Nellie McKay

Nellie McKay presents GEE WHIZ: The Get Away From Me Demos, playing the entire album.

When Get Away From Me was released on February 10, 2004, Rolling Stone gave the album four stars. McKay made her national TV debut on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” and the record landed in the Billboard Top 200.

“But if older reviewers—mostly men—scoffed at her juvenile assessment of George Bush and world politics, with twenty years of hindsight, we can now say that she was a lot more astute than many of the scholars writing at the time,” notes Audiophix. “Nellie McKay—and her debut album—were not perfect. They were better than that. They were real. And in a year that saw seminal punk from Green Day (American Idiot) and seminal hip hop from Kanye (College Dropout), which came out the same day as Get Away From Me, that was enough to make it the best album of the year.”

Revisiting the album, Salon named it “one of the great pop albums of the early 21st century.” Popmatters writes, “Two decades later, the circumstances and names differ, but the anguish remains the same, as politicians, dictators, and other killers make life hell for ordinary citizens.”

Nellie McKay has released an eclectic bunch of critically acclaimed albums, her songs and sound ranging from jazz to pop to indefinable, and with her latest, HEY GUYS, WATCH THIS, ably assisted by The Carpenter Ants, she taps into the soulful sounds of West Virginia. Coming soon, the GET AWAY FROM ME demos on Omnivore Records.

She's won a Broadway Theatre World Award for Polly Peachum in The Threepenny Opera, co-created/starred in off-Broadway's Old Hats, created musical biographies of Barbara Graham, Rachel Carson, Joan Rivers, & Billy Tipton ('Best Concerts of the Year' - The New York Times).

As well as acting in the films PS I Love You & Downtown Express, Nellie provided music for Rumor Has It, Monster-In-Law, Last Holiday, Gasland, Private Life, & PS I Love You. Her TV appearances include David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Craig Ferguson, The View, and Jimmy Dore, and her music has been heard on Mad Men, Weeds, Boardwalk Empire, Grey's Anatomy, NCIS, and Nurse Jackie. Most recently Nellie was nominated for an Ovation Award for her performance in Ethan Coen's A Play is a Poem at the Mark Taper Forum.

McKay is a recipient of PETA's Humanitarian Award for her dedication to animal rights, & she is a vocal critic of endless war, capitalism, & the two-party system that sustains them.

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