After a decade of making records that didn’t capture the full range of her musical personality, singer and songwriter Nicole Atkins broke through with 2017’s Goodnight Rhonda Lee. Cut in Texas with a band led by pianist and guitarist Robert Ellis, the record showcased Atkins — who moved to Nashville in 2015 — as a polymathic pop figure with an amazing voice. Atkins sings like a pop-soul diva who has absorbed the lessons of Roy Orbison, Cass Elliot and Aretha Franklin. As you can hear on Rhonda Lee, her 2020 full-length Italian Ice and a forthcoming reimagined live version called Memphis Ice, Atkins isn’t afraid to experiment. She has a feel for high-end pop-rock: She’s covered songs by Scott Walker and the Texas power-pop band Cotton Mather. More recently, Atkins has been a duet partner with one of the definitive pop polymaths, Elvis Costello — a fascinating story she tells in the interview below.
Atkins was born in Neptune City, N.J., in 1978, and grew up obsessed with music and singing. She signed to Columbia Records for a brief tenure with the big label that began in 2006, and released her debut album Neptune City the following year. She was clearly a remarkable singer with an arresting stage presence, but her early albums tended to be somewhat overproduced. Rhonda Lee and Italian Ice give her vocals space within dense arrangements. In particular, Italian Ice — recorded at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Muscle Shoals, Ala., with a crew that included veteran bassist David Hood and keyboardist Dewey Lindon “Spooner” Oldham, both of whom made major contributions to soul music in the 1960s and ’70s — affords Atkins the room she needs to range across the landscape of American music. She covers a great deal of territory, from modernized funk and disco to echoes of Orbison, Harry Nilsson and Rufus Wainwright.
Cut live at the Bluff City studio Memphis Magnetic Recording, Memphis Ice reworks eight of the songs Atkins recorded for Italian Ice. Atkins revisits those songs, and two others, with pianist Dan Chen, cellist Maggie Chaffee and violinist Laura Epling providing the spare backing. The performance was filmed, and you can check out a stream of said film Friday, Dec. 10, when the album is out — check out Atkins’ website for all the details.
In addition, Atkins has sung a duet with Elvis Costello, “My Most Beautiful Mistake,” that will appear on his forthcoming album with his band The Imposters, The Boy Named If. As she says, she connected with Costello at a September 2019 event at New York’s Radio City Music Hall called Easy Rider Live, which combined a screening of the 1969 movie with performances of the film’s soundtrack tunes by the likes of John Kay and Roger McGuinn. Atkins sang “The Weight,” and her take on The Band’s song caught Costello’s ear. As Costello told Paul Stokes for a 2020 piece in The Quietus, he wasn’t familiar with Atkins' work before he saw her in New York. Their collaboration is the latest in a string of career moments for Atkins, who says she’s working on a record of new material.
I sat down with Atkins at her Nashville home, where we talked shop for a couple of hours. Atkins is a lifetime enthusiast of every style of music, and she occasionally slipped into a rich New Jersey accent to make what were often comic points about her life in the music business.
What was the concept behind Memphis Ice?
Singing the disco songs with no rhythm section, I thought, “How the fuck is that gonna go?” They sound creepy. It’s the songs as they are when I first wrote them, before you get into the spirit of having a band in the room—the camaraderie and everyone playing together. I felt really tethered to my singing, which I don’t get to feel that much, because I’m lost in the music. I thought I wanted to have my Liza Minnelli moment later, or my Bette Midler moment later, but I want to have it now. I’m making a new record of standards that sound like standards, but they’re my songs. There should be a way to write about modern things in an elegant way, when you’re not, like, fuckin’ Michael Bublé schlocking it up.
How did you come up with the look of the film of the Memphis Ice performances?
We looked at those old Sinatra films from his TV show. We wanted it to have that kind of vibe. I’m Italian, so talking with my hands is pretty easy. When I was singing, I thought about what were the words I was actually singing, and what was the tale I was trying to tell. You almost feel like a bard: Here’s the story. It’s a movie, so you can’t just stand there and sing.
Nicole Atkins at City Winery during AmericanaFest 2019
You sang in the 2019 Easy Rider Live show in New York. How did you look at doing “The Weight,” and how did you meet Elvis Costello?
It was more like Aretha’s version, but, like, mine. I just kinda sang it like myself. I don’t really do runs or ad-libs or anything. [Costello] showed up in my dressing room. I hadn’t thought about Elvis in a while, even though I’ve always felt kind of musically connected to him. I was gonna go to this thing for John Hiatt during AmericanaFest [in September 2019] at BMI in Nashville. [Hiatt received BMI’s Troubadour Award.] I was told it was a casual thing, and I thought, “What do I wear?” And I was watching AC/DC videos and I was, like, “I’m gonna dress like Angus Young today.” You know, the debut of me in shorts and knee socks. And I’m an hour late for this thing and dressed like an asshole. I go to the thing and it’s a formal, sit-down dinner, like, John Prine, Bonnie Raitt and Emmylou Harris. I heard Elvis Costello do “Take Off Your Uniform” and I thought, “I want to sing with him.”
What happened next?
The next day, I was with Carole King’s daughter Louise [Goffin]. She was living here for a while. We were talking about New York, and I said, “I was a bad waitress, so they let me book music instead of giving me the good shift.” And she said, “ ‘Bad Waitress’ is a great song title. Elvis Costello, can’t you hear him singing ‘Bad Waitress.’ ” And I told her about the night before.
So you met Costello in New York at Radio City later that month, and you ran the idea by him?
He came into my dressing room, and I said, “We gotta talk.” He sent me the lyrics two weeks after we met. He said, “I can’t say ‘bad waitress’ because I feel like that sounds too Grand Funk Railroad.” So he changed it to “part-time waitress.” [Sings] “She was a part-time waitress / With a dream of greatness.” [“My Most Beautiful Mistake”] came out of the idea of writing a song about a bad waitress. I didn’t think I’d be singing on it. I thought I was gonna write the song with him, and he just kinda ran off and wrote it. But I thought: “That’s cool. If I can put a little mark on music somehow, that’s fine with me.”
