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“I was attracted to the lyrics immediately,” says legendary Beatles engineer and producer Geoff Emerick, on the demos for what would become Nellie McKay’s 2004 critically-lauded debut album, 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.” Get Away From Me landed on the Billboard Top 200, received four stars from Rolling Stone, and Nellie made her network television debut on The Late Show with David Letterman. In 2020, Salon hailed the record as “one of the great pop albums of the early 21st century.” Revisiting the album in 2024, reviewers remarked: “. . . anger and discombobulation reflect the violence happening in her name via her tax dollars . . . 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. The word “brilliant’ comes to mind, as does the acknowledgement—the reality—that the average listener can’t deal with this many ideas, lyrical and musical. The average listener will be as alienated by this music as by Metropolis or any movie by that bygone boy genius Orson Welles, who was supposed to remake Hollywood in his image(s) and ended up with a fascinating, difficult, and individual body of work.” —Pop Matters “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 . . . 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.” —Audiophix That said, the story really began before the album was recorded. Gee Whiz: The Get Away From Me Demos collects Nellie’s recordings which became that landmark album, composed, performed, and produced by Nellie, and sequenced identically to the original record, now on CD, Digital, and as a double-LP. As a bonus, the CD and Digital programs also contain three very early, previously unissued tracks. Mastered by multiple Grammy-winner Michael Graves, these revelatory demos show how complete the album was in its initial stages and brings new insight on the creative process from one of music’s most creative artists.

FEATURES:

• 18 previously unissued demos on 2-LPs mirroring Nellie’s critically acclaimed, Geoff Emerick-produced and -engineered debut album.
• CD and Digital contain three bonus tracks.
• Packaging contains new liner notes from Nellie McKay.

NELLIE MCKAY / GEE WHIZ: THE GET AWAY FROM ME DEMOS