Nicole Atkins Interview

1 month ago 05th May 11:02

American singer songwriter Nicole Atkins has been tipped as one of the top ten artists to watch in 2008 by magazine Rolling Stone and has been likened to Roy Orbison and Jenny Lewis.

So there is no pressure placed on the twenty nine year old from New Jersey. I caught up with her to talk about her debut album Neptune City and her career so far.

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.

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