FIREWORKS.(singer and pianist Nellie McKay)

The nineteen-year-old singer and pianist Nellie McKay has said repeatedly that she wants to be famous, and she has generated a small bible of press clippings to nudge the process along. It's a fun read. McKay pushes her politics (peta activist, no friend of Bush, "tired of white people") and cherry-picks her rich backstory: a peripatetic childhood, spent travelling with her mother, the actress Robin Pappas, between the Poconos; Olympia, Washington; and Harlem in a Volkswagen bus. Her grandfather did time in San Quentin. In school, Nellie ignored her classmates' musical tastes, wore shoulder pads, and immersed herself in the work of Jo Stafford, Greta Garbo, Doris Day, and Rita Hayworth. After two years at the Manhattan School of Music, she abandoned the conservatory for night clubs, often accompanied by her mother. She relishes using interviews to scare off anyone expecting a biddable camp figure: "I thought all the '50s rockers were so dirty"; "There's a side of me that identifies with Aileen Wuornos"; "I'd really like to raise the minimum wage." She speaks openly about the real-life subject of one of her songs, a conservatory teacher who is both a neighbor in her apartment building and the unwilling object of her obsessive infatuation. It's impossible to determine how much of all this is genuine and how much is just fireworks. (She cites Bill Clinton's saxophone performances as a childhood inspiration.)

Last year, Columbia Records signed McKay and hired Geoff Emerick, the longtime Beatles engineer and Elvis Costello producer, to work on her first album, "Get Away from Me." Oddly, the album takes up two disks, even though the music lasts just an hour. There is no discernible thematic split between the two halves. The only reason it's a double set is that McKay, over the record company's objections, demanded it. She seems to be playing the crazy card--a way to get into the room and turn on all the lights while saying, "Sorry, don't mind me!" Anyone who, like McKay, has watched "Access Hollywood" and MTV's "Driven" knows how these stories often end. The crazy artist winds up dead and famous or, if she's a woman, dead and a footnote. At nineteen, Nellie seems to have figured out the pros and cons of crazy. She tells us as much when she kicks off the album by singing, on the first track, "I ain't got a grip on nothin'," and then begins the final song with this couplet: "Am I mad / Not mad enough." For performers, "crazy" is a category like "cabaret"--it's a rhetorical position, a place to speak from.

McKay does perform in cabarets, but "Get Away from Me" is designed to discourage any genre associations. She sings and plays the piano, yes, but the studio musicians behind her move quickly from style to style: light tropicalia, fast spy-movie music, imitation hip-hop. "David," the song about her former teacher, begins the album with some approximation of a reggae backbeat and a sprinkling of harp playing lifted from a weepy melodrama. When the words start pouring out, anyone hoping for the female Bobby Short will be left behind. Reversing genders, McKay plays Quixote to her high-rise Dulcinea, but she has to move quickly before the restraining order arrives: "David don't you hear me through the wall / waitin' here not makin' a sound." In case we missed her waving the big foam "No. 1 Crazy Person" finger, she re-states her position four songs later, with "Baby Watch Your Back," a clarification of the stalking theme implicit in "David": "Now you walk down ...