Although she made a decent splash with her 2007 debut, 'Neptune City,' Nicole Atkins won't be releasing music on Columbia Records, the label that reportedly bid for her talents back in 2006. "We got divorced," Atkins tells Spinner. "Even when I was over there, it didn't seem like the right place to be. The company that I signed up to got fired within the first couple months of me being over there." In a weird way, she actually predicted this back in 2007, when she told Billboard "I started getting worried about getting dropped."

And it doesn't appear that Atkins will be hitting up any majors anytime soon, either. "I just want to be somewhere that is a little bit smaller and easier to get things done faster," she says. With that in mind, she's entertaining a few indies that she's quite excited about but was keeping mum about, as not to jinx anything. One thing's certain: her band name has now been changed from just the simple sounding "sea," to the more tumultuous sounding "black sea." So far, she's written 38 songs for her next album and expects to pare down to 13.

"The sound is a lot less orchestral and more guitar heavy," Atkins says. "It's a bit darker and heavier in general. It was inspired a lot by rock music from the late '60s and '70s. It was a really hard year for me personally, so I needed to get my ya ya's out with some rock music."

Atkins is currently opening a string of shows for Aimee Mann and will join the Avett Brothers on the road this fall. Her first headlining show as 'Nicole Atkins and the Black Sea' is set for August 6 at Brooklyn's Bell House.