As the Title of Nellie McKay’s New Album Exhorts, Listeners May Want To Pay Attention

Nellie McKay‘Hey Guys, Watch This’Hungry Mouse RecordsIn one of Rudyard Kipling’s most quoted lines, the author insisted in 1911 that “the female of the species is more deadly than the male.” It’s hard not to think of that line when listening to “Make a Wish,” the last tune of Nellie McKay’s new album, “Hey Guys, Watch This.” I hope you will indulge me in a mild bit of vulgarity when I tell you that it’s the damnedest thing I ever heard. “Make a Wish” is a statement about feminism, racial equality, and LGBTQ rights — that much seems clear — but other than that, it’s hard to theorize from whose point of view the song is written; clearly, it’s not Ms. McKay’s. Let’s agree at the outset that there is one area of achievement where women lag far behind the male animal: There are virtually no female serial killers or mass murderers shooting up schools. C’mon gals, what’s up with that?“Make a Wish” uses the fundamental meter of a rap number — as well as some of the profanity, violent imagery, and transgressive attitude — to make its point. Opening with the bell-like jingle of an ice cream wagon, “Wish” tells of a young queer Black girl who aspires to become the “female Jeffrey Dahmer.” As she puts it, “I want to be the first black woman & the first gay female to lure indigent youth to my basement.” This, in the ingeniously twisted logic that she espouses, is a surefire route to becoming “the first woman president.” We’re used to hearing Ms. McKay in all sorts of contexts; a few years ago, she was doing rather ambitious shows — with full “book” — speculating on the lives of such figures as Rachel Carson and Billy Tipton. At the other end, she’s been more recently delighting us at Birdland in unaccompanied, one-woman recitals intermingling standards with her own most memorable songs.“Hey Guys” is officially Ms. McKay’s “first album of original material in 13 years.” Where her Birdland solos were models of remarkable spareness and simplicity, “Guys” has more the sheen and polish of the better pop albums, and in this case, that’s a good thing. This is a very attractive-sounding production, recorded at Charleston, West Virginia, with a fully realized backing band composed mainly of a local quartet called the Carpenter Ants, as well violinist Tim Carbone, bassist Alexi David, and Ron Sowell on harmonica. The textures are simultaneously folky and psychedelic; on “Drinking Song,” they give her a dreamy sheen, appropriate for a song about “drinking and dreaming,” which turns out to have a profoundly sad undercurrent.Messrs. Carbone and David joined her last Friday to help launch the album at Le Poisson Rouge. It was a flawless 90-minute set that mixed in songs from the new album, McKay classics like “The Dog Song,” and also her idiosyncratic favorites like the 1933 “Willow Weep for Me,” Shel Silverstein’s manifesto of feminine identity, “One’s on the Way,” and Les McCann’s soul jazz civil rights anthem, “Compared to What?”If “Wish” is by the most extremely dark number on “Hey Guys,” then “Luckiest Mood” is the sunniest; it’s so relentlessly cheerful that it could be sung by a cockney chimney sweep in the next sequel to “Mary Poppins.” “The Party Song” is somewhere in between; it’s not about a party in the sense that any of us would recognize, and in the middle it builds to a contemplation of the bombing of Hiroshima. Not every song contains such a serious Easter Egg in the middle: “Did I Catch You Dreaming” is suitably dreamy and wistful, while “Lali” is an upbeat folksy air, sung to a little girl, with a keyboard solo by Ms. McKay; it has an innocent quality that seems amazingly sincere.I know I’ll be playing “Hey Guys, Watch This” a few hundred times more, and not just trying to decipher “Make a Wish.” The song has its own inherent logic, but compared to what?

As the Title of Nellie McKay’s New Album Exhorts, Listeners May Want To Pay Attention

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