[Ed. Note: Next week, NYU Local will release Local Sounds Vol. 1, the first installation of a music compilation featuring artists from the NYU community. Interviews with each of the musicians featured in Vol. 1 will run through this week and next.]

A few hours before climbing onstage in an American flag bodysuit and five-inch sparkly Jeffrey Campbell heels, Morgan Neiman is naked. “I look like, an un-human color,” she tells one of her dancers. “This isn’t a real color.” Neiman, who performs as electro-indie nymph Ducky, has been experimenting with her live act for several months. In September at Sullivan Hall, Ducky played a set wearing boots, skirt, blouse, and duck hat, but tonight she will arrive at Fontana’s in the Lower East Side with blow-up stage props and go-go dancers in tow. And her Jeffrey Campbells, of course.

“When I started playing shows I didn’t really have a concept of what I wanted it to be,” Neiman explains. “Now I just want to put on crazy parties, and part of that is having cool shit to look at, like go-go dancers, hot girls.”

Ducky, a second-year student in the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, has been consistently booking shows in lower Manhattan since last summer. She left The Urban School in San Francisco a year early to get a head-start executing her career ambitions, and since then has added to a small collection of trippy, introspective EPs and albums with The Dreamland Series and Weekdays. In the coming months, she is set to release The Glamorous Gutter and play the SXSW music festival in Texas.

How did you start?

We had these projects in eighth grade—I went to like, a “gifted” school—super artsy, and liberal, and bullshit, but we had these recital projects where you worked for the whole year in eighth grade. I always thought I wanted to do music, so I used it as an excuse to get software. I got LogicPro and I got a cheap little microphone, and I made a CD and that was my project and I didn’t stop.

You’ve described your work as “music for the introspective party person.”  What does that mean?

I guess it’s just because my lyrics are all about trying to figure out like, all that introspective bullshit like who I am, what I want to do, shit like that. But I want my music to be—what I want my live show especially to be—is a party, and I want everyone to get fucked up. So it’s that balance.

Do you feel like you need to construct a persona for your career?

I think I already kind of have one, just how I am. I’m naturally super outgoing, super outspoken, and just…drunk. But I mean, you definitely have to put on like, a certain extra self-confidence just to feel comfortable being onstage.

How did you end up going to NYU after three years of high school?

Well…I hated my high school. I was done. I finished my math program at the school—I finished Calculus AB when I was a junior, and I basically didn’t have anything left to do. I had worked my ass off all year and they told me I could graduate on time, so I applied to college, and they changed their minds without telling me. They only told me when NYU called and said, “We don’t mind, as long as she gets her GED or an equivalent degree. It seems like she’s right for the program, we want her anyway.” My Dean of Students actually sat me down and goes, “You are the luckiest motherfucker alive.”

Where do you want to go with Ducky?

I want to go to the top. You know? If I had my way in a perfect world, I would play, I mean…Madison Square Garden. You might as well shoot for the moon, right?

Local Sounds: Ducky Interview Extras from NYU Local on Vimeo.

For more of my interview with Ducky, check out this video.

For more info and free Ducky downloads check out her website and/or Bandcamp.

(Image via Ducky’s Facebook)