By STEPHEN HOLDEN APRIL 14, 2015

A globular light show flickered behind the piano at 54 Below on Monday evening as Nellie McKay resurrected the cheerfully embattled spirit of the hippie counterculture in her new show, “Nice Try, ’60s.” The performance celebrated the release of her wonderful album, “My Weekly Reader,” devoted to vintage psychedelia and period protest songs.

True to Ms. McKay’s idiosyncratic sensibility, her concert, like her album, bypassed the musical monuments of the period (there were no references to Woodstock) to exhume lesser-known songs like the Small Faces’ euphoric “Itchycoo Park,” the Kinks’ wistful “Sunny Afternoon” and Donovan’s phantasmagoric “Sunny Goodge Street.”

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By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist on Apr 14, 2015

Nellie McKay is one of those artists you’ll be glad you saw on the way up (like catching Bruce Springsteen in a small club, which I happened to do in 1973). This is because McKay’s star is burning brightly these days and she is going to be very big.

McKay (pronounced mick-kai) detonated her vocal dynamite on Sunday evening at the Deer Head Inn, a Delaware Water Gap, Pa. institution that happens to be the oldest continuously running jazz club in the U.S. It was the eve of her week-long residency at the 54 Below supper club in Manhattan’s Theater District, just off Broadway and a few blocks from Carnegie Hall, two venues where she no doubt will be a headliner some day.

Beyond being a terrific singer (and a damned good pianist and ukelele player), a big part of what makes McKay so special is the consciousness raising message she brings to the stage while stopping thisshort of being drop-dead funny. There is not another contemporary artist, let alone one so at home with jazz, rock, pop and torchlight standards, who so lethally combines the serious and the hilarious. Neither has undercut the other whenever we have seen her high-wire act over the years, and the balance between the two poles was pitch perfect at the Deer Head even when, in one between-songs monologue, she took off on rapacious developers who have despoiled her native Poconos, turning the once lovely region into one big waterpark and strip mall.

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We talk about “1960s pop anthems,” but what if it were possible to take soul, folk, and rock opuses from the era of pot-and-protest and reinterpret them in a completely personal and intimate way? That’s what the highly individual singer-multi-instrumentalist Nellie McKay is doing this weekend at 54 Below and on her new album, “My Weekly Reader.” Throughout, she takes songs that were anthemic or dogmatic and reweaves them into something warm and vulnerable—stories about human beings, rather than abstract causes. Most of us have grown up accepting these lyrics without questioning their deeper meanings, but Ms. McKay extracts their inner truths by illuminating their foundations: the barn dance vaudeville of “Fixin’ to Die Rag,” the delicate balance of defiance and compassion at the heart of “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying.”

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Huffington Post – Michael Giltz 

Nellie McKay has a new album and she’s ready to…storm the Bastille! Covering classic pop tunes from the 1960s, McKay brings alive the era when protest didn’t seem pointless, without ever losing her sense of humor or pop smarts. She’s on an extended tour and you don’t want to miss her terrific live shows, where McKay’s deadpan humor always threatens to — but never quite — gleefully upstage her musical chops. God knows if she wanted McKay could do stand-up, host a variety show or some day in my dreams run for President. (Though the PETA-friendly McKay might want to concede Texas right off the bat.)

Catch her if you can and you’ll be a fan for life. In New York, McKay is playing 54 Below from April 13-April 18, an ideal venue for seeing her since it’s in the heart of the theater district and it’s only a matter of time before McKay starts creating musical theater staged on Broadway.

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