Like no other: Singer Nellie McKay here Friday

Not since Bob Dylan’s salad days has there been an interview subject more enigmatic and elusive than Nellie McKay, the singer, pianist and ukulele-strummer who’ll visit the Palladium Theater’s Side Door Cafe Friday.

Talking with McKay (it’s pronounced “M’Kai”) can be an exercise in frustration, as the Catalyst found out this week, as she not only dodges questions, she also goes off on tangents that don’t seem to be related to anything at all.

Here’s the thing, however: She is a music-maker of the higher order, and is one of today’s most articulate and interesting interpreters of the Great American Songbook.

Conventional, she’s not: One reviewer called McKay “a mix of Katherine Hepburn and Blossom Dearie.”

In McKay’s catalog, you’ll find Beatles, Ray Charles and “Zip-a Dee-Doo-Dah” sandwiched between “Angel Eyes, “The Nearness of You” and “In a Sentimental Mood.”

One of her albums (2015’s My Weekly Reader) features McKay channeling the Mothers of Invention (“Hungry Freaks, Daddy”), Herman’s Hermits (“Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter”) and the Kinks (“Sunny Afternoon”).

Prior to that one, she released Normal as Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day.

All this might come off as just marketing manipulation, forced cleverness, or eccentricity for eccentricity’s sake, were it not for the fact that McKay is a phenomenal singer, a charming personality – and a pretty darn good jazz-influenced pianist, too.

In other words, Nellie McKay is an artist.

St. Pete Catalyst: Why do you choose to record the things you do?

Nellie McKay: I guess you make lists of ideas, and then sometimes they happen. You can’t really control them, like a person or maybe even an animal. They have their own personality and they do go their own way. You can offer guidance when it’s sought, or if you really think you need to. But I don’t know how anything happens.

What music do you like? What moves you, and is it different all the time?

Oh, yeah for sure. Well, I was listening to an album of National Lampoon’s from the ‘70s, and just the freedom of it was lovely. We need to get back to that, or the arts are dead. There was a real feeling of liberation back then, and now it’s become kind of dour – neo-Victorian guardians of coercive compassion, to paraphrase Camille Paglia, and that’s true.

You have steadily avoided typecasting by playing different kinds of music. Was that on purpose, or just the way the wind blew for you?

I guess I just like all kinds of music, so why not make it?

Well, at a certain point after your first album you could have said ‘I’m going to focus on one thing because it’s successful,’ and go in that one, commercial direction. But you didn’t do that, you followed your own muse. Was that a conscious decision?

I guess, because the former is much smarter [laughing].

[Laughing] Are you not interested in being rich and famous?

If I’d been given the opportunity to sell out, well, I’d like to say you’d be a fool not to. But I guess there have been certain times where … I was asked to do a song for a TV show about women in science. I wanted to do a famous Irish suffragist, social reformer abolitionist and anti-vivisectionist, Frances Power Cobbe. It was the perfect time period. They wanted a certain time period and everything.

And they decided to do her, and then I got cold feet because they were going to make a cartoon of her. And she was a big lady, and I just started worrying they’d make fun of her.

So I guess that’s just one of many instances where I said ‘Well, if it could turn out badly I’d rather just not do it.’ And that has happened a lot.

Is your career at a level you’re comfortable with?

Yes! It’s just, gotta pay them bills. I did a show in L.A., and there were all these celebrities who came. My mother was outside there as people were arriving. And this guy came next to her, wearing a little cap and a jacket. And she thought ‘Oh, who’s that?’

And all of a sudden all these flashbulbs went off. She said the paparazzi, they were just insects. They were like locusts. And of course it’s like that novel Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, which has those vivid crowd scenes.

It’s such hell, fame. John Updyke said that fame is a mask that eats the face. There’s so much that’s wonderful about being anonymous in this day and age, where if you want  to hold on to something that’s on something technological, you can lose it. You can lose all your photos. It’s not necessarily permanent.

But if you want to delete something from your life, it will haunt you for all your days and beyond. If you do something bad as a teenager, it will haunt you your whole life.

They’re doing facial recognition, everything’s turning into digital. We don’t need a real ID. I just think it’s beautiful not to have an imprint. For nobody to know you.

I think that’s the goal, really. To in some way have money, and just, you know, blend.

But would you want to delete all the music that you’ve done? Like it never happened? You must be proud of so much of it.

Oh, yeah. I also just love stuff. We all must treasure our stuff. There are exquisite thrift store and flea market finds; you want future generations to love what already exists. Whether it’s old buildings, or old people or just all these treasures. They may not have a lot of dollar worth. But throwing stuff out needlessly, it breaks my heart. It’s part of the consumerist culture. So much of what they’re selling us, we don’t need, we already have it. We don’t need to replace whatever it is we have.

I forget what the question was.

Concert details and tickets are here.