Following the release of her album Goodnight Rhonda Lee last year, Nicole Atkins has been playing a select number of shows around the UK in support of the record.
The tour finishes tonight with a date at Brighton’s Komedia, for which you can buy tickets here. Above, you can also check the recently shared video for album track ‘Brokedown Luck’, which was filmed at The Asbury Hotel in Nicole’s hometown of Asbury Park, NJ. The video was directed by puppet maker and director Kevin Kelly and features Atkins, a variety of puppets, a cast of nuns and Elvis Presley impersonators, as well as Hunter S. Thompson and Floyd from The Shining.
"When I was a kid there was so much cool stuff on TV to get into," Atkins says. "I was obsessed with puppets, claymation and animation like Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock and Gary Panter’s puppets and art in Pee Wee’s Playhouse and even the little David Lee Roth singing cheeseburger dude in the movie Better Off Dead. Those things stuck with me for my whole life. It was always a dream of mine to be able to combine some of those elements along with my music in a video."
Goodnight Rhonda Lee saw Atkins enlist The Bad Seeds’ Jim Sclavunos to co-write a number of the album’s tracks. "Nicole Atkins and I have been writing songs together on and off for about five years now," Sclavunos says. "When I first met her, though we were total strangers at that time, we began composing a tune literally within minutes of sitting down in the same room. It goes without saying that I find Nicole very inspiring – and easy! – to work with; stuff just flows when we’re together.
"Nicole already had the title, melody and some lyric fragments for ‘A Night Of Serious Drinking’, but the song begged for some kind of framing narrative. She played it for me once or twice as it was, and then I set about writing three completely different sets of lyrics for the song that laid out three different scenarios. Nicole liked bits of all three and she combined parts of them all into one beautiful bittersweet storyline about a damaged relationship, regrets, seeing the light and healing. And that process is pretty typical of how we write together."
You can purchase Atkins’ recent album directly via Bandcamp here.
