With her expressive soprano voice employing sudden alterations of volume and force, and her lyrical focus on Los Angeles street life, Rickie Lee Jones comes on like the love child of Laura Nyro and Tom Waits on her self-titled debut album…
Consulting theologians and Bible scholars during the 1990s, photographer, writer, graphic artist, and everyday mystic Lee Cantelon (aka Pennyhead) assembled a small book presenting the words of Jesus Christ (just Jesus' words, not the stuff surrounding them) in a fitting translation called The Words. He did it for the purpose of presenting those words to people who were not "religious" – people who were put off by organized religion or even offended by it…
No doubt to the consternation of Warner Bros. Records, Rickie Lee Jones took more than three years to follow up her second (and second Top Five, gold-selling) album, Pirates (1981) with The Magazine. (In the interim, the label issued the mini-album of live tracks and outtakes Girl at Her Volcano [1983].) But from the evidence of the finished product, she might have been better advised to take a little longer. Her self-titled first album was a delightful collection of folk-jazz-pop, sparked by the hit single "Chuck E.'s in Love," but it also pointed toward the moodier and more ambitious Pirates. On The Magazine, Jones seems to be rewriting both albums at once…
Duchess of Coolsville is Rhino's three-CD career retrospective of the work of singer and songwriter Rickie Lee Jones, an artist who changed the face of pop in the 1970s in her own way beginning with her surprise hit "Chuck E's in Love." Since that time she has continued on a highly personal, often idiosyncratic path; one that does not always give the marketplace its due…
Life sounds fĂȘte champĂȘtre for New Orleans resident Rickie Lee Jones on her most spirited album since 1989's Flying Cowboys. Just listen to her soar on the deliriously joyful "I Wasn't There", and the gorgeous R&B-inflected chorus of "Feet On The Ground"…
Five years after the disappointing The Magazine, Rickie Lee Jones returned to form with Flying Cowboys, which shared much of the playful, childlike charm of her debut, Rickie Lee Jones, and some of the musically diffuse, lyrically ambitious form of its follow-up, Pirates…
Rickie Lee Jones "unplugged" – in fact, solo with an acoustic guitar or piano on all but a couple of tunes – Naked Songs is otherwise a retrospective concert album on which Jones cherry-picks songs from her five studio albums, including the hits "Chuck E.'s in Love" and "Young Blood," and others from her breakthrough debut record. The studio album arrangements always tried to support and augment Jones' idiosyncratic writing and playing style, which sounds less unusual when she is simply accompanying herself, and in many ways more effective. "Altar Boy," a previously unreleased song, strays into Leonard Cohen territory, mixing religion with eroticism.
Ghostyhead finds Rickie Lee Jones in the odd position of following a younger generation, as its languid trip-hop beats suggest that she has been listening to Portishead, Tricky, and Beth Orton. It is certainly a precarious situation, since she could seem out of touch and old-fashioned, but it is a makeover she pulls off surprisingly well…
After the critical (and commercial) success of her debut two years earlier, Rickie Lee Jones had a lot riding on her sophomore album, Pirates. From the opening track, "We Belong Together," Jones served notice that she was willing to challenge herself and experiment with more unusual, complex song structures…