Nicole Atkins Interview

05 May 2008

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Your debut album is Neptune City what can we expect from it?

I guess you can expect, this might sound cheesy, but for the forty five minutes that you listen to it to be whisked away into a little dark romantic world, it’s not background music.

Is there any meaning behind it’s title?

Yeah Neptune City is the town I grew up in in New Jersey and I wrote the song when I was living back there for the first time in ten years. It’s kind of the place that you want to get away from, and a lot of people do get away but they always come back, and I didn’t want to sound like I was defeated so I tried to immortalise the town in a special and romantic way to make it cooler for me to live there again.

Well I was about to ask you about that your home town seems to inspire you a lot why does it do that?

I come from a Sicilian family so I have had a lot of tragic things happen in the family, even though they are all very happy and good natured people, there is always kind of a looming sadness over them. And I always get inspired by their stories and I try and take their stories and turn them into songs so that they can be something that they could maybe take a little bit of joy from their sad stories.

’Brooklyn’s on Fire’ is quite a vivid song what was the inspiration behind it?

That song I wrote when I met my best friend Susan, we met on the rooftop of a Brooklyn apartment building on the 4th July. We met and we instantly hit it off and all these fireworks were going off it was like the city was on fire. It’s just talking about being in your very early twenties and going out and having bruises on your legs that you wear like badges of your youth.

And how did you get involved in music?

I just always sang and when I was really young my uncle, who was a total hippie, turned me on to Steve Woodward’s old band Traffic and Cream and Led Zeppelin when I was in fourth grade.

I became obsessed, really music obsessed, and I always wanted to hang out with the older kids. I got into indie rock too when I was in grammar school I was like ‘oh I want to hang out with the high schoolers.’

And then I started to become obsessed with who is inspiring the likes of Jimmy Page and then I found Burt Jansch and it was really fun for me to retrace bands I like’s musical history, so yeah I’m a music geek.

When did you pick up a guitar for the first time?

When I was thirteen, my mom’s little passed a way when he was thirteen and I found his little guitar in the attic when I was thirteen and I taught myself how to play.

Then there’s the writing side of things how does the writing process work for you?

It’s very subconscious and very lucid, I don’t sit down and just write a song, a melody just comes to me and it usually comes to me when I’m driving, moving, at real inopportune times.

So I will record the melodies into my phone and work on them later and I will make up these fake words and a line will just come, usually I start with a line from the beginning or middle of the song that sound really heavy and I will try and figure out what that line could mean and then I will just make the story around it. And once that starts happening I will start getting all these arrangements in my head and so I sing all of the arrangements, in layers, into my phone.

When did you start writing did it begin at an early age?

No, I was always in bands when I was eleven and twelve, but I only started writing my own songs from the age of twenty.