Asbury Park, New Jersey

“Music is the only thing that really gets me through my day,” says the Neptune native, Nicole Atkins, from her Asbury apartment just as the afternoon hits full stride.  “I could wake up in a really weird mood and a familiar record just seems to straighten everything out.”
           
With Columbia Records gearing to release her debut LP, Neptune City, on October 30, after a tweaking postponement by Rick Rubin, Atkins has already earned the title of local patriarch joining a long list of musical practitioners who have contributed to the cultural makeup of a shoreline community frozen in time.  
           
With a record that is as haunting as it is majestic, Atkins mixes the roots of folk, from the hills of Carolina, with the free-spirit of Jersey’s coastline. 
           
“Asbury Park was the only place for me to go see bands when I was growing up and there was nothing there at that time.  There was no restoration of Asbury Park going on, but there was still the Stone Pony and the Saint.  That was my world.  The Saint to me at 16 was just the best, or going to Sunday afternoon hardcore shows at the Pony.  I wasn’t really the prep-party type,” Atkins explains with an accompaniment of laughter.
           
Her vocal tone caresses as she dives into the creative process for debut record as it manifested itself in the face of a recording session that took place under Sweden’s daylong evening glow.
           
“It was in a transitional phase,” she says.  “I have been trying to get somebody to help me make a record my whole life.  A lot of politics were happening with the label, and a lot of people were getting fired.  My fate was hanging in the balance with Columbia for months.  My relationship with my boyfriend was on the rocks during that time as well.  When I left to go to Sweden for the sessions it was in the middle of winter and it was dark all-day and rainy.  I was pretty depressed and kind of freaked out.  The producer just broke up with his girlfriend so he was in the gutter and the string arranger was going through a divorce,” as laughter ensues. “We were all just lush.”
           
“The songs were all written before we got there and we arranged them in the studio.  Everybody would get to this big barn in the middle of nowhere around noon and we would sit in this tremendous room with tons of instruments and would play for three or four hours to figure out arrangements,” offers Atkins.  “There was a lot of arguing going on but once we figured out what the tracks were going to sound like the sessions were amazing from there.”
           
With Neptune City being overseen by producer Tore Johansson, the recording breathes with relaxed musical reverberations as waves of instruments fill the sea of rhythmic expression, accented by Atkins and her haunting tone of lyrical story telling.
           
“We didn’t use a click track,” Atkins explains.  “The record is based all on feel and instinct.  We would just sit and play the songs over and over until they were a part of us.  Tore Johansson was amazing.  The man is very stoic. When he spoke it was incredibly funny or really deep.  He was able to help me lock into this darker side of my songwriting.  He kept calling the record, ‘the dark side of the moan.’”
           
“We met this Swedish band Dungen while we were there and they turned us on to a lot of old Swedish folk and Turkish music.  When we were doing the final arrangements we were taking influences from these Swedish folk records with things like flute, horn, and violin.”  

_________________________________ "If you want to be a great musician, don't look at the local girl and say, 'I want to be better than her,' look at fucking Elvis." - Nicole Atkins _________________________________

 

“My aspirations lie in making songs that I want to listen to,” offers Atkins.  “I think music is struggling and my intentions are to write the most honest music I can.  Hopefully the result will be a living in music and a place of my own.  I would love to make another record as well; if this one does well of course.”
           
What makes Nicole Atkins a refreshing character on the musical landscape is her admirable drive not for generational popularity acceptance.  With an unspeakable amount of artists falling victim to the surge in the latest trend, the spilling of ink in Atkins’ favor is warranted.  Her candor speaks volumes, and her sound is foreign to Asbury Park’s emo-punk populous. 

“I was living in New York City in 2003 and I got sick of it.  A lot of bad shit happened and I needed to breathe.  I ended up moving down to North Carolina where I went to college.  There is a scene there with a bunch of musicians who sounds nothing like each other but who are all friends and supportive of one another,” shares Atkins. 

“The Carolinas rule because there is not much to do down there and it is nice and warm.  You can just sit on your porch with your friends and play guitar.  You got one friend in a bluegrass band, another in a gay glam rock band, and another in an English styled punk group.   We would be all sitting together playing Beatles tunes.”

“It was nice to get a breather from New York City and to make some new friends while writing these songs.  I got a nice financial break as well.  I learned how to write songs that incorporated country music mixed with 60s sounding pop.”

“But that is the thing, there was a scene there,” Atkins explains.  “A scene is where people encourage each other and hang out together.  You know, play music together.  For a long time Asbury Park was a very unsupportive scene.  They make you pay to play and the people that came out to see you were not there to be your friends; they were there to size you up.  I don’t think there could be a worse attitude.”

“If you want to be a great musician, don’t look at the local girl and say, ‘I want to be better than her,’ look at fucking Elvis.  It is getting better now though.  Red Bank is coming back.”

“I don’t really know if I am going to become pop famous,” says Atkins.  “It might do more bad than good considering all the shit that is on the television and radio today.  Music is suffering and I think that is why radio is in the state that it is in because they have forced so much bad stuff on people for so long that audiences don’t want to listen anymore.”
           
“I am influenced by so many different genres that I could kind of attach myself to a couple different scenes at once.  The thing about my music is that it was never trendy to begin with so it can never really go out of style, because it was never in style,” concludes Atkins before hopping on a plane and flying back out to the west coast for a trip to Los Angeles and San Francisco.