Nicole Atkins Explores Muscle Shoals & Jersey Shore Nostalgia On ‘Italian Ice’

Nicole Atkins calls them "little fate drops"—signs, cues, nudges from the universe that push her in the right direction. "I've always kept my eyes and ears open for them," she says. "I pay attention to dots connecting."

A cluster of them popped up in Nashville in June 2018. The singer-songwriter was at home after spending the last year touring behind her 2017 album Goodnight Rhonda Lee, a soulful collection of ballads and anthems tailored for repeat play on dive bar jukeboxes. Binky Griptite, a renowned guitarist known for his work with the Dap-Kings, was in town, and the longtime friends had plans to write songs for his upcoming solo album together. While out one night, they ran into another pal, Roxanne Oldham. She mentioned that they'd be throwing a 75th birthday concert in Muscle Shoals for her father, Spooner Oldham, the legendary session keys player whose work with Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and countless others made the Alabama town an American musical landmark. She casually invited Atkins to head south for the shindig: did she want to come, maybe sing something?

Her immediate answer was a hearty "F**K yes," and the stars aligned a few days later. Atkins is signed to Single Lock Records, which was founded by Muscle Shoals native John Paul White; he was on the bill for Oldham’s birthday bash, as were David Hood and the Muscle Shoals Horns, Oldham’s longtime bandmates. Atkins impressed the session vets with her belt and her verve, and they shared their compliments with the Single Lock crew.

"Single Lock was like, 'You should make a record at a studio down here with those guys! It could just be the perfect thing,'" she remembers. "I thought, yes, it would be a perfect thing, what an honor! But I also knew, no matter what I made, unless I did it really my way, [the critics] would pin it as another tribute record—and I didn't want to do that."

Italian Ice, Atkins' fifth studio album out May 29, is forged by these "fate drops," which made it her most intuitive musical effort to date. Born and raised on the Jersey Shore, Atkins shared the stomping grounds of the Strokes, Regina Spektor and more as she came up playing bars and clubs in the East Village and Brooklyn in the early Aughts. She left the East Coast in 2016 when she and her husband (and former tour manager, Ryan McHugh) moved to Nashville, and Goodnight Rhonda Lee embraced the twang of her new town and exorcised the growing pains of her married, freshly sober life in a new city. By the end of her Rhonda Lee tour, Atkins' personal life had settled, but tensions mounting in Trump's America kicked her dormant anxiety into high gear. ("We're living in the garbage of Eden" is a sentiment she often felt on the road, and it’s the first chorus we hear on Italian Ice, via "AM Gold.") She countered it by turning towards the familiar: As a coping mechanism, she imbued her songwriting with the low-tide melancholy and nostalgia of her Garden State childhood.

"I made this record as kind of a cure for myself, you know?" she says. "I want to feel better. What makes me feel better? Asbury Park boardwalk. Oldies radio. Carnival rides. Spooky shit. That quintessential, Asbury Park summertime feeling. When people listen to this, if they’d never been there, I want them to feel like they were there. I wanted them to smell the pork roll. If they had been there, I wanted to remind them of that, so it’s not nostalgic but more romantic in a way."

She assembled a verifiable supergroup to back the boardwalk poetry she wrote as the world spun on a far more anxious axis: Griptite, Hood and Oldham, as well as drummer McKenzie Smith and Jim Sclavunos and David "Moose" Sherman of the Bad Seeds, make up Italian Ice's all-star band. Britt Daniel (Spoon), Hamilton Leithauser (the Walkmen), Seth Avett (the Avett Brothers) and Erin Rae co-write or sing on the album as well. ("It’s fun to be your own A&R person when you're 40 and you've met a lot of cool people," she says, chuckling about the musical murderer's row she assembled.) Together, they met Muscle Shoals standards while crafting an album that sounds definitively Jersey with its reverb of a boombox hoisted by a stranger shuffling by on the beach, echoes of surf-rock guitar and '70s funk blasting out the window of a car on the corner. For Atkins, it makes perfect sense that she’d head to the place where the albums that inspired Jersey's most revered musicians were made, an organic development that speaks to the ease each player brought to the record.

"On the Jersey Shore, all the musicians—Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes—they were doing the Muscle Shoals sound, but in their way," she says. "Since they started it, there’s 30 years in between then and now. No one ever mentions that that's a genre of music. And it is. And I like to f**k up genres."

Each Italian Ice track is a worthy entry into this canon, from the slow strut of "AM Gold" to the doo-wop charm of "Forever," or the hazy slow dance of "Captain" and deafening howls of "Road To Nowhere." Her patron saints are the ones named after East Village watering holes ("St. Dymphnas") and battered statues on the Asbury Park boardwalk that somehow survived the carnage of Hurricane Sandy. The latter directly inspired "In The Splinters," which she co-wrote with Leithauser: she sings of the world ending over a looping carousel turn of a melody, and channels the late-night sing-alongs around the piano of "I Don’t Want to Go Home" that her parents would warble at their parties.

"I wanted my own version of that," she says. "I wanted a good swash-buckling, drinking chorus song about getting knocked down, and getting knocked down, but you're still standing, and you look different, and you're chipped up, but you’re still f**kin' standing. I just thought about how people need this right now. I just want to make people feel better, and maybe they’ll know the lyrics by the time they get to tour it."

That resilience, in a way, is the lifeblood of Italian Ice. Yes, we may be living in the garbage of Eden, but Atkins will follow her fate drops until she wades through this trash timeline and comes out stronger on the other side. The timing of Italian Ice’s debut is weirdly fitting, given that plans to tour behind the album in the season that inspired it went up in smoke thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. Still, Italian Ice is the culmination of so many things, and that’s enough for Atkins: it reminded her of who she is, where she comes from and where she’s capable of going.

"I always thought that I have to be struggling to make art," she says. "Now, without having that inner struggle that I couldn't control—I still have problems all the time, but I know that it’s a feeling and I can combat that by doing the things that will help you get out of it. If you want to sit in it, do it for awhile, but don’t stay there too long. I really can’t afford to let myself sit in darkness for too long, because I've seen what happens when I do. I had a lot of fun writing this record… I've been doing this a long time, I know that I’m not the best at it, and I don’t want to be the best at it, but I actively love it. I love writing and producing, and it just feels like instead of something I do, it feels like something I am. I don’t feel cheesy saying that; it doesn’t feel conceited. I've finally accepted that this is my shit, so let’s have fun doing this."

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Nicole Atkins Explores Muscle Shoals & Jersey Shore Nostalgia On ‘Italian Ice’

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