So it had been well over a year since I'd seen Nicole Atkins, and she's been spending that time well. Playing a last-stop-before-Texas show at City Winery on a cold and blustery evening, she made the bottle-and-cask lined room seem like exactly the place to be. With her inviting, soaring vocals and her shyly quirky banter iced with smiling self-deprecating humor, Atkins lit up the stage for a short set while an enthusiastic crowd clinked their glasses and swilled their wine.
Last time we saw her, Atkins was fronting an outfit calling itself Nicole Atkins and the Sea. Since that time, they've reconfigured, and the new backing band is the Black Sea. Though this suggests something deeper, darker, and even sinister, we'll have to wait for her forthcoming release to know for sure, as the City Winery show was a solo affair. Well, mostly solo. Joined onstage by a painter and her former pianist, Dan Chen (Cashmere), Nicole sidled through some favorites from Neptune City, her debut, and treated us to some sneak peeks from the new album as well. Even just listening to the guitar-and-piano accompaniment, Atkins seems to have lost none of her knack for sonic landscaping and texture. Though we surely lose some of the epic and anthemic in such a stripped-down arrangement, her gorgeous plaintive voice is an orchestra unto itself, perfectly in control at her cryingest highs and chestiest lows.
The show felt very comfortable, almost like we were all sitting around in a living room with a friend who just happens to be a righteously talented songseuse. Going through an index of what was in her pockets as she searched out a pick, Atkins was playful and gentle, betraying none of that earlier hard-edged seeming discomfort with her growing popularity and success. When she was rewarded with an orange pick from a former bandmate, she was all smiles and shining eyes, telling the crowd that they'd just had a moment, and happily stepping back with her guitar to strum her way into the next piece.
Even with just the two stringed percussion instruments, Atkins wailed her way through "The Way it Is," a crowd favorite from the debut that is arguably more than a fair match for her rollicking "Brooklyn's on Fire." She has mastered the theater of her songs, telling stories with sophisticated lyrics but still leading with that startling alto that simply leaps from her small frame.
Atkins gave us a lovely and warm evening, exciting our ears and making our hearts pound again as we head into a wet and wild spring in New York.
