A talent with many faces

For a simple introduction to the wacky world of Nellie McKay, start with the young musician's album cover. There she is, a fresh-scrubbed girl in coat and gloves, arms flung jubilantly skyward, turn-the-world-on smile spread across her face. And there's the title: "Get Away From Me." In the lower left corner: the black-and-white parental advisory sticker. Just opposite is a promotional blurb, comparing McKay with Doris Day and Eminem.

All of which combines to announce the arrival of a crooning, rapping, tart-tongued, Tin Pan Alley-loving teenager who lives in Harlem and rhymes "pneumonia" with "soy bologna," and who used her copious and mysterious powers of persuasion to convince Columbia Records to allow an unknown, uncategorizable, and arguably unmarketable new artist to release a double album -- a first for a female on a major label.

By pop culture standards, McKay (pronounced muh-KYE) isn't even cool. Her witty, issue-oriented repertoire toggles senselessly from twinkling bossa nova and seditious ragtime to ersatz American songbook and savage raps. McKay wrote her first song exactly two years ago. But she's been planning her brilliant career for a long time.

"I went to music school to try and be Jane Monheit, and I went to drama school to try and be Doris Day," says McKay, who also tried her hand at being Joan Rivers. She dropped out of both schools and got bored with stand-up comedy. "I was even thinking of doing stunts like hiring a friend to fall in the subway tracks, and I could save her and be on the front of the [New York] Post. I mean, gee, I hate being poor. I've been trying to get famous in so many ways."

There is no rational response to such candor, which would be laughable in the face of a lesser talent. But McKay's a natural -- fluent on piano and mallet percussion instruments, an impressive saxophonist and cellist, and a prolific, original songwriter. She's a genuine character, in conversation and on disc -- a kooky charmer who swoons for PETA, flows in defense of liberal theology, and coos about the life of a stay-at-home mom. "I wanna get married/ I need to cook meals/ I wanna pack cute little lunches/ for my Brady bunches/ then read Danielle Steele," she sings, gorgeously, in "I Wanna Get Married," conjuring an impossible mix of pure want and killer condescension.

"Everyone thinks of that song as a joke, or an attack on marriage," says McKay, who plays at the Paradise Lounge on Sunday. "But that's how I really feel. I have a disturbing need to be, who's the lady on `Bewitched'? Elizabeth Montgomery. One of those women who wear pink all day and has a husband who goes to his job at the firm. We watched a lot of `Nick at Night.' "

"We" refers to McKay and her mother, actress Robin Pappas, with whom she's "bonded at the hip." The pair moved from London to New York when McKay -- who is estranged from her biological father -- was 2. In 1994, after McKay was mugged, they moved to Olympia, Wash., and then back east to Pennsylvania, where McKay attended junior high and high school.

She was a terrible student, section leader in the marching band, and a member of the Pocono Youth Orchestra, among many other regional ensembles. McKay enrolled in the Manhattan School of Music in 2000, when she was 16, and started playing up to eight gigs a week in gay bars in Greenwich Village. Go to www.boston.com/ae/music to hear audio clips of "Get Away From Me.""At first she only knew a few songs, but she rustled up a repertoire fast," says Pappas, who travels with McKay as her assistant. "Of course I was worried about her. But she's the captain of her ship, and no one was going to stop her. Even as a kid her reach exceeded her grasp."

McKay was, needless to say, a bit different from the other kids. Her wardrobe essentials were giant curlers and shoulder pads. Once she ran from a room where some friends were watching "GI Jane" because, she says, "I just had to avoid the gruesomeness. So I went downstairs and turned up Doris Day as loud as I could. It made me so happy."

One of McKay's early champions was Jason Trachtenburg of the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, who heard her sing at a Christmas party.

"She was like all the great American songwriters rolled into one girl," Trachtenburg says. He invited McKay to open a show at Tonic, a performance space on New York's Lower East Side, in February 2003. A piece in Time Out New York followed, and in short order so did offers from record labels.

McKay signed with Columbia last spring, recorded "Get Away From Me" with legendary Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick at the helm, and is launching her career with the help of a high-powered creative team.

"She's highly eclectic for a 19-year-old person, and extremely subversive in a very subtle way," says Joe Brauner, McKay's booking agent at Creative Artists Agency. "People will love this record or not like it even a little bit."

Such mundane concerns are of little use to McKay, whose sense of destiny looms so much larger than numbers on a spreadsheet. These days she's hardly sleeping. She knows she's dangerously run down, and can't shake a nasty cold. But Nellie McKay is over the moon. It's almost as if she's stepped into one of her beloved vintage films, where the skirts are tailored and stars are born.

"I watch movies from the '40s, the way they dress and their sense of style, and I want to be them," McKay explains. "Being famous, it's like it's not a choice. It's the only thing to be."

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com