Nancy Atlas Makes Music To Her Own Beat

She faced the packed house last Friday night, her microphone stand draped with a magenta boa, and planted her right foot on top of a nearby speaker. Her low-cut black dress clung to her figure, sharply contrasted by her black zip-up biker boots—her third outfit of the night, all changes conducted on stage.

Watching her belt out songs from “Lola” to “Proud Mary” as she swung her hips and blonde hair, and deftly navigated the intimate Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, it was impossible to imagine this rocker as a mother of three—her youngest, Tallulah, just 1½ years old.

“How do you like the New York Belles?” the musician said, flinging out her arm and gesturing to her backup singers, during the first of this year’s Fireside Sessions series. She was met with a round of applause.

“How do you like Jim Camponolla and Gary Henderson on the horns?”

More applause.

“And how about that Chad Smith?”

The longtime Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer smirked from behind his drum kit, the audience’s cheers crescendoing.

“All right,” she said—before someone in the crowd interrupted, “How about Nancy Atlas?”

And then, the audience roared, drowning out the musician’s surprised laugh.

“I’m still going, baby! I’m still going!” she said.

“You can’t kill her!” Mr. Smith shouted.

“Me, Cher and the cockroach!” Ms. Atlas said. “You just can’t kill me.”

Nancy Atlas grew up to the sounds of Steve Winwood, The Police, Phil Collins, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and even Luciano Pavarotti in her childhood home in Commack before leaving in 1989 to study in England and Italy. For most of her young life, she had struggled to choose between art and music. She loved to draw and paint as much as playing keyboard, which she began at age 3, and she penned her first song at age 10.

“I think it was something like ‘Shades of Blue,’ or something, like, you know …” she paused, and laughed, “really pathetic. I haven’t thought about those songs in a long time.”

Eleven years later, she made a decision. It was a rainy London afternoon and, during a walk down Portobello Road, she bought a guitar for 60 quid, put it in a black plastic bag and never looked back. It was “game on” from the first strum, she said.

“I knew that this was something I could die for, and with art, I just didn’t have that feeling,” she said. “There was an insecurity with the arts. With music, I had a connection to it. We were one.”

In 1993, Ms. Atlas moved to the East End and has called Montauk home for the last 10 years. Many of her first shows were at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett—from open mic nights to full-fledged gigs.

“There was a period I was wearing a cowboy hat at the Talkhouse,” she recalled. “Suddenly, we’d go to play a show, and there’d be, like, five girls with cowboy hats. That’s when the light bulb went off, when my bass player said, ‘You see how many girls are wearing cowboy hats tonight?’ And I was, like, ‘Yeah. Wow.’”

The 43-year-old musician has no problem admitting that her career has ebbed and flowed over the last two decades. In the early 2000s, she found herself playing to fewer than a dozen people at any given gig, she recalled. But these days, she’s stronger than ever. Ms. Atlas and her band, The Nancy Atlas Project, have played more shows than she can count.

“Peter [Honerkamp] was talking to me at the Talkhouse the other day, and he’s, like, ‘No other woman’s played more at the Talkhouse than you have,’” Ms. Atlas said. “I’ve probably played 250, 300 shows at that bar alone.

“To most people in this business, you’re out to pasture by the time you’re 40,” she continued. “They send you away to make glue by the time you’re my age. I’m very, very lucky that I’m able to make a living off what I do. And it doesn’t pass on me at any point.”

Still, Ms. Atlas finds herself daydreaming about hitting the road one day. It’s usually around September, after playing five shows every week of the summer with three kids at home—8-year-old Cash, 3-year-old Levon and the aforementioned Tallulah, who was a happy surprise for Ms. Atlas and her husband, Thomas, last August.

“Of course I burn out, for sure. But it’s more from the political and the bullshit side of the business than the actual music. Sometimes I wish I could leave and run away,” she said. “Would that be the best-case scenario for my children? No, it would not. I choose to live here, and that’s what Fireside Sessions is all about. It’s actually bringing the road to our town.”

Rockin’ To Her Own Drum

Every Friday night in January and March, Ms. Atlas will simulate the tour life in Sag Harbor by bringing a different guest musician each week—old friends and acquaintances alike. “Clark Gayton, who’s coming this week, he’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ll come the 9th. I’ll just talk to Bruce,’” she said. “He’s on tour with Bruce Springsteen, in his horn section. Before that, it was Sting. His résumé is mind-numbing.”

The series kicked off on the same weekend last year with the same pair of headliners, Ms. Atlas and Mr. Smith. Except they had a third guest—a major snowstorm that threatened to wipe out the concert altogether. At 1 p.m. that day, they made a decision: the show would go on.

And it was a packed house, just as it was this year.

They hit the stage wearing jumpsuits, in order to match the evening’s 1970s theme—Ms. Atlas’s was aquamarine blue with a top hat, Mr. Smith’s tan and paired with a blonde afro and aviators.

“It’s Nancy Atlas! And the other dudes! And The Project! And Hulk Hogan’s evil twin brother!” Ms. Atlas turned to Mr. Smith, settling into his set. “What exactly are you?”

He fluffed up his wig and shrugged before kicking off the set with “Lola” by the Kinks. Ms. Atlas was confident and cool, mirroring her naturally extroverted personality. She rarely gets nervous before a show and plays every gig as if it’s her last, she said. She cares deeply for her audiences, she said, just not what they think.

“I studied the Renaissance in Italy, and the one thing you realize is art is totally based on opinion. There will always be naysayers,” she said. “You just have to not really care about opinions and do your thing. If you get coiled up in what other people think about you, you’re constantly chasing your tail. If you like my shows, great. If you don’t, that’s fine, too.”

Three costumes later—“Don’t you worry about a thing,” she reassured the audience. “I haven’t surfed in a while, but when you live on the East End, you learn how to change”—Ms. Atlas finished the show wearing a shiny, slate-colored dress and top hat, rocking out to AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” finally ripping the boa off the mic stand and wrapping it around her neck.

She looked out to the audience and smiled. Not a single person was in his or her seat.

Fireside Sessions with Nancy Atlas and her band of Journeymen will continue with Clark Gayton on Friday, January 9, at 8 p.m. Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. In the coming weeks, guest musicians will include Brian Mitchell, Randi Fishenfeld, Bill Sims Jr., Billy Campion and Billy Ryan. Tickets are $20. For a full schedule and more information, call (631) 725-9500, or visit baystreet.org.