Between the rock and a soft place Nellie McKay, Rod Stewart, Bobby Darin, and Caetano Veloso bridge the ages BY FRANKLIN SOULTS

From Jack White to Rufus Wainwright, Old 97’s to OutKast, it seems that more musicians than ever have come to view the past the same way Willie Sutton long ago viewed robbing banks — "That’s where the money is." Some want to loot prefab styles for their nostalgia, but even more may just be after the fundamental paydirt of form following function, from rock that rolls to love songs that are lovely. As Nellie McKay comments about classic pop revivals when I catch her by phone as she’s heading unhappily toward the Sundance Film Festival, "I guess you could have really crappy contemporary songs or you could have decent renditions of really good songs. That’s better. That sounds good to me."

In case you missed the long review in the New Yorker back in May, the profile in the New York Times magazine last month, or the reams of stories in every other media outlet in between, McKay is the hottest, youngest old-timer of last year, plying styles on her excellent double CD of original songs, Get Away from Me (Sony), that recall prim pre-rock singers Julie London and Doris Day but spiked with a bad-girl rap here, a really good Pet Shop Boys rip there, and sly political barbs everywhere. In part, she was such a sensation because her music took the obsession with the past one step beyond, begging the question of how low you can go on pop’s history ladder while remaining within shouting distance of the present, or for that matter without losing your grip.

It has become the norm to play down the gulf between the pre-rock era and today, just as it’s currently fashionable to see the American electorate as a modulated shade of purple instead of red and blue. Yet both those dualities arose for reasons that can’t be altogether discounted. That is, there’s an elemental difference between Kerry and W. voters and between, say, Sinatra and the Stones, between traditional "values" and the subversive streak that’s essential to the rock attitude.

Nellie McKay was only one artist who tried to straddle this historical chasm in 2004 and whose effort was as noteworthy for the divisions it highlighted as for the bridges it built. At the end of the year, Kevin Spacey came out with Beyond the Sea, a bio-pic as dazzlingly odd as its subject, Bobby Darin, the last performer since Elvis to act as if the divide between pre-rock and rock didn’t exist. Then there was celebrated Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso, who dabbled in A Foreign Sound (Nonesuch), his first all-English album, which was recorded from a vantage point so distant, it spanned the historical divide the way we span æons when we gaze into the night sky.

But in a way, the biggest pre-rock shock of the last few years has come from Rod Stewart. Last fall, a quarter-century after his previous #1 album, the aging rake climbed to the top of the pops again with Stardust . . . The Great American Songbook Volume III (J Records), his third release of warm and easy crooner standards in as many years. Much of the credit for the entire series’s success — 10 million albums sold and counting — goes to J Records founder and industry legend Clive Davis, who supplied various savvy marketing techniques and one crucial musical insight. As Bill Zeheme writes in the first volume’s liner notes: "It was Davis who suggested the deliciously bright tempo that floats and shimmers above and below so winningly," pronouncing, " ‘I want this to sound like Fred and Ginger! I want this to sound like Fred and Ginger!’ "

Stewart went straight to the source on the series’s first volume, 2002’s It Had To Be You . . . The Great American Songbook (also on J), offering a soft-shoe rendition of "They Can’t Take That Away from Me," which was penned by the Gershwins for the 1937 Astaire-Rodgers picture Shall We Dance? The problem was, Astaire wasn’t just a dancer but a singer, and he imbued that number with what it seemed to call for in 1937: a melancholy undercurrent of loss that makes the theme of savoring a lover’s memory more poignant. It’s the same tone that has characterized adult art across the ages, but most rock-bred pop stars don’t accept defeat while they indulge in pleasure. So whereas Astaire’s simple, sad delivery hones the melody’s lilting shape and gives it emotional weight, all Stewart goes after is amorphous vocal seduction, creating a compassionate conservative cousin of "Hot Legs."

That explains why the entire series feels slightly vapid, and also why it’s such a commercial success. By Davis’s standard, Volume III is its pinnacle, nudging the insouciant mood to a sustained pitch of mellow, playful reverie. Which doesn’t mean it’s all that good — beyond the recurring shortfall in meaning, there’s the annoyance of Stewart’s rubbery vowels, the dentist-office-ready arrangements, the unvarying tempos. Even so, Volume III’s broad updates avoid Broadway’s sanitized styling and the swing revival’s reactionary swagger. If nothing else, that makes them honest gauges for how much mass tastes have changed between the rock and a soft place.