A forward-looking throwback

Things are complicated for Nellie McKay, just as they are for the rest of us. She embraces the contradictions, revels in them, a young singer as filled with confidence as she is with self-doubt, a songwriter exploring modern life through music rooted in the ancient pop styles of Cole Porter and Billie Holiday.

Listen as she laughs and coughs on the phone from her apartment in New York, and you begin to get the picture. She has the flu, but a few days earlier she was onstage at Lincoln Center, playing her piano songs of wit, longing, anger and joy, set to classic jazzy pop grooves, with subtle bits of hip-hop and endless self-deprecation.

“It’s easy to just be called a throwback,” she laments. That would miss the point, as her music is as much the result of absorbing everything she heard while growing up: Not just Doris Day and Rosemary Clooney, but also the Dylan and Chopin records played by her mother, the Destiny’s Child songs she heard at school.

The lyrics on her debut album, “Get Away From Me,” are romantic and political, both charming and challenging, with words seemingly scattered and colliding and overloaded with information (“Yeah, I’ll have my coffee black / Hey look, we’re bombing Iraq”). The 18-song album made several of last year’s Top 10 lists, was nominated for the Shortlist Music Prize and will deliver McKay this Saturday to KCRW’s “A Sounds Eclectic Evening” at the Universal Amphitheatre, with Coldplay, Cafe Tacuba and others.

That album came out a year ago, and McKay wonders why people still want to talk about it. She sounds embarrassed by the whole thing, as if she’s already moved on to the next one, now more than halfway complete and aimed for release by early summer -- if she can just finish the lyrics to her remaining songs.

“Every song is different. I wish it were more of a science,” she says wistfully. “I feel like I’m getting worse at it.”

At the Shortlist concert in October at the Avalon in Hollywood, McKay sat at an electric piano, wearing an elegant pink evening dress, her strawberry blond hair glowing beneath the spotlight. She sang of the strange and the everyday, name-dropping George W. Bush, Dr. Phil and Ethel Merman in a voice that could be soft and velvety or crisp and confrontational.

Her postmodern twist on classic pop is not unlike that of Tom Waits or Bette Midler in the ‘70s, when those artists first embraced the sounds and crisp, archaic language of earlier generations. In the context of big rock drum solos and arena rock laser beams, Midler and Waits seemed modern, almost revolutionary.

McKay was just getting even. “I just had so much to say with that first record, and I was getting back at everybody in high school,” she says now. “I was going to say my piece because no one ever let me say it. I like to think this new record is more fun.”

The new songs, she says, are less obsessed with herself, and she may open the album with biting musical statements on gay marriage and tenement rights. “The idea that the new album will start with three protest songs in a row doesn’t sound more lighthearted,” McKay says. “But I actually think that protest songs are incredibly lighthearted.”

The still-untitled album is just one of several projects in the works. She’s been creating songs for an upcoming Rob Reiner film, “Rumor Has It,” and is working on a proposed half-hour TV variety show with herself as the star. She’s also set to make her Broadway debut in the cast of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Threepenny Opera” in April 2006.

There is some irony in that, since McKay is the daughter of actress Robin Pappas. As a teenager in New York, she’d had dreams of Broadway. She tried out for a part playing a Russian immigrant girl on Ellis Island. She went on cattle calls for “Mamma Mia!” and “Dance of the Vampires.” And her manager at the time wanted her to try out for the stripper role in “The Graduate.” She thought about going to clown school. Nothing happened.

Apparently, she had learned little from her mother’s career. “I used to tell her, ‘I think I could get a lot of the auditions that you don’t get, Mommy.’ Very helpful. Then you try it yourself and see how rough it is.”

Facing the press has also been an endless disappointment. She rarely enjoys what she reads about herself, even some of the positive reviews and profiles that have appeared in the New York Times and the Village Voice. She did like an interview she did for the farcical weekly the Onion.

“I don’t think journalists have an easy job,” she says. “But it’s like the police department: It attracts a lot of the wrong people.”

But tell her that you researched her name on the Internet, and she moans: “Oooh, no. You will find.... Oh, boy.” She can’t look anymore, at least at nothing about herself.

On March 29, “Get Away From Me” will be reissued in the DualDisc format with a pair of extra songs, including “Teresa,” written originally in tribute to Teresa Heinz Kerry, which manages to retain its charm long after John Kerry lost the presidential election.

“I kind of like the fact that as the months have gone on, there are hardly any laugh lines in it now,” she says happily. “People just hear it as a straight song. I kind of like that it’s changed that way.”

Even topical songs need to survive beyond the political moment. She wants her songs to last. It takes too long to write them. “Anyone’s interpretation of anything artistic is viable,” McKay says. Then she laughs. “Well, not on the Internet.”

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Steve Appleford can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.

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Nellie McKay

What: KCRW’s “A Sounds Eclectic Evening,” with Coldplay, Cafe Tacuba, Paul Buchanan of the Blue Nile, Van Hunt, Aqualung, the Like and others

Where: Universal Amphitheatre, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City

When: 7:45 p.m. Saturday

Price: $40

Info: (818) 622-4440

Also

What: Nellie McKay, with Cary Brothers opening

Where: The Roxy, 9009 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood

When: 7 p.m. Sunday

Price: $20 and $17.50

Info: (310) 278-9457