Nicole Atkins

One Liner: Crooner who apparently sounds like a Brill Building singer

Wikipedia Genre: Crooner, soul, psychedelic, Americana
Home: Neptune, New Jersey

Poster Position: 26
Day: Friday at 12:45
Weekend Two Only.

Thoughts: The first few songs had me hopeful - music outside of my normal zone of tunes, but kinda pleasant.  But some of these songs are actually boring a hole directly into my skull and laying eggs on my eardrums that plan to destroy my brain.  Looking at you, "The Way It Is."  Also, she's on a playlist from Spotify called Torch + Twang, and now I want to die.

Much of this is kinda country, kinda rock, sorta classic crooning combination of both.  Wikipedia says she has been compared to Roy Orbison and the Brill Building singers.  

Quick aside on that.  The Brill Building is a building in Manhattan (Broadway and 49th) where many of the top pop songs of the 60's were written and recorded.  Listen to this horrible sounding description from Wikipedia: 

"The Brill Building approach—which can be extended to other publishers not based in the actual Brill Building—was one way that professionals in the music business took control of things in the time after rock and roll's first wave. In the Brill Building practice, there were no more unpredictable or rebellious singers; in fact, a specific singer in most cases could be easily replaced with another. These songs were written to order by pros who could custom fit the music and lyrics to the targeted teen audience. In a number of important ways, the Brill Building approach was a return to the way business had been done in the years before rock and roll, since it returned power to the publishers and record labels and made the performing artists themselves much less central to the music's production."

Neat!  Remove the artistry entirely and just robotically churn out the hits!  Sounds wonderfully organic and not-soul-crushing!  Interesting though, I had heard that term before but never really read about it.  Anyway, she apparently sounds kinda like 60's fungible singers.

She has bounced around from NYC to Charlotte, NC, back to NYC, and apparently lives in Nashville now when she is not on the road.  Her music seems to have a country bend to it, even if it is more like classic 60's sound.

Four albums - 2007's Neptune City, 2011's Mondo Amore, 2014's Slow Phaser, and 2017's Goodnight Rhonda Lee.  Her top track isn't from any of them though, it is a single from 2017 called "Bye Bye Blackbird."  2.1 million streams.

Sleepy.  Pretty enough, I suppose, but just uninteresting to me.  Her second-most streamed is a cover of Bowie's "Heroes," so I'll give you "Listen Up," from the newer 2017 album, which wins the next highest at 860k.

Yeah, another nice, jazzy little tune with good vocals, but it just doesn't do anything for me.  Some of her tunes get a little more of a groove ("Darkness Falls So Quiet" or "Goodnight Rhonda Lee"), but most of them don't make me feel a thing.  I doubt I'd be at the Festival at noon on Friday anyway, but I don't think I'd do this one.