Nellie McKay with special guest Simon Lynge

Name: Nellie McKay with special guest Simon Lynge
Start: 2025-09-13T19:30:00-07:00
Location: Rainshadow Recording

Schedule

Sat, 13 Sep, 2025 at 07:30 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

Rainshadow Recording | Port Townsend, WA

"The one thing certain about Ms. McKay is the size and range of her talent..." - New York Times
A note from Everett:
When I learned Nellie would be making a short run up the West Coast, this was simply too good to pass up! I was first introduced to Nellie while stage managing the Houston Jazz Festival at Miller Amphitheatre a few years ago. Nellie is an accomplished jazz pianist and vocalist, but her range extends far beyond just jazz, garnering the attention of the legendary Beatles’ engineer, Geoff Emrick, who produced her double CD debut “Get Away From Me.” I have the honor of working with Nellie again, along with producer Joe Peine, engineer Andy Bradley, and a who’s who in both jazz and country on a forthcoming album of classic country duets. Nellie will perform solo, accompanying herself on Rainshadow Recording’s 7’ Steinway Grand Piano, as well as ukulele. This will be a very special and intimate, musical night. More about Nellie below...
"A renegade songwriter with an ultraflexible Great American Songbook sensibility. McKay finds modern resonances everywhere." - Rolling Stone
Nellie McKay has released an eclectic bunch of critically acclaimed albums, her songs and sound ranging from jazz to pop to indefinable. She's won a Broadway Theatre World Award for Polly Peachum in The Threepenny Opera, co-created/starred in off-Broadway's Old Hats, created musical biographies of Barbara Graham, Rachel Carson, Joan Rivers, & Billy Tipton ('Best Concerts of the Year' - The New York Times). As well as acting in the films PS I Love You & Downtown Express, Nellie provided music for Rumor Has It, Monster-In-Law, Last Holiday, Gasland, Private Life, & PS I Love You. Her TV appearances include David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Craig Ferguson, The View, and Jimmy Dore, and her music has been heard on Mad Men, Weeds, Boardwalk Empire, Grey's Anatomy, NCIS, and Nurse Jackie.
Most recently Nellie was nominated for an Ovation Award for her performance in Ethan Coen's A Play is a Poem at the Mark Taper Forum.
McKay is a recipient of PETA's Humanitarian Award for her dedication to animal rights,
& she is a vocal critic of endless war, capitalism, & the two-party system that sustains them.
Nellie McKay has announced Gee Whiz: The Get Away From Me Demos, an 18- track collection of rare recordings that led to McKay’s groundbreaking debut album, Get Away From Me (2004). Gee Whiz will be available May 9, 2025 on streaming, CD, and as a 2-LP set on Omnivore Recordings.
“I was attracted to the lyrics immediately,” says legendary Beatles engineer and producer Geoff Emerick, who was drawn to the demos and produced Get Away From Me. “Her level of maturity at such a young age is astounding. You come across an artist of this caliber once every 10 or 15 years. And I don’t do a lot of projects these days unless something really stands out, like this did.”
Composed, performed and produced by Nellie, these revelatory demos were recorded in 2002 and sold by McKay as a series of handmade CD-R’s. The new demo collection has been sequenced identically to Get Away From Me, with three unreleased bonus songs, and mastered by multiple Grammy-winner Michael Graves.
When Get Away From Me was released on February 10, 2004, Rolling Stone gave the album ★★★★. McKay made her national TV debut on The Late Show with David Letterman, and the record landed in the Billboard Top 200. She was compared to both “Doris Day and Eminem,” said NPR Morning Edition. “And throw in a bit of Billie Holiday for good measure.” “It was a different time,” says Nellie.
“But if older reviewers—mostly men—scoffed at her juvenile assessment of George Bush and world politics, with twenty years of hindsight, we can now say that she was a lot more astute than many of the scholars writing at the time,” writes Audiophix. “Nellie McKay—and her debut album—were not perfect. They were better than that. They were real. And in a year that saw seminal punk from Green Day (American Idiot) and seminal hip hop from Kanye (College Dropout), which came out the same day as Get Away From Me, that was enough to make it the best album of the year.”
Revisiting the album, Salon named it “one of the great pop albums of the early 21st century.” Popmatters writes, “Two decades later, the circumstances and names differ, but the anguish remains the same, as politicians, dictators, and other killers make life hell for ordinary citizens.”