Nicole Atkins

New Jersey rocker Nicole Atkins is one of the most intriguing recording and performing artists on the music scene today. Although she has been performing since high school, she is still relatively closer to the beginning of her career than she is to the midpoint, yet she and her band The Sea have appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and the Late, Late Show With Craig Ferguson. Earlier this summer, Atkins and her band The Sea, twice toured Europe, performing in festivals and promoting the current album Neptune City. In 2007, Nicole Atkins and her band were featured in a major commercial plugging the merits of American Express. Riveting Riffs Magazine caught up with the talented singer /songwriter / musician, with the stunning vocals, while her band was driving through the mountains, on the way to another gig. Our conversation covered a number of topics including her recent tour, her musical influences and her current CD.

Nicole Atkins possesses that gift that separates good songwriters from great ones, that being the ability to create images, that allow the listener to step inside her songs, walk around, and to absorb the sights, sounds, smells and emotions. She says, “This is the way that I have always been. Everything has a strong visual thing for me. I can’t listen to music without seeing it; whether it is my own or somebody else’s music. From the time that I

was ten and started listening to Traffic, I would make videos in my head for every song. When I am making my own songs, all of the ones that make it to the people, are songs that unfold for me in a really cinematic way in my head.”

“Maybe Tonight,” and the companion video, which was produced by Josh Forbes, bring to the forefront, Nicole Atkins’ creativity. Atkins was really juiced while talking about her video shoot, “It was completely exhausting and so much fun. Every time that we cut, the circus just kept on going,” she says of the video which features clowns and a man riding in a unicycle. “The song, “Maybe Tonight,” is about thinking of someone that you haven’t seen in a while and all of a sudden they email you or call you. The producer Josh Forbes suggested that we do the video as though I was getting ready to do a Letterman performance or an old Ed Sullivan type show, where you would walk through the studio. I said, ‘That’s cool, but it’s staged.’ I am from Asbury Park and I live in Asbury Park, so I thought that it would be cool to have Coney Island boardwalk type carnies getting ready to do their variety show. He (Forbes) said that he would look into it. I thought that he was going to get, like one midget or a bearded lady, but he got the entire Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque to do it for pennies. There are entire scenes that didn’t even make it on there. They had the aerialists suspended from drapes on the ceiling. It was so cool. We did it completely off the cuff. The shadow puppet guy, we got that morning and the guy, who played the stage manager, is my friend Jim Turner, who is the actor who used to be Randy of the Redwoods from MTV, back in the day. He (Turner) used to be the hippie who was running for president. The dance moves at the end of the video were just old theater moves that I taught to everybody. When we did the video, it was so, on the fly,” Atkins says, as she lowers her voice to mimic the encouraging comments others were making during the shooting of the video.

To say that Nicole Atkins’ songs are personal would be a gross understatement. While chuckling to me, she admits that to this point in her career a large percentage of her songs have been based on relationships. When asked if it is fair to say that she is a romantic, she replies, “Totally, almost to a fault. It is awful.”

One of Atkins’ songs, “The Way That It Is,” finds its roots in a conversation that took place between her father and her, while she was breaking up with an old boyfriend. “My dad didn’t know him that well, and I told him that he didn’t know him as well as I did, so I just wanted to figure it out for myself.”

Those relationship influences will be felt on Atkins’ next project as well, “Most of it is going to be about my boyfriend and I. He is in a touring band too. This is our first year doing this. It is an album about connection.”

July 2008