Nellie McKay elects political themes

Nellie McKay

Pretty Little Head

Hungry Mouse

At long last, Nellie McKay got to release the “Pretty Little Head” that she wanted to release — all 23 songs of it, and all 44 pages of its lyric booklet and sumptuous glamour-girl photo spread.

The bulky double-disc set, which is available online today and in bricks-and-mortar stores next week, cost the Manhattan pianist-songstress the support of a major label (Columbia Records). Problem solved: Miss McKay soldiered on and formed her own imprint, Hungry Mouse Records.

There’s a funny little paradox in all this. For someone whose politics are proudly bohemian, Miss McKay’s idealistic insistence on the integrity of the dusty old album format seems downright conservative.

God bless our pretty little Donna Quixote.

Was “Pretty Little Head” worth all the trouble and delay?

Say this: It’s never, ever boring.

Miss McKay is so strikingly talented a musician, and so restless a music fan, that her compositions are all hungry little genre aggregators: They can whipsaw from sing-songy Broadway ditties one minute to mouthy hip-hop the next.

She clearly is impatient with cliche and banality, and, so, toys with classic forms with a refreshing irreverence and invention. With “Lali est Paresseux,” she even makes French pop sound good.

“Pretty Little Head’ kicks off with the ebullient “Cupcakes,” a wry celebration of homosexual love. That’s followed by the miraculously concise “Pink Chandeliers,” on which Miss McKay purrs over a Latin jazz groove with sitar-like noise buzzing in the background. That, in turn, is followed with the proper piano conservatory flourish of “There You Are in Me,” whose word-spitting refrain is overlaid with circa-1989 Paula Abdul production values.

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Like the Beatles’ “White Album” (but in no other respect, I assure you), “Pretty Little Head” has its share of “Honey Pie”-like throwaways. Here, there’s the annoyingly synth-y “G.E.S.,” the summer-stock singalong “Food” and the rootsy “Yodel.” But even the latter includes self-searching lines such as: “Everybody is dying/walking to the temple of art/where I’m found out as a fraud/and there’s nobody who’s buying.”

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