If there’s one thing to expect from nineteen year old New Yorker Nellie McKay, it’s the proverbial unexpected.

Not only is her debut album, Get Away From Me a double but it flits wildly from style to style, taking in jazz, Broadwayesque show tunes and hip hop along the way. And, while she may come across as a happy go lucky US teenager, McKay’s lyrics pack a powerful punch too.
So when we’re told that Nellie is really excited about doing an interview with an Irish magazine, it shouldn’t be that much of a shock that she greets hotpress with a yawn. Press duties, it transpires, are not going well.
“It’s kind of primitive,” she rues. “I was going to say that you gotta do what you gotta do but I don’t think you actually have to do it. Maybe we’re not smart enough to stop. You don’t need to talk so much. I’d just like to do stuff out of my studio at home and do TV shows. Making these live personal appearances in front of a few hundred people seems so wasteful to me”.
Doing things her own way is obviously something that appeals to her, so why you wonder did she end up signing to a major label like Sony.
“I felt I needed to sign at the time. Now I think I understand a lot more how to do it yourself. I’m glad I went to Sony but I feel that you can divorce your mother or your puppy so much easier than you can divorce your record label. It’s absolutely crazy, they have you in a headlock for so many years of your life. The problem with corporations is that money is their bottom line and they take forever and ever to do the simplest thing. It can be maddening for someone as impatient as me”.
While she may be a huge headache for all concerned, the effort that went into Get Away From Me is starting to pay dividends with blossoming sales on both sides of the Atlantic. Most memorable are McKay’s acidic lyrics, an iron fist often wrapped in the velvet glove of the record’s lush orchestration.
“I do like to punch things and I do like pretty gloves so I guess that goes with the territory,” she perks up. If you look at the people who I admire in my life, half have a lot of front and have incredible substance and I’d really like to aspire to both”.
With various references to American and world events scattered across its songs, does she think of it as a political album?
“I hope so. This is such an important time. I don’t see how you can live a non-political life. People who do that are really missing out and are kind of pathetic to the contribution they make. Any album I put out will be political but at this point it’s good that people pick up on it. If you’re a chick people tend to marginalise what you have to say or put it into categories of love or comedy to try and make it less important than it actually is”.

Get Away From Me is out now on Sony