IVY ROOM PRESENTSSUNDAY MAY 18THâNellieâs McKayâs Strange Days: Get Away From Me TourCelebrating the release of Gee Whiz: The Get Away From Me Demosplus special guestâDoors 7:00pm / Show 7:30pmAdvance Tickets Available / $27 Day of Show(partially seated show)âIVY ROOM860 San Pablo Ave, Albany ⢠21+âNELLIE McKAYâNellie McKay has announced Gee Whiz: The Get Away From Me Demos, an 18-track collection of rare recordings that led to McKayâs groundbreaking debutalbum, Get Away From Me (2004). Gee Whiz will be available May 9, 2025 onstreaming, CD, and as a 2-LP set on Omnivore Recordings.âI was attracted to the lyrics immediately,â says legendary Beatlesengineer and producer Geoff Emerick, who was drawn to the demos and produced Get AwayFrom Me...
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IVY ROOM PRESENTSSUNDAY MAY 18THâNellieâs McKayâs Strange Days: Get Away From Me TourCelebrating the release of Gee Whiz: The Get Away From Me Demosplus special guestâDoors 7:00pm / Show 7:30pmAdvance Tickets Available / $27 Day of Show(partially seated show)âIVY ROOM860 San Pablo Ave, Albany ⢠21+âNELLIE McKAYâNellie McKay has announced Gee Whiz: The Get Away From Me Demos, an 18-track collection of rare recordings that led to McKayâs groundbreaking debutalbum, Get Away From Me (2004). Gee Whiz will be available May 9, 2025 onstreaming, CD, and as a 2-LP set on Omnivore Recordings.âI was attracted to the lyrics immediately,â says legendary Beatlesengineer and producer Geoff Emerick, who was drawn to the demos and produced Get AwayFrom Me. âHer level of maturity at such a young age is astounding. You comeacross an artist of this caliber once every 10 or 15 years. And I donât do a lot ofprojects these days unless something really stands out, like this did.âComposed, performed and produced by Nellie, these revelatory demos wererecorded in 2002 and sold by McKay as a series of handmade CD-Râs. The newdemo collection has been sequenced identically to Get Away From Me, with threeunreleased bonus songs, and mastered by multiple Grammy-winner MichaelGraves.When Get Away From Me was released on February 10, 2004, Rolling Stone gavethe album â
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. McKay made her national TV debut on The Late Show withDavid Letterman, and the record landed in the Billboard Top 200. She wascompared to both âDoris Day and Eminem,â said NPR Morning Edition. âAnd throwin a bit of Billie Holiday for good measure.â âIt was a different time,â says Nellie.âBut if older reviewersâmostly menâscoffed at her juvenile assessment of GeorgeBush and world politics, with twenty years of hindsight, we can now say that shewas a lot more astute than many of the scholars writing at the time,â writesAudiophix. âNellie McKayâand her debut albumâwere not perfect. They werebetter than that. They were real. And in a year that saw seminal punk from GreenDay (American Idiot) and seminal hip hop from Kanye (College Dropout), whichcame out the same day as Get Away From Me, that was enough to make it the bestalbum of the year.âRevisiting the album, Salon named it âone of the great pop albums of the early 21stcentury.â Popmatters writes, âTwo decades later, the circumstances and namesdiffer, but the anguish remains the same, as politicians, dictators, and other killersmake life hell for ordinary citizens.
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