As countless pop auteurs have proved over the decades, nothing is more exhilarating to an ambitious artist than experimenting with songwriting until it yields its secrets. Nashville soul-pop singer-songwriter Nicole Atkins messes around with the concept of pop songs on her splendid new full-length, Goodnight Rhonda Lee, but she’s a serious record maker and a supple singer, which means she allows her latest music to unfold in real time.
Goodnight Rhonda Lee harks back to the ’60s, when Atkins’ forebears Dusty Springfield and Cass Elliot drew from a deep well of soul, pop and Broadway compositions. Americana artist and former Nashvillian Robert Ellis and his band — with Ellis playing keys instead of the guitar some fans might expect — back Atkins on Goodnight Rhonda Lee, and their playing transforms a pop album into a spare, weird record that’s both eccentric and classically constructed.
“I didn’t meet them until the first morning we started tracking,” Atkins tells the Scene from her Nashville home, where she’s lived with her husband since October 2015. “I was very familiar with Robert Ellis’ stuff, and there were a couple of songs where I was like, ‘OK, is it going to sound like Americana?’ But it was funny — we were having some coffee and meeting each other, and Robert started playing a Rufus Wainwright song on the piano. As soon as he did that, I said, ‘All right, I can trust this guy.’ ”
Atkins recorded Goodnight Rhonda Lee at Fort Worth, Texas, studio Niles City Sound with producers and songwriters Austin Jenkins, Josh Block and Chris Vivion, who also do business under the name Niles City Sound — they gained traction after their production of soul singer Leon Bridges’ 2015 debut full-length, Coming Home, helped the record garner a Grammy nomination. As Atkins recalls, Niles City Sound’s aesthetic suited her vision as neatly as did the playing of Ellis and his band.
“I wanted to do a record that doesn’t sound like a soul-music paint-by-numbers thing, especially lyrically,” says Atkins. “I sent [Niles City Sound] a bunch of demos that I had — like 20 — and we whittled it down to 14 songs. We cut [Goodnight Rhonda Lee] in four days.”
Born in 1978 in Neptune City, N.J., Atkins attracted notice with her 2007 debut full-length, Neptune City. Her big, precise voice evoked Cass Elliot’s as much as it did the decadence implicit in the vocals of another one of Atkins’ avowed influences, Roy Orbison. Neptune City amounted to a tart reshuffling of ’60s pop styles that peaked with “Party’s Over,” a superb piece of post-Motown soul.
The expertly performed Neptune City established Atkins as a topflight singer and songwriter, and she added rock to her sound on 2011’s Mondo Amore and 2014’s Slow Phaser. A true eclectic, Atkins collaborated with Texas power-poppers Cotton Mather on a set of 2016 British Invasion-style tracks (appropriately titled Cotton Mather With Nicole Atkins) that suggest she could record a convincing Petula Clark tribute album. But Goodnight Rhonda Lee may be her masterpiece to date.
As befits a concept record about self-definition, Goodnight Rhonda Lee partakes of several pop music styles. Written by Atkins and Reno Bo, “Sleepwalkin’ ” is pop soul in the manner of Archie Bell and the Drells, while “If I Could” sounds like a deconstructed Phil Spector production. Atkins wrote most of the album with a list of collaborators that includes Louise Goffin and Chris Isaak. The only song she wrote by herself, “Darkness Falls So Quiet,” features horn and string arrangements that suggest the influence of Philadelphia-born songwriter and producer Jerry Ragovoy, who wrote the soul standard “Time Is on My Side” and produced superb records by vocalists Howard Tate and Lorraine Ellison.
Talking to Atkins about such subjects as The Fantasticks and her love for English rock band Traffic’s 1970 full-length John Barleycorn Must Die, I sense the force of a remarkable personality. Atkins allows Goodnight Rhonda Lee to breathe by letting her musicians express themselves, a tactic that results in a one of the year’s most original pop records. It never flirts with retro, and that’s a tribute to Atkins’ integrity. The album verges on the avant-garde when Ellis’ piano parts evoke the playing of such exemplars as Randy Newman and Allen Toussaint. His rubato introduction to the record’s “Brokedown Luck” exemplifies the experimental approach Atkins and Niles City Sound take throughout the album.
Whether or not Goodnight Rhonda Lee will turn her into the big star she deserves to be, Atkins seems proud of the record’s modestly heroic, human-scaled achievement, which she compares to Traffic’s relaxed approach on John Barleycorn Must Die.
“If you listen to it, you can hear shit in the background,” she says about Traffic’s classic album and, by extension, Goodnight Rhonda Lee. “You can hear people laughing and talking and hear shit falling. It’s cool, because these are humans making music in a room.”
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