IVY ROOM PRESENTS

SUNDAY MAY 18TH

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Nellie’s McKay’s Strange Days: Get Away From Me Tour

Celebrating the release of Gee Whiz: The Get Away From Me Demos

plus special guest

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Doors 7:00pm / Show 7:30pm

Advance Tickets Available / $27 Day of Show

(partially seated show)

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IVY ROOM

860 San Pablo Ave, Albany • 21+

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NELLIE McKAY

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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.