Tonight, Nicole Atkins will play New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge, marking the first show in the city in three years for the New Jersey native. The singer-songwriter will be revealing much of her new album, Goodnight, Rhonda Lee, which she recently recorded in Fort Worth, TX’s Niles City Sound studio with former White Denim bandmates and Leon Bridges producers Austin Jenkins and Josh Block (and is now available for pre-order via PldgeMusic). Atkins says she wanted to take advantage of the spacing and old-school feel of the duo’s work with Bridges, and the results can be heard in new single “A Little Crazy,” which was released last week and can be heard further below.
Prior to the show, Atkins spoke about her new album and the three years she spent writing it—years filled with marriage, a stint of sobriety and a move from Asbury Park to Nashville—along with her love/hate relationship with the places she’s lived, her relationships and collaborations with the Jersey boys of Joe Russo’s Almost Dead and the influence of the Grateful Dead on her new music.
Let’s talk about the new album. You started a PledgeMusic campaign, what has been your experience with that?
It’s doing really well. We did this without knowing who’s putting the record out yet. We didn’t want to wait on recording music, because it took three years to write it, and the guys from Niles City down in Fort Worth, they were available at very specific times. We thought we could get our fans to help us be able to do this now rather than wait another year, and it’s going really well. We do one of our first private house shows tomorrow, so that should be interesting.
What’s the plan for that?
My keyboard player and me are going to go and do it. We took a bunch of requests and we’re going to play some fun cover songs. Hopefully it will be cool. They usually tend to feed us pretty well at those things.
Have you done something like PledgeMusic before?
Yeah I did PledgeMusic for my third record and it went really well. I was able to put the record out myself and pay for all the videos and radio and PR, just through fans funding the record. That was really cool. We also did a Kickstarter to buy my van, on my second record. My fans are really generous and sweet. Every time I do it I think it’s not going to work, and then it does. I gotta start being more positive.
Have all the album’s songs been recorded yet?
Yeah we recorded it in four days, live to tape, and mixed it in three days, to tape, too. We did it in a cool, efficient, live, old-school way. The band was Robert Ellis and his band, and Austin and Josh from Niles City that did Leon Bridges’ album and were from the band White Denim. So we just worked from 10 a.m. to midnight every day with little breaks, going through all the songs and doing take after take until we found one we thought was the one. There weren’t many overdubs or anything.
Did you know these guys before?
No. I was a fan of the Leon Bridges record, ‘cause I loved the way it sounded. It sounded so old—you turned it on and you couldn’t tell it wasn’t an old record, and that’s what I really wanted. I wanted to make a record that sounded like a mix of Roy Orbison and Janis Joplin, but me. I wanted it to have that sound of the air in the room. I didn’t want any of it to sound clean.
So my friend was tour managing Leon Bridges, and I was going through one of those pit of despair moments—like, “Nobody’s gonna make my record”—and he asked if I had talked to Austin. I didn’t think he’d want to talk to me. It turned out he was a fan of my first record, so we had a lot of long, really lovely conversations, and we were so on the same page, artistically. So within a month, we just banged it out in like a week. It was crazy. I can’t believe it worked. I panicked before I went there. I had never met these people before—“What if this is horrible?” But just from the first song we did, it was like, “Finally. Finally we made some good choices.” [Laughs]
Did you have all the songs written already or was anything done in the studio?
Some lyric tweaks were done in the studio as we were going, but no—I took three years off and worked on writing. I did a lot of co-writes in Nashville, wrote a lot with my friend Jill [Tracy] from the Bad Seeds, and I also am a host on SiriusXM. They asked me to interview Chris Isaak, because I used to tour with him. I hadn’t seen him in like seven years, but I interviewed him and he said we should write some songs together. So I flew out to San Francisco and we wrote two songs that kind of became the cornerstone for the album: the song “A Little Crazy” that I sang on the show Roadies, and we also did this song, “Goodnight Rhonda Lee,” that ended up being the album title track. That’s what the whole album is about, becoming more of the woman that you want to be. Other than this crazy, depressed little kite blowing in the wind. I took all that time, and for every song that was on the album I had like ten songs written. It was a cool way to do it that I had never done before. I’ve always been like, “Alright, I have 10 songs, let’s record the album.” I really wanted to have each song have its place as part of the bigger picture.
Did you have more music just because you had been writing for three years or was it more of a fruitful time for you as a songwriter?
It was a fruitful time, and I quit drinking for a while. I was just making stuff all the time. I really wanted to hone in on a specific sound. I write a lot of different types of songs. My last record was kind of a prog-rock record, and some songs are like indie or pop. For this, the two main favorite artists that I love and feel like my singing style sounds a bit like—Roy and Joplin—I wanted to make a record that sounded like a marriage of those two styles. It took a while but I think I nailed it.
Speaking of the last album, how do you think that this music compares to that and the ones before?
I think in tone, this record is more similar to the first record, Neptune City. But it’s more Memphis sounding and raw, kind of European. There’s not a lot of density; there’s a lot of room in this record, musically. That was a big thing I wanted to achieve, the space between the notes. That helped a lot with the story. Compared to the last record, which was really, “How do I make this prog-rock pop record?” I don’t think that record sounds like anything I’ve ever made. Every record sounds pretty different from each other. But live—once you put a setlist together and you pick the two or three songs from each album and put it together—you see how it all fits. It’s all part of the same record collection, you know? You get like a Peter Gabriel record on the same shelf as you’d have a Fleetwood Mac record.
You say this record sounds like your first one—does it feel like you were going back to your original roots or influences?
Yeah. I moved to Nashville this year, so it was like, “Let me write a record about searching for a home.” I guess it’s a theme that pops up for people that like to move a lot, like me. There’s a song called “I Love Living Here Even When I Don’t”—I have such a love/hate relationship with home. I go away from Asbury Park and come up for a weekend of shows, and I can’t wait to go to all my little spots and walk the boardwalk. It’s so awesome there. But then, after day three, I’m so spent on the things that I don’t like about it. I’m like, “Ah, get me out of here.” I kind of feel like that everywhere I go.
When I was moving, I got married too. In this period of time, I got married, quit drinking and moved to Nashville. It was a lot, and [the songwriting] was like thinking back on my past and trying to reconcile these past grievances with people and myself and stupid things I did. All of the songs are more about those things, just to try to put them to bed in a really beautiful way. Instead of writing a letter and burning it, just putting it all into a beautiful album that sounds like it was made in 1968.
So this show in New York City is the first time you’ve played the city in a few years?
Yeah, it’s my first headlining show since we did the Bowery Ballroom. I’m super excited. We’re going to do most of the new record, too.
I’m curious, being from Jersey, what is your relationship with Jersey music and living in a shadow of the New York City music scene?
I feel like the music scene in New York City is what shaped me most. Other than the scene in the South—I went to college in the South, and that’s where I started writing music. So I kind of brought that with me to New York, and I started out in the anti-folk scene with Regina Spektor, Langhorne Slim and The Strokes in the early days. There was just so much music coming out of there. TV on the Radio was like two houses down from us, and everybody was experimenting so much. There’s a great music scene here in New Jersey, but it veers a lot towards of the Bouncing Souls or punk scene. It’s kind of a very male-dominated scene, too. There’s a lot of Bruce Springsteen cover bands, and so I felt like New York gave me more space to experiment with the sound. When I moved there, I was like, “I’m an Americana artist.” And when I started living there, I realized it was okay to not have a genre. So many bands that I love, they don’t really have a genre, because they’re their own thing.
You sat in with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead at Lockn’, and you’ve played with them before, and I know that WOLF! and Scott Metzger are playing with you in New York. What’s your relationship with those guys and how did you meet?
I met them all doing the Last Waltz four years ago at The Capitol Theatre. We just really hit it off because, one, we all love the Grateful Dead and, two, we are all from New Jersey. Jersey kids kind of stick together. We get each other and get our dark humor. So when Metz was playing with me off and on—when I needed a guitarist, he’d be so kind—I kept saying, “If you guys ever need a Donna in here, give me a call.” And he asked if I was serious about the Donna thing, and I said, “Yeah.” And then the [Almost Dead] show was at the Cap—and I had no idea how popular they were. I thought we were playing at Garcia’s, and I got there and said, “Holy shit, this is insane.”
My husband is from Scotland, so there’s not really a jamband scene over there or much improvisational music, and he was like, “What the fuck is this? This is crazy.” His mind was blown. I’m singing with them, and I never know when they’re gonna be done jamming so I don’t want to stand up there and dance. That would be super awkward. So after I’m done singing I always go off to go to the side of the stage and I’m staring at them, waiting for a sign. I just see Joey’s jaw start wagging and I know it’s “run back out there.” It’s like a workout.
But the Lockn’ show was absolutely insane. I finished my record the day before. It was like nine days down in Austin—waiting three years to make a record and doing it all live and mixing it all to tape. The comedown from that was… The night before I went to Lockn’, I was like, “Oh my God, everything is over now. What am I going to do? This is crazy.” I didn’t know how to handle it. The next day was Lockn’, so thank God for some stress, because it was the most stressful time getting there. My flight was delayed, and I was supposed to land at 10:30 p.m. and I went on at 1am. I had to re-finagle a new route to get there and put my show outfit on and my hot rollers in on the plane. We were supposed to go on stage at 1 and I got there at 1:15. They waited and said, “Let’s go.” I ran up there, and it was more people than I’ve ever played for before in my life. I thought, “Holy shit.” It was great.
Great show.
Thanks. I used to save up money all year to go to festivals like that when I was in high school. When I was up there I was thinking, “High school me would be doing backflips right now.”
Speaking of your shared love of the Grateful Dead, obviously you’re a big fan and know a lot of the songs. Do you put their music into your sets at all?
I used to cover “China Doll” sometimes and “Stella Blue” during my solo sets. We also referenced a lot of Grateful Dead on this new record. There were times, where we did it all live, we were kind of jamming on it. There’s no extended jams, but for a lot of the guitar tones and rhythms I was like, “Holy shit, this sounds like ‘Eyes of the World.’” And we’re trying to make this Aretha Franklin song, and it sounded like the Dead, so it’s kind of seeping in. It’s like all my favorite influences in one thing.
Does that music influence your songwriting?
Definitely. Robert Hunter is one of my favorite lyricists. A lot of the darker Dead songs, like “Blues for Allah” or “Terrapin Station”—the part where it jumps down the rabbit hole. I definitely draw from those moments. Not so much as to copy them, but just to capture that feeling.
