Atkins, a singer from Asbury Park, N.J., who plays the World Cafe Live tonight with her band, The Sea, is in her element here. And not because rock-star types like Perry Farrell and Moby keep strolling by.

It's because the Driskill, which served as Lyndon Johnson's congressional campaign headquarters and is said to be inhabited by the ghost of a 4-year-old girl who tumbled down the grand staircase to her death, is suffused with history.

"I like places that seem like they're haunted," says Atkins, who wears a black dress with a red cravat that matches her velvet Mary Janes. "This is like The Shining hotel. It looks like Scarlett O'Hara is going to descend that staircase."

Atkins' major-label debut, Neptune City, which came out in October, outfits her cinematic songs in a big, old-fashioned, dreamy pop sound full of swelling strings and soaring choruses that would fit nicely on the soundtrack to a David Lynch movie.

The 29-year-old songwriter and visual artist is nostalgic for a time before she was born. "The '50s and '60s are where it's at for me," she says. She calls Arthur Lee, of the band Love, "my total hero - he's like, completely depraved, and beautiful," and says Roy Orbison is "hands down my favorite singer."

"And the Mamas and Papas: Nobody's like that today. Nobody puts that much texture and buildups and harmonies into their songs. It's almost like there's a craft missing from music. There's a whole circus vibe and even a ragtime element that a lot of '60s bands had that is so appealing to me. It's like a carnival."

Neptune City songs such as the majestic "The Way It Is," the wistful "Maybe Tonight," and the heartsick "Torn" - which Atkins wrote about an Australian boyfriend who was deported for overstaying his U.S. visa - also show the influence of '60s girl groups like the Ronettes and Shangri-Las. That's quite by accident, Atkins says.

"Neither I nor the producer [Tore Johannsson] could play lead guitar very well," she says. "So I just sang all the lead guitar lines and harmonized, and we were like, this sounds like a girl group."

Atkins grew up in Neptune, just south of Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore, with two older half brothers, a younger sister, and "about 50,000 Sicilian cousins" on her mother's side. "I lived in my own little world. I just wanted to paint and draw."

Getting over a bout of bronchitis in the midst of a hectic SXSW, where she played a half-dozen shows and did scads of interviews to prepare for a European tour, she's fallen off her "no caffeine, sugar, booze or marinara sauce" regimen, and asked her road manager to fetch a Frappuccino. "The marinara sauce has been the hardest," she says.

She studied art at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, then came home and painted murals in New Jersey suburbanites' homes. While she worked on her music, that paid the bills.

"People would be like, 'I want a lighthouse and a dove over my bed.' Nothing that I would put in my own house."

Atkins, a horror-movie fan who puts Dario Argento's cult classic Suspiria on top of her list and aims for a "spook factor" in her music, has been working on a series of horse head paintings. For her, visual art goes hand in hand with songwriting.

"All the songs really start with the idea of a movie," she says. "The way I write begins with mood. That's where painting training helped. When I'd illustrate something, [the teacher would] say, 'Think not only of what it looks like, but what the grass feels like underneath your feet, and what the air smells like.' So you create something that you could almost walk into and feel you're a part of it."

After her Aussie boyfriend was sent home, Atkins moved to New York and concentrated on her music. She was signed by Columbia in 2006. That deal has presented high-profile opportunities, like an American Express commercial, putting her in the company of Robert DeNiro, Tina Fey and Beyoncé, and is meant to convey the impression that she's a big star, even if you've never heard of her.

Ironically, signing a big label deal has made her broke. She's so busy promoting herself that she had to quit her day job and could no longer afford to live in New York. So two years ago, she moved to Asbury.

"It's great. There's a lot of artists and a big gay community, and everybody knows each other. It's weird because I always hated it. I never felt close or connected to any of the people who lived there, except for my friends and family, of course. I just felt like the weirdo.

"But now I have this group of friends who are in great bands and we all share the same vision of how music should be and how life should be, and I really have found my niche there. It's made me really love New Jersey again. And I thought, yeah, we can live here and start a new scene and write a new chapter in Asbury Park music history."

Atkins' compadres in the new Asbury scene include the formerly Philadelphia-based singer Scott Liss and the '70s-style rock band Parlor Mob.

Identifying yourself as an Asbury Park rocker, of course, means a certain central Jersey songwriter will always be looming.

"Everybody's always looking for the next Springsteen," Atkins says. "I was talking to his wife, Patti [Scialfa] about it, saying, 'This sucks.' She said, 'Honey, there's worse things you could have hanging over your head.' I was like, 'You know, you're right.' I can only try to be myself."

Since Atkins signed with Columbia, the label has gone though major changes, with maverick producer Rick Rubin taking the helm last year. She survived the shake-up, and finds herself there among a coterie of cool, indie types that includes the Tings Tings, the Gossip and MGMT, though Neptune City wound up being delayed several times before it was released with little fanfare. That's OK with Atkins, who's happy to take a patient approach to getting her music heard.

"It's not like there's one single and nine songs that are all fluff," she says. "That way people can discover it for themselves. And hopefully, when they do, they'll be like, 'Wow, I found this.' And they'll love it forever."