Nicole Atkins had a pretty normal upbringing. Yeah, right. Not only did she grow up on scratch that in Neptune, a town on the New Jersey shore thats undoubtedly the butt of a lot of jokes, but she also honed her skills playing Grateful Dead songs on a guitar once owned by an uncle who died when he was 13. The title track to her six-song, anti-folk EP, Bleeding Diamonds, is about watching the Iraq War on TV. That song and the rest of the disc enamored Rolling Stone so much that the magazine included Atkins on its list of Top 10 Artists to Watch in 2007. Atkins and her band, the Sea, released their full-length debut, Neptune City, in October