Nellie McKay comes to Ringwood

If you think there’s even a chance that Nellie McKay will go through the motions and call it a day when she appears at the Ringwood Public Library on May 19, then her show is guaranteed to surprise you. Of course, it will also probably surprise her too.

"They say rich people plan for generations and poor people plan for Saturday night," she said. "I’m kind of the latter. I just kind of take what comes."

It might not be the typical approach to a live performance, but then little about the 31-year-old singer/songwriter is typical. She refers to her music, which is a funky, piano-and-ukulele-based maelstrom of folk, jazz, and just about everything else, as "music for people who can’t make up their minds."

One song might be a sweet ballad; the next, a bouncing Caribbean-esque reggae tune featuring lyrics loaded with irony and humor. Next, a front-porch, ukulele-strumming, tongue-in-cheek analysis of feminism. Who knows?

Her track-list ADD might make it seem that she’s trying desperately hard not to be pigeonholed, but McKay said the opposite — if she could stick with just one thing, she’d probably be more successful (in the traditional music industry sense).

"It isn’t intentional. I think we’d sell a lot more records if we could just do one thing. It’s kind of against my own will," she said. "It’s nice if you can find one genre and excel at that and make that your thing."

But now, after five albums and a decade in the business, she is (true to form) currently doing something completely different: providing the musical end of the off-Broadway show "Old Hats," a revue of sorts featuring long-time entertainers Bill Irwin and David Shiner.

There’s eight shows a week, McKay said, and each one — between the music, the comedy, and the audience-engaging skits — has "something for everybody."

"It’s nice once in a while to be part of the big machine… you get swept up alongside it, and it’s nice to see people laugh," she said.

It seems to be a good fit for McKay, whose off-kilter humor somehow works its way into nearly everything she does. Songs like, "Won’t U Please B Nice," where she sings in a soft, charming voice, "If you would sit / Oh so close to me / That would be nice / Like it’s supposed to be / If you don’t I’ll slit your throat / So won’t you please be nice," are as disarming as they are funny.

She doesn’t readily admit to the humor, however, and believes that she "just gets lucky" sometimes.
"I think I grew up in a pretty funny house, and maybe that seeped into some of the lyrics," she said.

The wit does provide a counterweight to the heavy topics she addresses in her songs, however. She’s not afraid to voice her opinion about political or social issues like feminism or animal rights. (McKay is a vegetarian.)

"I think most people have the same politics — it’s mostly common sense — but it gets perverted," she said. "Most people think it’s wrong to make animals suffer, but they do it because they eat them."

She tries to make all of her statements "in an entertaining way," though. And the only thing she can guarantee for the library show is that she’ll "try to keep it moving."

"I don’t know. This is a daytime show… can you drink at the library?" she said.

McKay will be playing on Sunday, May 19 at 2 p.m. Tickets are available at ringwoodlibrary.org.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

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