“I've made a lot of records and I like to pay attention to what people do on the technical side, but as far as being a producer, I think it's just being able to communicate, having the right people in the studio that are open and want to get weird,” Nicole Atkins tells Apple Music of the mindset she brought to her fifth album. Italian Ice, which Atkins co-produced with Ben Tanner, conjures scenes of her native New Jersey, but was made in the storied Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama with a coterie of rock, roots, and soul luminaries. The idea was to capture the feel of the place and its legacy without sacrificing the unease of her own music. “I wanted to not do a retro record and not do a Muscle Shoals record—nothing like a tribute that was done before—but just take those sounds and keep them in your pocket as you get older and march into the future,” she says. “Because if you don't keep those beautiful things about music that's already been made, they disappear.” Here Atkins talks through each track on Italian Ice. Am Gold “Happy music with happy subject matter, it's just not cool. When I thought about what kind of record I wanted to make, I wanted to make a record that was going to make me feel better, because the news was so bad. Even before the plague happened, the news is consistently bad. I can't write about my life without writing about what's going on around me, reflecting what's happening right now. But I can do that in the music. I made a list of all the things that instantly make me feel better. On this list, there was walking on the boardwalk, rides, playing blackjack on the video screen, AM radio. My parents, that's one thing I can always count on without fail is when I go to their house and borrow their car, the AM radio station is on, and you just get in and no matter what's going on, you just get taken away somewhere.” Mind Eraser “That was one of the first songs that I wrote when I moved to Nashville with Carl [Broemel] from My Morning Jacket. He was one of the only people I knew in town when we first moved here. So Carl and I got together and I had this idea, the pre-chorus for that song. I was hearing it in my head as a Roy Orbison-type chorus, or Jay Black and the Americans—very grand and dramatically sad, but uplifting. Carl started playing these Radiohead chords underneath it, and I was like, ‘Whoa, this is cool.’ Then I just started pacing back and forth singing whatever came to the top of my head.” Domino “Out of the whole record, that was the hardest vocal to do, because I knew that it needed to sound cold and clipped and robotic. I'm a gut singer; I usually sing like I sing. But I just knew that for that sound, I needed to treat my voice as a piano or a guitar or an instrument rather than an emotional tool in my body. Also, too, with the electro sound, I wanted to make a song that had that, but that sounds like me. It took a long time for me to love the song. Everybody in the room was like, ‘Man, this is a hit.’ I was like, ‘Really? Because I'm not really singing much.’ Britt [Daniel] from Spoon was like, ‘This is a fucking hit.’ And I was like, ‘Well, you've had hits and I haven't, so I trust you.’ He especially really put a lot of time into that song, and attention, was making a lot of percussion tracks and just working on it when he didn't need to, because he believed in it and made me believe in it.” Forever “When I sang at Spooner Oldham’s birthday party, the guy that played guitar with Little Richard, Kelvin Holly, was the only other guy that smoked. So we became instant friends. He was like, ‘Oh, your husband's from Scotland. How did you two meet?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, well, he's my tour manager and not really my type, but then I smelled him and he smelled like forever, so that was it. We got married.’ He was like, ‘That's a song right there.’” Captain “It was written stream-of-consciousness. Then I got together with Carl and we worked out the music in half an hour, and I didn't think it was going to be on the record because it was too easy to write. My husband is a tour manager. I grew up around boats, too; my best friend's dad had a party boat. Thinking about a captain, they run the ship. They're leading you, they're in charge, and if something goes wrong, they go down with it. They don't abandon it. That's like a tour manager. They're a special kind of personality. I know people that are like, ‘Oh, yeah, I'll be a tour manager. I like hanging out with bands.’ That's not what you do. You are like their mother and their caretaker, and their big-time caretaker. People that just take care of people at their detriment, and they never take care of themselves. There was a point when I was at the height of my drinking and stuff where I couldn't really take care of myself. But when you have somebody like that that's always taking care of you and everybody else, then you get your shit together and you have a capacity to take care of business and people and say, ‘Hey, just relax. I can handle everything for you right now.’" Never Going Home Again “They're funny stories and they're real. Touring music is not for everybody. I wrote that between Jim [Sclavunos] and I, because it's something that I know really well. I didn't have the lyrics totally done, and then he was telling a story about how the Bad Seeds were banned for life from Japan. I was like, ‘How do you get banned for life from a country?’ Then I was like, ‘Wait a second. You should write this with me.’ There were a couple of stories in there that happened to both of us. Stuck in a hotel room with a guy you used to watch on TV and you just get really sad because you're like, ‘What are you doing at this Days Inn?’ Or getting blackout drunk and putting your finger in a journalist's ear. Not good.” St. Dymphna “When people pray, they're talking to somebody. It's like, ‘Dear God, please let the tests come back okay, blah, blah, blah.’ But you don't hear back. Or sometimes people say that they do, or they have a good feeling. I guess that's called faith. I was thinking about that when I was out on the road with Mercury Rev. We did a bunch of these really beautiful old churches in the UK. We were in this church called St. George's Cathedral, and I just heard this Morrissey-type melody in my head: ‘Saint Georgey, can you hear me?’ I looked up Saint George. He was a boring saint. So I thought, ‘Okay, what's a good saint?’ Then I thought about the bar that we used to always drink at in the East Village. It was called St. Dymphna’s. It was old. When I had my bands in New Jersey, everybody was breaking up with their girlfriends and boyfriends and getting really shitty at this place, and exes walking in and yelling and crying and then dancing and making out with whoever, and then waking up and feeling like you're so hung over, you're having a panic attack and you're going to die. What do you do? You pray. Like, ‘Please let me come out of this,’ because you don't want to lose your mind. I looked up who Saint Dymphna was, and she was the patron saint of mental illness. I was like, ‘Bingo.’” Far From Home “I love a Broadway musical. Old Broadway is my favorite thing. I just wanted to write a song that was not from my point of view, but I was more playing a character, playing a kidnapper, basically. I was thinking about the Asbury boardwalk and my memories of the fun house. My grandfather left me in the hall of mirrors when I was four thinking it was funny, and it was terrifying and horrible and I was like, ‘I can't get out.’ So I just thought I wanted to write a murder ballad where nobody dies. A lot of the themes on this record are about social media and people being on their phones all the time, and looking inward that way. But instead of looking outward at somebody else and being able to see yourself through other people and the friendships you make and the things that you do with other people, I just thought of this idea of kidnapping the narcissist and putting her in the hall of mirrors forever so she's never alone. She could look at herself all day, and there's thousands of eyes because they're reflections.” A Road to Nowhere “When I first heard that song, I didn't know it was a Carole King song for a while. I thought it was a Judy Henske song, because I got this Jack Nitzsche anthology from my friend, and it was all his production work. I love his production style, that hints at old Hollywood cinema with lonely surfer stuff. This woman who sang it was named Judy Henske. So I looked into her. Really low voice but with that rock wail. She was before rock guys started wailing. So the way she sang it, though, with the words, she sounded like a woman that has been through hell and if this guy doesn't leave, she's going to fucking eat him. So I wanted to cover that song, but tone it down a notch. Then I sang it in Brooklyn and people were like, ‘That's a great Carole King song. I haven't heard anybody cover that.’” These Old Roses “When I first got together with Britt to write, I wanted to write something like a Spoon song, and he wanted to write something like a girl group. This Italian singer named Mina that, the performance online of her on YouTube of her in the '60s singing a song that Ennio Morricone wrote called ‘Se Telefonando.’ It modulates, and it never goes back. So it's just one steep uphill climb, and it just ends. So I played him that, and I'm like, ‘I've been trying to figure out for 10 years how to write a song, not to copy it, but to copy the form.’ Then we slowed it down and in two seconds, Britt figured out the form. When I was out on tour a month before that, there were these dying roses in my dressing room, I think from the band that was there last time. I was like, ‘Hey, everybody, look. These roses have seen better days.’ Then my friend that was with me, he was like, ‘Write that down.’ I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that's a good line.’ So thinking about that kind of melodrama girl group, like ‘these old roses have seen better days’ just all fit.” In the Splinters “I had that song kicking about, the melody of it, since 2012. It never had words. Then in 2012, Hurricane Sandy happened. I was remembering my parents when I was growing up, they would always have parties. There was a guy, Bobby Watson, that played piano. So at 4:00 in the morning they'd all be singing Southside Johnny’s ‘I Don't Want to Go Home’ on the piano. I wanted to write a song that was like a bar song that everybody could sing at the end of the night, with the ‘la da da.’ So I kept saying, ‘On any other night, I wish the world would end, but much to my surprise I'm swept away again.’ Just thinking about when I heard that the hurricane happened like it did. The only thing that can help you get through it is experience and time, and not letting it kill your spirit. It's almost like a metaphor of a relationship or a career or a storm in your town. You might get knocked around, but you're still standing, even if it's on one wonky leg. You're still going to find beauty in the bad thing. I always found a lot of beauty in how the neighborhood came together.”