodega!’, a rollicking tribute to the most cherished of New York institutions: the mom and pop shops where "schoolchildren come eager to buy their Ortegas" that are being driven out of business by crippling rents. Incorporating a chorus singing in Spanish, and lyrics about making love and building honeymoon cottages in the aisles, she gives chip and soda lovers of Gotham a delirious song to call their own and also manages to stand up for the little guy. Socialistic and humanistic with a smile - and a "baby baby" - she sings in ‘No Equality’ that "we should have kicked over the ladder from the start."

In another age, Nellie McKay may have been a superstar from the get-go. More than perhaps even that other New York curmudgeon, Stephin Merritt, she has mastered the elements of every part of the pop spectrum. She dabbles in salsa and samba and straight-out music hall crooning and comes off as an old soul. She may even have the chance at superstardom now. She starts the album with something sounding like the polished AOR brand of rock that tends to play in the background of our lives, and she recorded three songs in Jamaica with a reggae beat - the type of thing every modern middle-of-the-road artist does to show their credibility - and these songs sound polished, radio-friendly and gorgeous. But you scratch their surface and there's something unexpected. That opening song, as shiny as it seems, is a brooding, eccentric piece of poetry. "I had a dream I saw a rainbow," McKay sings but it was "just a bruise on the sky." It's a power pop ballad about ennui with lyrics like "send me a smile like Charo" and "I used to think about it. When I say think, I mean satirize." One of the reggae songs is the most on-the-nose finger-pointing songs on the album. Vegan and PETA member McKay blisses out while describing hamburger eaters as "eating that moooother," "eating that tor-tuuure" inspiring laughs and an anthem for the patrons of soy-chicken-serving Asian restaurants in the West Village. She's just too happily different to be a star. (The album art, by McKay, alone illustrates that. Outside: cute pink kitties on lawn chairs. Inside: zany smiling pictures of McKay including one pointing a gun like Ma Barker, flanked by an illustration of animals going into an oil rig-poisoned basin to die.) One of my favorite songs on the album is a jazzy little number laden with tin drum and flute about being a loner shunning the spotlight called ‘Beneath the Underdog’. "I don't get people / I don't get things they think are reasonable" she confesses as she decides that:

Setting off from this here camp
I'd rather be a little tramp.
My own companion
Or maybe with one who's tail is waggin'

If McKay became a VH1 diva, I think she'd have to compromise her soul a little bit.

What's ironic considering the political consciousness that draws me to her is that Home Sweet Mobile Home really shines through when she puts down the protest sign. On Dispossessed she leads a ragtime band through a perfectly written piece of Dixieland glee and actually squeaks like Judy Holliday when she chortles "May a pox come like a copper 'cause you intoxicate me, Papa!" The album's first single ‘Caribbean Time’ is breezy and lovely without being vapid. And in ‘The Portal’ she gets a rare chance to let save her considerable piano skills (displayed more prominently on earlier albums) from being drowned out by the lush orchestrations while singing in her most mature, melancholy and soulful voice sing she began recording. It's the albums' spotlight moment.

The album was produced by McKay and her mother, actress Robin Pappas, and that only seems appropriate. Nellie McKay is someone who can entertain multiple generations in a darkened room with clinking cocktail glasses. And in the process, maybe everyone can learn a little something.