In recording an album full of ’60s songs, from the Beatles’ “If I Fell” to the Cyrkle’s “Red Rubber Ball,” singer Nellie McKay discovered two important truths. First: Ha ha, drugs! “The stoner songs are really hard to do, especially stoned,” she says. “But, generally, man, are they intricate. How did they ever play them when they were high out of their minds? I have no idea. Those bands must have just been together so long that they could play in their sleep. I’m still having my trouble; maybe they’re harder to play straight.”
Second, the ’60s do not deserve our mockery: “You want to have fun. You want to be free and easy and explore the drug culture. On the other hand, you don’t want to make the ’60s any kind of joke, because it was very serious, and the politics matter now more than ever.”
McKay’s new album, “My Weekly Reader,” captures both sides of that decade, in the same way her album of Doris Day covers, 2009’s “Normal As Blueberry Pie,” reveals a darkness to sunny pop songs of the pre-rock era.
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In her warm high pitch, the 33-year-old singer has a way of drawing out lines like “horror grips us as we watch you die” from Crosby, Stills & Nash’s 1969 anti-war rocker “Wooden Ships” and the wry narrator whose girlfriend accuses him of “drunkenness and cruelty” in the Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon.”
Most potently, she takes a 1968 Moby Grape song, “Murder In My Heart for the Judge,” and applies it to the recent outcry over white police officers killing unarmed African-Americans in Ferguson, Mo.; New York City; and, most recently, South Carolina. It’s especially jarring, halfway through the song, when McKay raises her blueberry-pie voice and shouts: “Hands up,” “up against the wall, m———–,” and, quoting from a widely circulated photo of an activist’s sign, “I cannot believe I still have to protest this s—.”
“Just as we were recording it, all that stuff happened,” McKay says in a phone interview from New York, her longtime hometown, referring to last year’s Ferguson protests over the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown. “We, of course, wanted to work that in. We were aware that this is ongoing; that the song, unfortunately is not going to date.
“And sure enough …,” she adds, a few days after Walter Scott’s death in South Carolina.
McKay’s mother, Robin Pappas, is a veteran actress who had roles in “The Shining,” “Superman II” and others. McKay was born in London but moved with Pappas to New York and lived in Harlem when she was 4 years old. In junior high, she once told an interviewer, she “first became weird, and that never ended.” She listened not to grunge or hip-hop but Tommy Dorsey, Dinah Shore and Jo Stafford. (Asked for advice for teenage girls with similar mindsets, she rambles briefly about how it’s “nice to be an individual,” then concludes: “I don’t know. Wear clean socks. Two shoes. Your feet are important.”)
McKay and Pappas moved around throughout the singer’s youth, living in Olympia, Wash., and northeastern Pennsylvania. In high school, she played piano with a jazz band and sang a bit, then moved back to New York to study at the Manhattan College of Music. Her mother supported her decision to drop out.
Instead of studying, McKay landed gigs at supper clubs throughout Manhattan, then signed a deal with a major record label and put out 2004’s sprawling, two-disc “Get Away From Me.” Critics raved about the album, which she mostly wrote, suggesting she had a lucrative future in the rich space between Broadway and pop music. It hasn’t quite worked out that way, but McKay has carved out a smaller niche on the club circuit.
For “My Weekly Reader,” which includes brilliantly offbeat song choices such as Frank Zappa’s “Hungry Freaks, Daddy” and the Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park,” McKay worked with her longtime engineer, Geoff Emerick, who is more famous for working with the Beatles in the ’60s.
McKay’s original idea was to take a “different approach” to “If I Fell,” but nobody seemed to like it, so she concluded: “Why mess with a good thing?”
Knopper is a freelance writer.
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When: 7 and 10 p.m. Saturday
Where: Old Town School of Folk Music, 4545 N. Lincoln Ave.
Tickets: $26; 773-728-6000 or oldtownschool.org