Nicole Atkins Offers Greetings From Neptune City, N.J.
Tuesday February 12, 2008 @ 05:30 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

Nicole Atkins (Photo By Jennifer Tzar)

You'd have to be a hardcore movie trivia buff to know that Jack Nicholson and Danny DeVito were born in Neptune City, New Jersey. Singer/songwriter Nicole Atkins also hails from the town of 5,200 and, while her fame at this point comes nowhere close to that of the two veteran actors, the 29 year old let everyone know about her roots by titling her debut album after her birthplace.

"All of the songs are about things in my life and experiences and what was going on at that time," she says over the phone while wearing her pajamas in her current home in the adjacent city of Asbury Park, which was put on the musical map by her Columbia Records labelmate Bruce Springsteen 35 years ago. "Some of them aren't that literal. Some of them are a combination of stories."

Neptune City was quietly released last fall, but the buzz around Atkins has been growing steadily as more people become aware of her beautiful, '60s-influenced, orchestral pop songs through glowing reviews, appearances on David Letterman and Conan O'Brien's late-night television shows, and opening slots on tours for Chris Isaak and The Pipettes. She begins a club headlining tour this week that includes stops at the South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas in mid-March and a performance at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee three months later.

Don't assume that Atkins is some sort of overnight success, however. She attended art school in North Carolina, where she was part of an alt.country band called Los Parasols for three years, then slept in a car in Manhattan's East Village for a time while performing for next to no-one in neighbourhood bars as a solo artist.

"There would be me, the bartender and three friends from New Jersey who took the train up," Atkins reflects on that not-so-long-ago lean period. "But as time went on, I started going to one open mic in the East Village and met Regina Spektor and a couple of people from the Moldy Peaches and started having all of these different musical friends.

"That helps your songwriting a lot. As time went on, I finally got a band and then people actually did come to our shows. There have been a lot of ups and downs. I feel like for every good thing that happened, one bad thing happened. But I've been doing this for so long, and music was the only career option that I wanted, so there was a good five years when nothing was happening and I just tried to ignore it. So when things finally did start happening, it didn't feel like, 'Oh, finally.' I never saw what I was doing as a long haul or dreadful drudge-work. I just thought of it as something I do. So when things started going well, it was a bonus."

Atkins' big break came when a demo recording she made with the help of friend David Muller (who's played with Yoko Ono, Fiery Furnaces and Fischerspooner) made it into the hands of a New York lawyer — who had helped Arcade Fire, Devendra Banhart and Antony And The Johnsons early on in their journey to success — fell in love with her material. With backing like that in Atkins' corner, the odds started turning in her favour.

Tore Johansson — a composer and musician whose production credits include The Cardigans, Saint Etienne, Tom Jones, Franz Ferdinand and OK Go — caught wind of Atkins' songs and invited her to Sweden to record Neptune City with his assistance.

"He called me and said he heard my music and thought that it sounded dramatic, creepy, scary and beautiful," says Atkins. "And I thought, 'You sound very cool,' so I went over there and we ended up hitting it off.

"The first song we did was 'The Way It Is,' and I thought it was really good, so I went for a month-and-a-half and recorded the rest of them. We're kindred spirits and work together really well. We fought a lot, too, but it was good."

Atkins cites Scott Walker, Love, Roy Orbison and The Doors among her all-time favourite artists, and their influence — as well as that of Phil Spector's pristine production work with The Ronettes and The Crystals — is evident on Neptune City. A current act she's digging isn't nearly as obvious, but she cites My Morning Jacket for setting the bar so high as live performers.

"That's what I'm hoping that my band (The Sea, who include Toronto keyboardist Dan Chen) can be. Even though I'm a solo artist, we're a band. We don't just want to showcase some songs, we want to give you a show."

The live lineup features two guitars, bass, drums and keyboards, with a Midi duplicating the string parts because Atkins can't afford to take violinists, violists and cellists on the road, or fit them into the tour van.

"The live sound is very similar to the album, but it has more of a rock vibe to it because we're really hyper people," she says.

You can find out just how hyper they are when Nicole Atkins And The Sea play at Toronto's Lee's Palace on Sunday night with local openers Magneta Lane.

—Steve McLean