Music: Nellie McKay: Dreamy voice through an old-school filter

HER FIRST ALBUM appeared six years ago. Yet people are still pondering who is this character Nellie McKay, and why does she so confound and astonish?

At first glance, this slight, strawberry-blond 28-year-old comes off as winsome and shy, a bit "kooky" and old-fashioned. Largely that's because she sings in a light, dreamy voice and with old school arrangements, some featuring ukulele. The sort of stuff that hasn't been in pop vogue since the 1950s.

True to that nature, too, McKay - pronounced McKye - devoted a recent album ("Normal as Blueberry Pie") to songs of the Eisenhower era - and even older - as once performed by Doris Day. While a big band singer first, Day today is thought of mostly as the featherweight yet unflappable star of romantic comedies opposite "hunks" like Rock Hudson.

But there was more to Day than first met the eye, noted McKay in a recent chat, prompted by her show Sunday at World Cafe Live. She first got interested in the now 88-year-old singer/actress from hearing about Day's pioneering work in animal rights, a passion Nellie shares.

And the same "first appearances are deceiving" notion also holds for McKay, an anomaly raised far off the beaten track, in the Pocono Mountains town of Stroudsburg, by her divorced mom Robin Pappas, a former actress who would became Nellie's manager and now album-producer. Also a big help in her teenage years was jazz great-in-residence Phil Woods, who counseled McKay then to "not think so much, just go for it."

Like Bette Midler, another quirky, time-warp character who worked equally well in cabaret and pop settings, McKay throws in lots of winks with her prayers. In one recent song ("Please") from her new "Home Sweet Mobile Home" album she intones, "Lord send me a hard luck childhood." In another, the carnival-funk rocker "No Equality," she reminds the emancipated ladies in the house that even today "it's an illusion, it wouldn't do a revolution."

Never easy to peg down, McKay won great reviews a few years back performing in a Broadway revival of "The Threepenny Opera." She's also acted and sung in the movie "P.S. I Love You" and contributed music to the Rob Reiner film "Rumor Has It," and the current HBO series "Boardwalk Empire."

And another of her recent albums, the especially terrific, I think, tongue-in-cheek Broadway parodying "Obligatory Villagers," has been turned into a dance suite called "Whoa, Nellie!" performed by the Chase Brock Experience.

We talked a bit about all that in a recent chat.