American Blues Scene premiered Nikki O’Neill’s single “Live Like You’ve Just Begun” from her new album, Stories I Only Tell My Friends. The album will be released on March 14, and we wanted to talk with Nikki about it and about some of the backstories behind the songs.
Stories I Only Tell My Friends is one of those albums you will want to listen to again and again without skipping any of the eleven songs. There are no filler tracks here. They are sometimes laidback, sometimes upbeat, sometimes rocking, but always soulful. If you like soul-inspired Americana this is an album you will want to hear.
With the release date just around the corner, Nikki must be excited for the album’s debut.
“Very much so, yeah,” she told me. “We got some nice reviews. They’re starting to come in. It’s fun that people are as excited as we were making it.”
“We” is Nikki and her band, comprised of husband Rich Lackowski (drums, percussion, harmony vocals), Chris Corsale (most lead guitars, harmony vocals), and Teddy Myers (organ, piano, Wurlitzer and Rhodes), along with John Abbey and Chris Stanford on bass. They were an integral part of the album creation process.
Still, the writing of the songs was a solo endeavor and that was something new for her. Previously, she had collaborated with Paul Menser when writing. At the time, she was – in her words – more of a music nerd and not as comfortable with “meter and rhymes schemes and things like that.”
Nikki’s determination to try songwriting on her own was in part due to a move from Los Angeles to Chicago. Yet, it went deeper than that. As she explained it, how she needed to connect with the songs themselves was a big consideration.
“Even if someone is a really great lyric writer they can’t know what an artist wants,” she told me. “They can’t know what makes them tick. And sometimes you don’t know yourself as a singer of songs until you start performing the songs.
“Some of the songs I started to have a little trouble performing. And I thought, ‘I need to write myself.’ And certain subject matters, there is just nobody who could write about that.”
A case in point is “Newcomer Blues,” the last track on the album. It is very much taken from Nikki’s own experience as a child moving from L.A. to Stockholm, Sweden to Warsaw, Poland. “I could tell someone to write a song about what it is like to move around a lot like a migrant. And from a child’s perspective,” she says. “But that is just one of those songs I have to write.”
Another song that only Nikki could write is a delightful tune called “Candy Apple Morning.”
“I toyed around with those words for a long time,” she said. “And then I decided to sit down and think ‘what did that mean? What is candy apple morning?’ And what came out of it is I love the morning, as opposed to people who are night owls. I love when the day is a blank page and before all other stuff comes in.”
Indeed, the song comes across like an ode to morning itself, capturing the energy and excitement of a new day dawning. She paints a picture of the world she sees: the lady sweeping the sidewalk out front of a bar; the guitar with mother-of-pearl on the headstock; the open blinds letting the light in; making tea in the kitchen; the butter on the bread; the unread paper; and the first bird greeting the sun.
“It’s a fine time for me to create,” Nikki says. But why “candy apple” to describe the morning?
“Candy apple – I know it sounds a bit psychedelic,” she laughs. “But maybe it’s because I lived in Sweden and English to me is kind of still a foreign language. But electric guitars have a certain paint – candy apple red. And I liked that. Candy apple red, and so candy apple morning.”
And of course there are many mornings where the sun rises red in the east. So, candy apple morning sounds right.
Nikki also wrote a book for those who want to play rock guitar called Women’s Road To Rock Guitar. Don’t let the title fool you, though. It was written for anyone who wants to learn.
“When I wrote that book I actually didn’t intend for it to be just focused on women. But I was told there are a lot of guitar books out there, so you have to have a niche.”
Nikki and her husband, Rich, love to travel and love to experience various ethnic cuisines. She loves Persian food, Indian, Bangladeshi, Moroccan, and “a lot of Asian food.” She shares her food explorations on Facebook.
“We go in alphabetical order,” she told me. “So we have gone from Afghanistan when we lived in LA to the letter D. And now we live in Chicago. We’re 115 countries in and we are now at Malaysia.”
In a way, the variety of food and the variety in the places she lived informed the Stories I Only Tell My Friends. “I like it to have variety and I like it to have more than one course, so to speak,” Nikki said.
Stories I Only Tell My Friends will be out on March 14, 2025 on the Blackbird Record Label. It will be available in vinyl, CD and digital format. Nikki co-produced the album with her husband Rich Lackowski. It was recorded mostly live with her 5-piece band by John Abbey at Kingsize Sound Labs in Chicago. The album’s recording was made possible in large part by the Illinois Arts Council, who chose O’Neill as one of their Creative Catalyst Grant recipients for 2025.
