"New Venture A Return To Form"
Published 10/30/09, Berkshire Eagle
By Jeremy D. Goodwin
GREAT BARRINGTON—Rickie Lee Jones is good at being herself.
She’s darted in and out of any category you could try to file her under. There’s the jazz-pop hit “Chuck E.’s In Love” on her 1979 debut, the electronic experiments of 1997’s “Ghostyhead,” and even the sometimes ragged, sometimes rambling feel of her last album, 2007’s “Sermon on Exposition Boulevard,” an improvisational spin-off from the teachings of Jesus.
Yet any stylistic lurch feels born from the unmistakable stew of musical influences a generation of music critics has attempted to define, before finally throwing up its hands and saying “it sounds like Rickie Lee Jones.” Its centerpiece is a remarkably open vocal technique, darting in and out of the melody, ahead of and behind the beat.
Jones recently embarked on a select, 11-date United States tour, to be followed by a visit to Europe and then only a handful of additional stateside shows. The tour comes to the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center tonight.
“I am blessed. This is what I am meant to do, it comes to me, and I do it naturally, and for some reason people keep paying me enough money to survive,” Jones writes in an email interview. (She writes in an open, flowing, conversational style, rarely employing capital letters. Capitalization has been standardized for the quotes in this article.)
“So I love to sing, I am given the opportunity to create. I am either economically viable or artistically commercial enough for someone to keep employing me, and I marvel at that myself. It's a blessing. But not as important as family, as home.”
“Balm in Gilead,” her third collection of original material in 11 years, is out November 3. By turns jazzy and soulful, meditative and joyful, it is likely to be celebrated as an impressive return to form.
“I think it is the kind of writing more associated with me, more folks like this kind of thing. I have a feeling right now that a very honest and loving venture into songs is what is needed. So there it is. Easy songs. I cannot explain things, I really just sing.”
She says the variety of musical flavors found on “Balm in Gilead” reflects the sort of diversity heard on AM radio in the late-60’s.
“We grew up with a wide palette, many of us, to appreciate different kinds of music, and I think it is a real loss of people today to not hear all kinds of music on the radio. That is my tradition, and within that tradition, like The Beatles, I heard an even wider cross section. I listen to whatever strikes my fancy.”
This veteran songwriter and performer says in a press release the new album “feels close to a debut.” A debut, or perhaps a summation: several of the tracks are songs that have been accumulating over the past 20 years, in various states of partial completion.
“In each project, over the years…there have been songs that simply did not make it,” she writes in the email. “They were not ready... but they were... they existed.... it’s not that they were bad ideas…they just were not formed. Not that I don’t have ideas I throw away. These songs...existed, they were not just ideas. They were unfinished songs. So this is a recording of many songs that took longer to come to fruition. “
“The Moon is Made of Gold,” a dreamy tune that sounds ripped from the Great American Songbook, was written by Jones’ father, Richard Loris Jones, and Rickie Lee previously recorded it as a duet with bassist Rob Wasserman in 1985. (Wasserman joins Jones’ four-piece band for the tour.)
She began writing “Wild Girl,” the album opener, in about 1986. It evolved into a song for her daughter, who was not yet born at the time she started writing it.
“I wanted to give her a song, and I wanted to give us a song to give to our children, to express without preaching. It’s hard, parents always want to impart something, and it gets tiresome for the kid.”
So as her daughter Charlotte grew and matured, the song did as well.
“I felt it would not really be heard, with the power I felt in it, if I put it out then,” she writes. “I have written many, many verses, but none were right. It took decades, and the need for it to be finished. I guess, after all, the songs are made of a kind of flesh of our emotions. I needed to finish it. I wanted it.”
Fiercely independent and in service to a wandering Muse, Jones may not have followed a career path cribbed from any “How to succeed in the music business” manual. But she’s found an audience that has followed her evolution, while picking up devotees from other musical scenes and traditions along the way.
“I had impact, and this is what I wanted most of all. Money she comes and goes. But to know, in your heart, and to be blessed in this way, I think somehow though it is not written about, it is understood. Why do people still come to hear this artist? It is not all marketing, people know.”
GREAT BARRINGTON—Rickie Lee Jones is good at being herself.
She’s darted in and out of any category you could try to file her under. There’s the jazz-pop hit “Chuck E.’s In Love” on her 1979 debut, the electronic experiments of 1997’s “Ghostyhead,” and even the sometimes ragged, sometimes rambling feel of her last album, 2007’s “Sermon on Exposition Boulevard,” an improvisational spin-off from the teachings of Jesus.
Yet any stylistic lurch feels born from the unmistakable stew of musical influences a generation of music critics has attempted to define, before finally throwing up its hands and saying “it sounds like Rickie Lee Jones.” Its centerpiece is a remarkably open vocal technique, darting in and out of the melody, ahead of and behind the beat.
Jones recently embarked on a select, 11-date United States tour, to be followed by a visit to Europe and then only a handful of additional stateside shows. The tour comes to the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center tonight.
“I am blessed. This is what I am meant to do, it comes to me, and I do it naturally, and for some reason people keep paying me enough money to survive,” Jones writes in an email interview. (She writes in an open, flowing, conversational style, rarely employing capital letters. Capitalization has been standardized for the quotes in this article.)
“So I love to sing, I am given the opportunity to create. I am either economically viable or artistically commercial enough for someone to keep employing me, and I marvel at that myself. It's a blessing. But not as important as family, as home.”
“Balm in Gilead,” her third collection of original material in 11 years, is out November 3. By turns jazzy and soulful, meditative and joyful, it is likely to be celebrated as an impressive return to form.
“I think it is the kind of writing more associated with me, more folks like this kind of thing. I have a feeling right now that a very honest and loving venture into songs is what is needed. So there it is. Easy songs. I cannot explain things, I really just sing.”
She says the variety of musical flavors found on “Balm in Gilead” reflects the sort of diversity heard on AM radio in the late-60’s.
“We grew up with a wide palette, many of us, to appreciate different kinds of music, and I think it is a real loss of people today to not hear all kinds of music on the radio. That is my tradition, and within that tradition, like The Beatles, I heard an even wider cross section. I listen to whatever strikes my fancy.”
This veteran songwriter and performer says in a press release the new album “feels close to a debut.” A debut, or perhaps a summation: several of the tracks are songs that have been accumulating over the past 20 years, in various states of partial completion.
“In each project, over the years…there have been songs that simply did not make it,” she writes in the email. “They were not ready... but they were... they existed.... it’s not that they were bad ideas…they just were not formed. Not that I don’t have ideas I throw away. These songs...existed, they were not just ideas. They were unfinished songs. So this is a recording of many songs that took longer to come to fruition. “
“The Moon is Made of Gold,” a dreamy tune that sounds ripped from the Great American Songbook, was written by Jones’ father, Richard Loris Jones, and Rickie Lee previously recorded it as a duet with bassist Rob Wasserman in 1985. (Wasserman joins Jones’ four-piece band for the tour.)
She began writing “Wild Girl,” the album opener, in about 1986. It evolved into a song for her daughter, who was not yet born at the time she started writing it.
“I wanted to give her a song, and I wanted to give us a song to give to our children, to express without preaching. It’s hard, parents always want to impart something, and it gets tiresome for the kid.”
So as her daughter Charlotte grew and matured, the song did as well.
“I felt it would not really be heard, with the power I felt in it, if I put it out then,” she writes. “I have written many, many verses, but none were right. It took decades, and the need for it to be finished. I guess, after all, the songs are made of a kind of flesh of our emotions. I needed to finish it. I wanted it.”
Fiercely independent and in service to a wandering Muse, Jones may not have followed a career path cribbed from any “How to succeed in the music business” manual. But she’s found an audience that has followed her evolution, while picking up devotees from other musical scenes and traditions along the way.
“I had impact, and this is what I wanted most of all. Money she comes and goes. But to know, in your heart, and to be blessed in this way, I think somehow though it is not written about, it is understood. Why do people still come to hear this artist? It is not all marketing, people know.”
