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Oct 14th, 2020
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  1. In each song she creates, Nicole Atkins reveals her incredible power
  2. to transport listeners to a much more charmed time and space. On her
  3. new album Italian Ice, the New Jersey-bred singer/songwriter conjures
  4. the romance and danger and wild magic of a place especially close to
  5. her heart: the Jersey Shore in all its scrappy beauty. Inspired by the
  6. boardwalk’s many curiosities—the crumbling Victorian mansions, the
  7. lurid and legendary funhouse, the Asbury Park rock-and-roll scene she
  8. played a key part in reviving—Atkins ultimately transforms her
  9. neverending fascination into a wonderland of her own making. “When
  10. you’re on the boardwalk there’s a feeling that anything can happen,
  11. and that’s the feeling I tried to create with this record,” Atkins
  12. says. “I wanted to give people something they can put on and buy into
  13. a fantasy that gets them excited about what might happen in their own
  14. lives.” For help in capturing the shore’s kinetic spirit, Atkins
  15. assembled a studio band whose lineup feels almost mythical. Recorded
  16. at the iconic Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama, Italian Ice finds
  17. the Nashville-based artist joined by Spooner Oldham and David Hood
  18. (both members of The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, who played on
  19. classic records from the likes of Aretha Franklin and Etta James),
  20. Binky Griptite of The Dap Kings, Jim Sclavunos and Dave Sherman of The
  21. Bad Seeds, and drummer McKenzie Smith (St. Vincent, Midlake). With
  22. special guests including Spoon frontman Britt Daniel, Seth Avett of
  23. The Avett Brothers, Erin Rae, and John Paul White, the album is a
  24. testament to Atkins’s uncommon talent for uniting musicians of
  25. radically different sensibilities. “I just invited all my best musical
  26. friends to be there with me, and then we roped in Spooner and David
  27. too,” says Atkins, who connected with the two musicians after
  28. performing at Oldham’s birthday bash. “Musically, it doesn’t make any
  29. sense. But I’m a superfan of all of them, and we ended up with the
  30. weirdest, craziest band ever. It just became this awesome misfit
  31. party.” Co-produced by Atkins and Ben Tanner of Alabama Shakes,
  32. Italian Ice makes brilliant use of its Alist personnel, unfolding in a
  33. kaleidoscopic sound that Atkins likens to “an acid trip through my
  34. record collection.” At turns as opulent as symphonic pop and gritty as
  35. garage punk, the album wanders into shades of psych-rock and
  36. honky-tonk and girl-group melodrama, endlessly spotlighting the
  37. tightly honed musicianship and unbridled originality at heart of
  38. Atkins’s artistry. “I didn’t really censor myself much,” she points
  39. out. “Everything that felt good to say or hear or feel coming back off
  40. the speakers, I just went for it.” Right from its very first seconds,
  41. Italian Ice hints at a deeper purpose behind that feel-good
  42. ethos. With its soulful harmonies and soaring string lines, the
  43. album-opening “AM Gold” speaks truth on the horrors of global warming
  44. and the corrosive effects of social media (sample lyric: “We’re
  45. stranded in the garbage of Eden/We’re starvin’ what we should’ve been
  46. feedin’”), yet simultaneously makes a case for music as a potent
  47. antidote to despair. “The world can be in so much chaos, like it is
  48. today, but whenever I go home and get in my parents’ car and turn on
  49. the radio to some Bobby Vinton or Frankie Valli song, everything feels
  50. okay,” says Atkins. “For a few minutes you’re just drifting away on
  51. this dreamy sound that makes you feel so warm and held and comforted.”
  52. From there, Italian Ice presents a pair of back-to-back tracks that
  53. channel Atkins’s untamed imagination into moments of sonic
  54. transcendence. Co-written with My Morning Jacket’s Carl Broemel, “Mind
  55. Eraser” matches its silvery textures and ethereal guitar work with
  56. flashes of surrealist poetry lifted straight from her hyperactive
  57. dream life. Meanwhile, “Domino” finds Atkins pushing genre boundaries
  58. to glorious effect, working with songwriter/producer Dex Green to
  59. carve out a groove-heavy pop gem. “We were talking about French
  60. electro and I told Dex how I wished I could have a song that sounds
  61. like that,” Atkins recalls. “He sent me over a beat he constructed and
  62. we ended up coming up with something almost like a Prince song or
  63. ‘Miss You’ from the Stones— that same kind of strut.” And in her
  64. smoothly delivered lyrics to “Domino,” Atkins serves up something of a
  65. mission statement for living fully in troubled times: “I’m not gonna
  66. play/Safe and sound/When the world comes tumblin’, tumblin’ down.”
  67. Although Atkins embodies a bold self-possession for much of Italian
  68. Ice, the album also has its share of tenderhearted offerings, such as
  69. the sweetly slow-burning “Forever”—a song sparked from an impromptu
  70. meeting with Kelvin Holly (longtime guitarist for Little Richard). “We
  71. were outside smoking a cigarette at Spooner Oldham’s birthday party
  72. and just hit it off,” says Atkins. “He asked how I met my husband, and
  73. I told him how he’d been my tour manager and then said something like,
  74. ‘I smelled him and he smelled like forever.’ And Kelvin told me,
  75. ‘Well, that’s a song right there.’” Another candid expression of
  76. unconditional love, “Captain” features guest vocals from Daniel,
  77. emerging as a beautifully lilting ballad duet. “Britt came down to the
  78. studio and we sat on the back porch and worked out the parts, then
  79. just went in sang it live,” says Atkins, who co-wrote “Captain” with
  80. Broemel. “It’s about how a lot of times in my life, I’ve needed people
  81. to take care of me, but now I’ve become much stronger. The song is me
  82. saying to my husband: ‘I got this. Just rest for a little bit and let
  83. me take care of you.’” Elsewhere on Italian Ice, Atkins showcases her
  84. gifts as a storyteller, like on the fantastically rambling
  85. road-warrior confessional “Never Goin’ Home Again” (a track written
  86. with Sclavunos and Daniel). “We’ve got so many crazy tour stories, so
  87. we decided to string them all together into one song that everyone can
  88. dance to and laugh about,” says Atkins. While those stories include
  89. “seeing aliens and blowing up a minivan and waking up in somebody’s
  90. daughter’s bed,” as Atkins puts it, one of the most jarring tales
  91. involves the time she stumbled into a sinkhole in a Knoxville parking
  92. lot. “I woke up at the bottom and my old keyboard player had to jump
  93. in and lift me out, and it really flipped my perspective on a lot of
  94. shit,” she says. Perhaps most profoundly, the incident inspired Atkins
  95. to focus on filling her life with the people and experiences that
  96. bring her the most joy—a turning point that led directly to the
  97. abundance of collaborations on Italian Ice. An album entirely
  98. unrestrained in feeling, Italian Ice closes out with one of its most
  99. gut-punching tracks: “In the Splinters,” an epically defiant finale
  100. co-penned with Hamilton Leithauser. “When Hurricane Sandy happened, a
  101. lot of our area got destroyed,” says Atkins of the song’s origins. “It
  102. was really traumatizing, but the upshot was how everybody came
  103. together afterward. I think as long as you’re alive and with the
  104. people you love, it really doesn’t matter what you have.” Describing
  105. her time at Muscle Shoals as “like summer camp, but in the winter,”
  106. Atkins looks back on the recording process with deep fondness for the
  107. camaraderie she helped create among so many disparate
  108. musicians. During that time, the band stayed together in a nearby
  109. lakehouse, cooked breakfast for each other every morning, and spent
  110. their nights playing dice in a local bar. “This record taught me that
  111. making music for music’s sake and seeing what happens is where the
  112. good shit comes from,” she says. “I feel like I’ve written some of my
  113. best stuff just feeling happy and confident and enjoying the company
  114. of who I’m playing with.” For Atkins, that shift in approach marks a
  115. full-circle moment in her trajectory as an artist. “My whole life,
  116. music was the only thing I ever really cared about,” she says. “When I
  117. was a kid I couldn’t get into sports, couldn’t get into school, but
  118. music was something I always wanted to know everything about. I never
  119. gave up on it, even when I felt like it was kind of failing me.” And
  120. in reflecting on the making of Italian Ice, Atkins returns to her
  121. eternal kinship with the Jersey Shore. “There’s this great quote about
  122. Asbury Park that I feel very connected to,” she says. “It’s something
  123. about how music was the thing that kept Asbury Park alive—even when
  124. the whole town was burned out and everyone moved away, music was the
  125. heartbeat that kept it going. I was thinking about that around the
  126. time I was making this record and I thought, ‘That’s just like my
  127. life.’”
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