My New Atkins Diet

I have a ritual that I run good songs through to see if they can be great songs. I play it three times in a row. If I want to hear it a fourth time, I take the CD out of the player, and I wait for at least three hours. If after a fourth play I am more excited than I was about the song than I was after its first play, it’s a great song. If I play it two more times in that day, and I still like it, it becomes an obsession.

Enter Nicole Atkins.

I got the latest TM Century disc at work, and listened for new prospects for the VBC. When I heard “The Way It Is”, I immediately stopped what I was doing. For the first time since “Blitzed” by the Raveonettes I found a song that was worthy of my music endurance test. It has since moved to the type of obsessive listening that I haven’t had since “Diablo Rojo” came out last summer.

The best way to describe Nicole Atkins is to think of Justine Bateman if she was cast to play Stevie Nicks in a Fleetwood Mac movie and Chrissy Hynde did the vocals.

On first listen, I thought that her new CD Neptune City (a reference to her home town, Neptune, NJ) was a few good songs with a respectable secondary line-up. This was after listening to the CD in the order that it was downloaded (thank you iTunes). But, after listening to it in the proper order, the album as a whole makes sense.