Nicole Atkins on the cusp

A singer on the cusp of greatness, or obscurity

RICK SOISSON

In October 2007 a fairly unknown singer named Nicole Atkins appeared on David Letterman’s show and sang “The Way It Is,” the principal song from her first CD. She wore a black, night-at-the-casino sheath, white shoes (the horror!), and nearly buried the song’s opening under Letterman’s condescending introduction. At points she seemed a bit awkward physically, and… she absolutely knocked everybody’s socks off, entirely scraped off Letterman’s smug, cynical crust. He ended up hugging her (also awkwardly) and declared the presentation a “good gig.” (To watch the performance yourself, click here.)

Atkins is a bit hard to categorize. Is she a torch singer or a pop singer? Does her lament about her hometown, Neptune City, make her a musical relative of Bruce Springsteen? Springsteen would have been nearly a neighbor if he’d been born 20 years later, or she 20 earlier. Atkins writes her own material, and her best compositions are ambitious and demanding in terms of range. “The Way It Is,” for example, begins with a near growl that my ten-year-old daughter calls “spooky”; about 65 seconds later, she’s soaring through an extraordinary line about blood “roarin’ ” in her ears.

Put another way, within a minute and a half, she establishes herself as the best new pop voice since k.d. lang, demonstrating strength, color, drama and beauty. On first hearing her, one listener I know personally remarked, “She’s channeling Roy Orbison.”

And yet look at this: In the video for her heartbreaking song about her hometown, she’s wearing Amy Winehouse’s goofy beehive hairdo, so the equation becomes: Amy Winehouse + a stronger voice + better range + better looks – crack = Nicole Atkins.

Menacing foundations

“Maybe Tonight,” “The Way It Is” and “Neptune City” are the triple anchors of her first CD (also called Neptune City)— and somehow, given only those three recordings, Atkins appeals to everybody from my daughter and other Hannah Montanans to those of us who heard Smokey Robinson when he could still sing.

“Maybe Tonight” also shows off the singer’s range in a composition that sounds like a ’tween standard, but one that sits quite uneasily on a menacing foundation:

I foresaw you like an old ghost story
From a family tree that was handed down to me

I've known you like a siren song that warns
I've been informed you could be the death of me….

According to the sub-teen music critic in my house, the difference between a Miley Cyrus song and an Atkins song is as follows: Cyrus’s message is, simply, “I gotta be me.” There’s no sub-text. Atkins’s message is: “I gotta be me, but being me is definitely problematic.”

“The Way It Is” still gives me goosebumps after hearing it a hundred times, and “Neptune City” couldn’t be further away from the torch sound of “The Way It Is” if it were Eastern European folk music. As I suggested, it is “a cemetery song for summer” and the singer’s birthplace. Yeats would have been happy with that formulation– that’s my guess.

Is she Loretta Lynn, or Carly Simon?

Atkins’s own website includes a list of influences only slightly longer than the Bill of Rights, so it shouldn’t surprise us that sometimes she sounds like Loretta Lynn, at other times like cutting edge alt-rockers, and still others, a bit like Carly Simon. Atkins has synthesized quite a bit of material into something very much her own.

Here’s the problem: Since Neptune City appeared last year, Atkins’s work has seemed somewhat weak, and given the absurdly fragmented, modern music scene, I fear that she’ll be lost in the shuffle. In a worst-case scenario, she could become Counting Crows, who never really touched the brilliance of their first album. The 11- and 12-year-olds will revert to popping in CDs of Miley Cyrus’s pleasant junk. We older folks will stick to Midnight Oil, Radiohead, Elvis and Frank.

In the best-case scenario, Atkins’s new material is still in development: She has spoken in interviews about different “layers” that she imagines setting down onto (or behind) her songs. “The Way It Is,” for example, briefly includes backup singers who seem to have escaped from Munchkin Land, a very weird but oddly effective counterpoint in an otherwise passionate recording.

Is Nicole Atkins Sinatra yet? Of course not. On the other hand, name the songs The Chairman wrote. Drop in on her website; surf around for a couple of free downloads. I bet you’ll end up sending her an encouraging message. Ask her when she’s returning to Philadelphia.



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