Rickie Lee Jones - The Lady of Pirates

Rickie Lee Jones is one of the "grand dames" of American singer-songwriting of the last twenty years. Her multifaceted voice and sophisticated arrangements have led her, over the years, to drift away from her folk origins and embrace an intimate kind of songwriting rich in a thousand shades: jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and, more recently, even pop and trip-hop. Her experiments haven't always hit the mark, but the American singer-songwriter, regarded by many as the finest heir to Joni Mitchell, has always managed to add a touch of class to her songs.

Born on November 8, 1954 in Chicago, the young and restless Rickie Lee wandered across America chasing her fortune. At 19 she moved to Los Angeles and began performing in folk clubs, with singular, almost purely vocal performances with barely any accompaniment. Legend has it that at the end of 1977, at the Tropicana Motel, she had her fateful encounter with Tom Waits, who was instantly bewitched by the young singer-songwriter's personality. The two began an artistic and romantic relationship that would last until 1980 and would be immortalized on the cover of one of the Pomona songwriter's most famous albums: "Blue Valentine".

After also working with Lowell George of Little Feat, Rickie Lee was noticed by Warner boss Lenny Waronker, who signed her, launching her into the pantheon of American songwriting. In 1979 her self-titled debut album, Rickie Lee Jones, was released. And the single "Chuck E's in Love" (dedicated to folksinger Chuck E. Weiss) was a revelation: it reached No. 4 on the charts and sold over a million copies. The Chicago-born singer-songwriter, aided by a team of studio wizards including Randy Newman and Dr. John, showcased her fondness for refined rock, made up of blues-soaked ballads but also jazz excursions, intense lyrics close in spirit to the beat generation, and top-class vocal turns. The obligatory reference points are Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits, but also whole generations of soul singers and jazz chanteuses.

But Rickie Lee is a difficult character: reserved and moody, she doesn't love the spotlight, and so she decides to retreat to the hills of Los Angeles to write the songs for Pirates (1980), her second album. It's a less commercial work, even more intense and mature, with a driving track like "We Belong Together" and a captivating overall structure, thanks above all to Jones's visionary lyrics and mischievous vocal turns. Hers is a songwriting formula destined to influence entire generations of female rock protagonists, from Suzanne Vega to Edie Brickell, from Sheryl Crow to Fiona Apple.

In the meantime, however, alcohol problems and family troubles make her output erratic. Her return in 1983 with the mini-LP Girl at Her Volcano is a peculiar project, alternating studio and live tracks. Above all, it's a covers record: from an unreleased Tom Waits song ("Rainbow Sleeves") to reworkings of jazz classics like "My Funny Valentine" and "Lush Life", right down to a curious version of the Drifters' "Under the Boardwalk". With the following The Magazine, on the other hand, Jones returns to her trademark formula, with her usual bittersweet spirit and ever more refined arrangements. It ranges from the soft orchestral "Preludio" to a poignant ballad like "It Must Be Love", all the way to the eccentric "Theme for the Pope", with accordion and Mediterranean rhythms.

But the restless Rickie Lee never manages to enjoy the success (mostly critical) that greets every new release. She loses herself in stories of drugs and alcohol, announces phantom "musical cabaret" projects that will never materialize, and disappears from the scene. Until, in 1988, she reappears with Flying Cowboys, a project made in collaboration with Walter Becker (Steely Dan) and Blue Nile. It's an accomplished record that seems to mark a return to life for the Chicago songwriter, who had in the meantime become the mother of a baby boy. But her aversion to the rules of the music business doesn't ease up: "In pop music, since there's so much competition, you have to stay within certain rhythms, and if you don't follow them you get ignored. But I'm not made that way...", she protests forcefully.

After the release of Pop Pop (1991), which dusts off hits from the Forties and Fifties in a jazz key, as well as compositions by Jimi Hendrix, Jones returns in 1993 with Traffic From Paradise and in 1995 with the unplugged hits collection Naked Songs. Then, in 1997, she releases Ghostyhead, a somewhat overambitious mix of dance and techno rhythms, which fails to convince either critics or her most uncompromising fans.

Three years pass and with It's Like This Rickie Lee Jones goes back to baring her claws, moving back toward jazz and reaffirming her great vocal expressiveness. It's another covers record after Pop Pop. "I don't know why I decided to go back to doing covers," the American singer-songwriter has said, "maybe because I didn't have any original songs. I'm very slow and I hadn't written a single one. I hadn't written new songs because it takes me a lot of time to do it. When I write something I want to tell a finished story, I have to think it through, let it settle. I just felt that for a while I'd wanted to sing some soul songs from the Sixties and Seventies. I like playing a bit of soul, a bit of Sinatra, a bit of Beatles".

And from the Liverpool quartet, Jones decided to revisit one of their most evocative songs: "For No One". "I recorded it because I really love it," she explained. "As a kid I had a real passion for the Beatles. So much so that I'd learned to sing exactly like John Lennon. I was in Los Angeles playing at a club, The Largo, where there was a guy who can play any Beatles song. Together we played 'For No One'. After that night, the idea for this record took shape." On "It's Like This", the blonde Chicago songwriter also tackles evergreens by Marvin Gaye, Traffic and Steely Dan, and is joined by exceptional guests such as Taj Mahal, Ben Folds and Joe Jackson. Her voice, warm and husky, keeps its intriguing charm fully intact. And her arrangements always retain a touch of unpredictability. In short, further proof of the pure class of this grand dame of American songwriting.

Her return to an album of original material after a full six years, The Evening Of My Best Day (2003), turns out, however, to be a misstep, revealing a boxed-in, monotone songwriting style, a distant relative of her golden-era work. The former lady of pirates throws herself into verbose political tirades (like the opening "Ugly Man", dedicated to Bush), without managing to leave much of a mark anymore. The exceptions are a couple of classy ballads, such as "Mink Coat at a Bus Stop", enriched by harmonica embellishments, and the biting "A Face In The Crowd", which closes the album with its low-flying guitar runs.

Inspired by a book by Lee Cantelon, "The Words", Rickie Lee Jones creates what is perhaps her most daring project, The Sermon On Exposition Boulevard, a concept album on the story and message of Christ. Peter Atanasoff and Cantelon himself wrote and played alongside Jones, the former contributing words and vocals, the latter providing guitar parts.

Thirteen tracks that deliver more than a few chills, from the opener "Nobody Knows My Name", through "Falling Up" and the instrumental "Road To Emmaus". Nearly thirty years after her debut, Rickie Lee Jones can still scratch and claw with the same class and intensity as back then, even if her songwriting no longer has the sparkle of her early years.

Two years later, the Chicago singer-songwriter returns with Balm In Gilead (2009), an album in which she recycles a handful of old compositions dating back to her past (even to her childhood), to celebrate thirty years of her career. Proof of this comes in "The Moon Is Made Of Gold", written for her as a lullaby by her father when she was a child, the reworked sketch of "Wild Girl" (dedicated to her daughter) and "Old Enough". A new tribute to Christianity in the vein of "Sermon" comes courtesy of "The Gospel of Carlos, Norman And Smith". The rest is a country-and-soul miscellany that, at best, amounts to self-imitation.

Despite some notable guest appearances – Allison Krauss, Ben Harper, Victoria Williams, Bill Frisell, Jon Brion, Vic Chesnutt – this is a meagre record, her fourteenth, with the artist now resigned to domesticity as its sole protagonist. Production duties are handled quietly behind the scenes by her trusted collaborator Dave Kalish.

Three years after her last album of original material, the Duchess released her third covers album in 2012, following in the footsteps of 1991's Pop Pop (a collection of delightful miniatures from the golden era of jazz and Tin Pan Alley – its cover sporting the packaging of the legendary firecrackers!) and 2000's It's Like This.

Produced by Ben Harper – who also writes the album's sole original track, "Masterpiece" – The Devil You Know feels like an excuse for Rickie Lee Jones to revisit, in a thoroughly personal (and highly unorthodox) way, well-known old songs by great folk and rock songwriters.

Fair warning, though: those who skim the tracklist and think they're about to hear a Van Morrison or Neil Young song "sung again by a woman" should steer well clear. Rickie Lee Jones has loads of experience, and – even more than Cat Power or Tori Amos – she possesses an innate ability to make songs written by men entirely her own, transfiguring them to the point of unrecognisability and dressing them in new meaning through an interpretation that pushes intimacy – and, it must be said, idiosyncrasy too – to its very limits.

Just listen to her take on the Stones' famously well-known "Sympathy For The Devil", placed right at the start here as if to put listeners on notice from the off: stripped of any rock'n'roll trappings, almost devoid of rhythm (and of those legendary wooh-wooh! backing chants that ran relentlessly through the six minutes of the original), Jagger's romp is transformed into a genuine conversation with Mr. Beelzebub himself, during which Rickie Lee Jones's voice, though aged and grown thinner, keeps its innate charisma fully intact.

Van Morrison's "Comfort You" likewise plays more with silence than with the shape of the original, but it only takes a few scattered piano notes on "The Weight" (originally by The Band) to remind us that, when it comes to a piano-and-voice ballad, Rickie Lee Jones still sits up there among the greats. Then there's Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", which keeps all the chords in major key (something, for instance, Saint Etienne didn't do) but likewise drops the waltz time, opting instead for a sparse, barely-there rhythm, so the song seems to float ethereally above the words.

The Duchess also takes on the traditional "St James Infirmary", once sung by Neil Armstrong among others, and despite an inevitably crushing comparison she pulls it off very well, because dwelling in the "uncomfortable" middle ground between folk, pop and jazz seems to be second nature to her.

Faint touches of Celtic folk warm up Tim Hardin's "Reason To Believe", while "Seems Like A Long Time" (known through Rod Stewart's gravelly voice) takes on an almost sacred tone, riding a slender thread of choir and organ that at times leans toward soul (or, given the producer in question, toward the Blind Boys Of Alabama…).

Even without resorting to uncomfortable comparisons with the past, it's hard not to notice that The Devil You Know is a record of real worth but far from pleasant or accommodating – at times it almost resists the listener outright, a factor that will affect its fortunes and ensure it appears on very few year-end lists. Still, as a self-confessed die-hard fan, I'll venture one observation: anyone not already familiar with Rickie Lee Jones's work is likely to remain fairly indifferent to an album as spare and monotonous as this, while those who loved her in the past may well say (and not without reason!) that the Duchess sadly doesn't scratch and claw the way she used to. Her small but devoted following, however, should know that within The Devil You Know there's still material capable of casting the kind of spell only she can.

Touted as her first album of new songs in ten years, her return to recording came in 2015, financed through a Pledge crowdfunding campaign. The Other Side Of Desire celebrates rediscovered inspiration, the sacred fire of art, resurfacing not out of contractual obligation or artistic habit: the project grew out of a return to New Orleans, the city where her alcoholic father spent the last years of his life after abandoning his first wife and a young girl full of dreams, and also the city where the artist created her most ambitious and intense work (Pirates).

The comeback arrives with the best of intentions and a team capable of translating into music the creative universe of a 61-year-old woman who has never given in to compromise.

Powerful, vivid imagery runs through "Jimmy Choos", the single and opening track of the project: a shot of energetic west-coast jazziness, which Rickie Lee Jones sings with unexpected maturity and a vocal style ever more steeped in soul-blues influences.

Her love of Fats Domino and Cajun music resurfaces too, in the swinging "J'ai Connais Pas", while her mother's French roots sail through on the delightful, sweeping country waltz "Valtz De Mon Pere (Lovers' Waltz)".

The music and lyrics of Rickie Lee Jones have always possessed a contagious, austere spirituality, and on The Other Side Of Desire it's present in every moment. When the tone turns more intimate and reflective, as on "Infinity", you can savor it fully. Above all, you can once again appreciate those complex chord sequences and structures that made her music so original and unconventional, ballads steeped in suffering and poetry that you can hardly leave in the background, because they dispense emotions too precious to waste or let slip by under the skin, like the splendid "Feet On The Ground", which despite the typical piano-and-voice style, breaks into an overwhelming vocal duet of pure soul romanticism.

It's hard to ignore the vocal maturity the artist has reached, increasingly chasing the spirit of Al Green and Sylvester (just listen to the superb "Blinded By The Hunt"), while retaining that harrowing, lived-in charm that only a few great artists have managed to preserve from mainstream contamination; in that sense, the intensity of the evocative "Christmas In New Orleans" remains exemplary: a ballad of great impact and charm that the artist delivers with harsh, intense tones.

At this point there would already be enough substance to hail The Other Side Of Desire as a fine comeback, but don't be hasty: Rickie Lee Jones's new album is the most important record of her career since the days of Flying Cowboys, and perhaps its intensity connects back to that distant debut album, where the artist managed to channel all the emotions of youth and her hopes for the future - now it's time to recount the emotions lived through in almost forty years of career.

Contributions by Michele Saran (“Balm In Gilead”), Damiano Pandolfini (“The Devil You Know”) and Gianfranco Marmoro (“The Other Side Of Desire”)

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