![]() ![]() Playing a Friday-night show at Kelly’s, a tavern in Neptune, she received so many requests for cover songs that they were hard to ignore: “It was, you know, ‘Have you ever heard of Jon Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen?’ ![]() It also helps explain a scrape she got into in 2003, when her mother was still clipping want ads for her out of The Asbury Park Press, and before she assembled the Sea, her Brooklyn-based band consisting of Daniel Chen (keyboards), Dave Hollinghurst (guitar) and Dan Mintzer (drums). “I found something in those old songs,” she said, “a way of singing that suited my voice, my body - the way I felt.” That explains several “female Roy Orbison” comparisons made by critics, who also noted resemblances to the Shangri-Las. And they all influence my songwriting.” Her music is a bruised, introspective indie rock that is as likely to lure folk fans as psychedelia and girl-pop enthusiasts. “I grew up with all that in Monmouth County, sometimes in a spooky way. “Trees, children, twilight, fog and fields,” she said, reeling off a list of favorite things found on her MySpace page. As “Neptune City” makes plain, she now has a sense of pride about her origins. Neptune, though, is where she first picked up a guitar - a dusty one, stashed in the attic, that had belonged to her mother’s brother, who died at age 13 in a go-cart accident. The people I met there taught me how to write songs.” “And really it was Charlotte, where I went to college, where I learned how to be a real musician. “I never used to want to admit where I was from,” she said over coffee in Manhattan before a recent gig in Brooklyn. Atkins, who still lives with her parents in Neptune, says that a half-dozen years ago, she was embarrassed by her New Jersey roots and routinely told acquaintances she was from North Carolina. It’s one of those sad suburban towns that’s still a great place to grow up.” “When my grandmother read that, she was like, ‘What are they going to think? They’re going to think we’re terrible, that Neptune City is an awful place.’ Well, it’s not.
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