Nellie McKay

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. 

“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.”