Dwight & Nicole

By HILARY HUGHES

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When you watch an enamored man pick a Flying V to the heartbeat of the belting woman beside him, you're in for an intimate set, and that's what you get from Dwight & Nicole: a couple of fiercely talented musicians who love making music as much as they adore each other. The jazz and blues musicians, who started in Boston with each of their respective ensembles before making a go of a musical and romantic partnership in New York, will be celebrating the release of their first full-length album, !Signs, at the Somerville Theatre.

The title, !Signs, is particularly apt—unorthodox punctuation and all. A number of "signs" led them to the record, starting with a friend's home burning to the ground and ending up in a studio on Brookline's Dwight Street—where the album's first takes were tracked. "Before we started recording, the fire woke me up to what direction we were taking in our lives," says Nicole Nelson on the record's serendipitous beginning. "The exclamation point in !Signs is the 'Holy shit!' that comes before the thing that shakes you up and wakes you up."

Very much a labor of love, !Signs includes new numbers, songs revisited from their EP and a little help from their friends, as a number of local singer/songwriter heavyweights were involved in the record's creative process. Says Nicole: "It's our little gang on one mission, and you can really hear that in the music."

"We had only had sketched those songs before," says better-half Dwight Ritcher. "Now, we got the whole picture."

[Dwight & Nicole, !Signs CD release party with Will Dailey. Fri 2.5.10. Somerville Theatre, 55 Davis Sq., Somerville. 617.625.4088. 8pm/all ages/$20. somervilletheatreonline.com]