Nicole Adkins has the kind of voice that sounds like it should be carved into vinyl grooves and played on a boardwalk jukebox forever. But when we catch up, her stories are less about jukebox romance and more about surviving disasters—literal ones. Nashville tornadoes, pandemic shutdowns, Hurricane Sandy flashbacks. She laughs about it, but not too hard. “Luckily I’ve been poor before,” she says. “So I know I can live through it.”
That mix of gallows humor and unshakable optimism is stamped all over Italian Ice, her most ambitious record yet, cut in Muscle Shoals with a crew that reads like a fantasy draft: Spoon’s Britt Daniel, My Morning Jacket’s Carl Broemel, Hamilton Leithauser, Binky Griptite, and a studio band of southern legends who make history just by plugging in. Adkins didn’t want to make a retro tribute record. “I hate it when people say ‘throwback,’” she tells me. “I’m not rehashing—I’m keeping it alive.”
She almost stumbled into the whole Muscle Shoals thing anyway. Invited to sing at Spooner Oldham’s 75th birthday bash, she suddenly found herself in a dressing room with William Bell and Charlie Hodges, snapping selfies, smoking cigarettes with Little Richard’s longtime guitarist, and jotting down song titles from conversations. (“Smells like forever” became one.) Later, watching the Muscle Shoals doc, she realized David Hood was in the room the whole time. “If I’d known, I would’ve been way too nervous.”
Instead, she brought her friends. “Even if it doesn’t make sense on paper, it makes sense in my life,” she says. That’s how you get a record that touches everything from AM gold melodrama to French electro. On “Domino,” she tips her hat to Air and Stereolab. On “Never Going Home Again,” she chases Mamas & the Papas harmonies before the lyrics dissolve into tour stories about coked-out child actors and terrible hotels. “What’s better in life than having a weird time?” she grins.
The weirdness threads through. Far From Home is a reimagined version of the bedtime horror stories her dad told called “Stinking Winkin,” about kids lured into basements with candy. Adkins rewrites it as a narcissist trapped in a funhouse of mirrors at Asbury Park. “It’s creative though, right?” she laughs, knowing full well it’s nightmare fuel. In the Splinters doubles down on the darkness with a refrain—“I wish the world would end”—that felt ominous enough before a pandemic hit. “Am I a doom prophet?” she asks. “Next record, I’m just gonna write about living in Malibu with tons of money.”
But even her gloomiest turns circle back to hope. In the Splinters was really about Sandy, she says. “When everything gets torn down, it’s not the end. Something comes along and builds you back up again. Your feelings aren’t facts.” That philosophy frames the whole album: from global warming laments to late-night carnival creepiness to the radio fantasies that raised her on the Jersey Shore. She calls it her “carnival of dreams and nightmares,” a summer soundtrack haunted by both Blondie and the storm surge.
By the time Spooner Oldham gave his blessing—“Write a new one, damn it”—Adkins had made the Muscle Shoals record that sounded least like Muscle Shoals and most like herself. Italian Ice isn’t nostalgia; it’s a survival strategy. She’s had storms wreck her home, tours disappear overnight, and still somehow finds a way to make it sound romantic. As she puts it, “People need people. Barbra Streisand said so.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out the tracks below.
