It’s been nearly five years since we last heard from Nashville-based pop-soul songwriter Nicole Atkins, with 2021’s Memphis Ice itself being a reworking of the original material she’d put out a year prior under the title Italian Ice. Yet after some quite-literal sleepless nights, the resulting full-length Drama is slated to arrive on September 18 via Sun Records and Wicked Game. The project’s latest single may directly address those restless evenings Atkins spent struggling to get back into a normal sleep cycle, with what she describes as a cocktail of burnout and depression keeping the vicious cycle going—yet you’d never know it from the grand choruses and opulent compositions that make “Trippin’ on Teardrops” soar. With the assistance of Peter Bjorn and John’s Peter Morén, the artist transforms her anxieties into something undeniably pleasant.
“After wrestling with what this song wanted to be for a while, I had the chorus. Like an SOS,” Atkins shares, recalling the process of getting the single underway—one which would soon invite crucial collaboration. “Then my good old pal Peter was visiting Nashville, and we were writing, and I showed him this chorus, which he loved, and I just put down the verse words which I thought I’d replace because I was almost embarrassed at how pitiful they sounded but that was just the state of my life at that time. Lonely and dreaming and wishing things were different. The person I was missing most was myself, but sometimes it just takes a good friend to shine a light to get ya through it.”
The video playfully depicts Atkins’ nocturnal woes with scenes of her strolling through a mansion, gleefully belting out the song’s lyrics. “When it came time to make the video, Caleb Herring, Sun Records cameraman extraordinaire, flew up to the Jersey shore while I was visiting family,” she shares. “We had two days to figure something out, and my high school friend came through with this estate he was taking care of that was now owned by the NJ Parks system. It was from the early 1900s and had a bajillion stunning rooms, bathing tunnels, grounds, etc. It also had all these fishing trophies that were left there, so an idea came quickly: A glamorous woman wakes up in her gorgeous estate, and as you follow her day, you see her seemingly perfect life is not all it’s cracked up to be when your only company is the dead and shellacked fishes on the walls.”
Check it out below, and pre-order Drama here.
