Nicole Atkins

“I'm sitting over/Neptune City/I used to love it/It used to be pretty/I'll come down/Walk around awhile/Until I'm sure/I can never go home again.” “ Neptune City ”

The sound of Nicole Atkins' Bleeding Diamonds EP, which serves as a handy introduction to her upcoming, feature-length Columbia Records debut, is like the opening scene to one of her favorite directors David Lynch's Blue Velvet . Underneath the sunny blue skies, immaculately manicured suburban homes and their bright green lawns lies a forbidding black hole of danger, violence and death.

That is the world described by this 27-year-old singer/songwriter from Neptune, a New Jersey shore town just down the coastline from Asbury Park , where she grew up in an idyllic childhood, teaching herself to play a Grateful Dead song on the guitar she found in the attic once owned by an uncle who died when he was 13. Her father turned her on to blues artists like Jimmy Reed, allowing Nicole to sit in on sessions with local musician friends. She played for three years with the North Carolina alt-country band Los Parasols before making a name for herself as a solo performer on New York City 's anti-folk scene.

Earlier this year, Atkins was named one of Rolling Stone 's Top 10 Artists to Watch, raving about her “big voice full of longing and Loretta Lynn elegance, and slightly surreal folk-pop songs that evoke moonlit walks with the shadows closing in.”

Think Roy Orbison's “Cryin'” if he was a woman, the orchestral sweep of Sufjan Stevens, the bleak vision of Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen, the darkly mysterious girl group-on-acid musings of Julee Cruise and Lynch composer Angelo Badalamenti, the sorrow of Patsy Cline, the ‘60s psychedelia of Love and Nuggets , all with a redeeming sense of hope amidst the emotional wreckage…

“Y'know, all that pain and heartache,” says Nicole, with her glasses on, looking like a ringer for Saturday Night Live 's Tina Fey.

“I'm trying to find the words you want to hear,” she sings on the title track of her six-song Bleeding Diamonds EP, recorded with her band The Sea—guitarist Dave Hollinghurst, bassist John Flaughter, drummer Dan Mintzer and keyboardist Dan Chen. Atkins explains the song was inspired by watching footage of the war from Iraq on TV, with the bombs exploding on the screen “as if the sky were bleeding diamonds,” as Nicole pretends to be a woman waiting for a loved one to come home from the battlefront.

“I'm not a political songwriter, but you can't help write about things that are happening to you and around you,” she says.

“Snowshakes” describes the darkness in youthful late nights (“Sometimes the drugs don't keep you going,” sings Nicole), while “Carousel,” with its brooding Brecht-Weill atmosphere, recalls her childhood love of musicals like The Fantasticks and Celebration , as it mourns the imminent demise of Asbury Park 's Palace Amusement Parks via wrecking ball.

“Everything looks so perfect, but you get down to it, the darkness can be overwhelming,” she says. “Everything is much more than what it seems on the surface.”

“War Torn” is about the frustration of a long-distance relationship that inevitably must end for your own good, while “Delora” is also about longing, as a husband tries to hang on to the wife who left him by immersing herself in the things she left behind, like the smell of her perfume. “It's about how people have a hard time moving on,” says Nicole, who admits to a similar problem regarding her childhood, which comes across in the Springsteen-like elegy for her hometown in “Neptune City,” with its double-tracked harmonies providing its ghostly atmosphere.

“There's a new town every several miles along the Jersey shore,” she says, “which is awesome when you're trying to outrun the cops, who aren't allowed to go past the borders.”

Although sometimes called a female Bruce, Atkins admits she only got into her fellow Jersey shore comrade a few years ago, when she first began to understand his links to psychedelic garage-rock, Spector wall of sound production and ability to tell real-life stories.

Atkins studied illustration while at UNC Charlotte, and still has her own mural business, with that artistic sensibility transferred to her songs, which come across as aural paintings, mixing and matching colors and sounds.

“That's why I have such a hard time playing solo these days,” says Nicole, who plied her trade in hundreds of bars both in North Carolina, where she went to school, and New Jersey before attracting the attention of a major entertainment attorney, who helped her get signed. “When I write a song, I think about all the different layers that will go on top of it.”

Atkins shopped her demo record Party's Over , which attracted the attention of several labels and led to a live audition in the offices of Columbia Records, who snapped her up. She's about to go to Sweden to work on her debut with producer Tore Johansson (Cardigans, Franz Ferdinand, OK Go, Saint Etienne, New Order).

“I think of myself as an all-around entertainer. I dance and tell jokes on-stage,” she says. “If I can make up an ice skating or ballet routine in my head to one of my songs, it's a keeper. Even if what I do on-stage is more of a mashed potato thing.”

As she prepares for her major label debut, Nicole Atkins isn't allowing her burgeoning fame to go to her head.

“I still try to stay close to my fans,” she says. “It's awesome when people come to your shows who aren't friends or relatives. I'm an old-fashioned chick in some ways and a hyper dude in others. You can call me a chude.”

With the release of Bleeding Diamonds, you can call her a star.