McKay a bundle of contradictions

In person, Nellie McKay isn’t nearly as tough and tart as she comes across on her recently released debut album. At The Barns of Wolf Trap last Wednesday, Miss McKay (pronounced to rhyme with “eye”) was elegantly dressed and endearingly nervous.

“I would talk to you,” she said to the curious, twice-her-age audience, “but I’m scared of you.”

This was no bad thing. Charming, in fact.

On “Get Away From Me” — the title itself a gratuitous swipe at Norah Jones’ “Come Away With Me” — the New Yorker is a bundle of scatterbrained swagger, sniping at the opposite sex in multiple musical vocabularies: hip-hop, cabaret, jazz-pop, music-hall, Broadway.

As her songs tell it, she’s more embittered, more caustic than you’d think possible of an attractive, unusually talented woman all of 19 years old.

On Wednesday, playing solo grand piano, she was agreeable — even vulnerable.

And what about all the references she makes to the bottle? “I don’t really drink that much; I’m just posing,” she said, calling to mind her song “It’s a Pose,” which contains a lyric that’s as man-hating as Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.”

The thing about Nellie McKay, an ex-stand-up comic, is that she’s got humor, irony and imagination; bluster and brashness aren’t her style.

She threatened to “slit your throat” on “Won’t U Please B Nice” and taunted “Baby Watch Your Back” — but always with a kittenish wink and glint in her eye. (When she sang in Mandarin, German and Japanese, it was impossible to tell whom she was threatening.)

Miss McKay would never go Liza Minnelli on a wayward man. One doubts she’d even toss a drink in a guy’s face.

She’s too smart, too plotting, for that.

Verbosity is her weapon.

On “Sari,” “Inner Peace” and “Work Song,” she let fly an amphetamine stream of frenetic rhymes that you or I would fumble over trying to recite. Miss McKay spewed them out while playing complex figures on a concert instrument.

She’s a political junkie, too, attributing her lack of a prepared set list to pre-show CNN overconsumption.

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