Rickie Lee Jones could have taken a safer path. That is to say, she could have followed a more predictable path. After winning immediate acclaim with her eponymous debut album and its smash hit single “Chuck E’s in Love,” she subsequently went on to score a successful follow-up with her sophomore set Pirates, accumulating all kinds of kudos along the way, from Grammy nods and a cover story in Rolling Stone, to a game-changing appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” and raves from fans, critics and contemporaries.
However, it’s to her credit that Jones wasn’t content to simply repeat herself. Early on she opted to tackle standards, veering from her pop base into jazz, electronica and all manner of ambitious experimentation. Despite intermittent success and various song placements in film and compilations, she fell out of favor for the most part, leaving her free to venture into other realms, but devoid of the faithful following she garnered early on.
“I think the typecasting is what drove me in so many diverse directions,” he reflects back today. “I just hate people deciding about something before they even hear it. I still wrestle with that sometimes.”
Jones hasn’t reason to worry on that score. Each of her albums have held something different, with no two seemingly alike. Nevertheless, her new offering, The Other Side of Desire, promises a return to the kind of music the masses can easily embrace. Her first new album of original material in a decade, it reflects the breadth and clarity of a woman who’s had ample time to consider her fortunes, while expressing herself with a weary reflection borne of both acceptance and desire. On the touchingly poignant “Christmas in New Orleans,” she grasps for clarity. “How could we explain a time as crazy as ours,” she coos, and while she doesn’t quite find the answer, her search for purpose is illuminating all the same.
Glide recently caught up with Jones on the eve of the album’s release. She spoke to us on the phone from her adopted home in New Orleans, a gracious, humble and still ruggedly independent artist and human being. “I’m in the Big Easy,” she began, and from there on, the interview rolled on just as convincingly.
Your new album brings you back into familiar singer/songwriter terrain.
That was the thought — to write simple songs that more people would like to listen to. Songs that come from the folk rock genre, and a storytelling mode bearing repetitive verses. It’s in a pop song format, and that’s wanted I to do. I wanted to write those kind of songs. I like radio in the ‘60s, because we heard every kind of music on the radio. I heard Harry Belafonte sing “On Top of Old Smokey” and I heard Bob Dylan sing “Like a Rolling Stone” and I heard the Beatles sing “Ticket to Ride” and the Rolling Stones sing “The Last Time” and a really wide range of music that people today don’t get to hear because there’s so much sub marketing. I was thinking of that a lot — how I’m attracted to different genres, and I wanted to write songs that basically had what they had to say in two or three minutes.
Do you write songs with the intention of using them for an album, or do you simply write when you feel the urge coming on?
In a way it’s both, and that’s the curse and blessing of doing what I do for a living. I say it’s time for a project now and I have to start writing because that gives me focus. It starts aiming for whatever it’s going to be. After the work I just did, I said to myself, “You can do this again in a year. You don’t have to not write. I think it’s one of the things about turning 60. I feel revitalized, although I don’t want to put a “re” on that. I just want to write, and do things, and live, and not waste my time. Maybe that’s the good thing about this age. It kind of puts a time limit on things, to remind one that’s there’s not so much time to waste. So I left the gates open and I’m still writing. I’ll see what direction it starts to go in.
Given your eclectic tastes, do you deliberately choose to write in a certain style at a certain juncture?
I’ve had this habit of when I go in a certain direction, I make a sudden left turn, like when I did the jazz record #Pop Pop# in 1991, I can’t tell you why, but I told myself, “Oh, I have to come back to this,” or “I have to put that on this.” I have to try to stay with a genre, and this time, I am at peace. I don’t know why I do this, and I second guess myself, but it’s okay to stay within the palette. I don’t have to put a Blue Cheer song on this collection. (laughs) I can let it be what it is. So for me, it shows a certain contentment for who I am and a confidence I haven’t had in some time, real deep water settle stuff. But I can still see that by the choices I made, it’s all in the same vein. I’m just lucky. Good timing maybe.
Still, early on you made a choice not to stay still, and to move away from a more commercially accessible sound.
I did. I think partly I felt really powerful, like I had the license to do what I wanted. Creatively, I wanted to be supportive of people who didn’t get to do what they wanted. One thing that bothered me back in the early ‘80s was that I was told one wasn’t supposed to do covers. One had to be a singer/songwriter. And if one did do a cover, one shouldn’t do a top 40 kind of cover. And if you did do a top 40 cover, one ought not mix genres. I was 24 or 25, and I just felt like, you guys can’t dictate what I want to do. Just because I didn’t write it, I can still sing it. To me, Frank Sinatra is as important as Van Morrison. It’s the singer that brings the song alive, and I felt from the beginning it was a deeply visceral experience, and for some reason I wanted to prove that. I kept taking risks that people today would have no idea how risky it was, because it swayed the critics to the left or to the right. And even if some of the important critics didn’t like what I did then, I knew in the cosmic clay you had to follow your own road, even if I followed my own road into oblivion.
Still, the criticism must have hurt.
I’m sure most artists feel that way. Because most people feel that way. Whenever somebody doesn’t like what you did, or doesn’t understand it, or interprets it differently than you intended, or just plain doesn’t like you, it hurts your feelings. It’s difficult not to react. That’s the main thing. But you have to put it into perspective, and in my case, that took a lot of years.. to put a critic’s view into perspective.
This new album ought to find the critics finally giving you some credit for taking those chances.
I’m not sure about credit. But yes, maybe it is credit. I definitely am getting notice. One person wrote that this was the best record since Ghostyhead, and I was like, really? You guys didn’t like it back then. But that feels good.
Did you ever feel that maybe you were ahead of the curve, and that’s why people maybe didn’t get you?
I don’t want to ring my own bell but another way to say “ahead of the curve” is to say I know my own way. I pave my own road, and one of my earliest intentions was to pave my own road so other people can do these things too. The thing that hurt my feelings back then was that I was hungry for some praise after the success of my debut. After Ghostyhead, I found a lot of other people getting attention for doing the same thing. And they never mentioned Rickie Lee Jones! It was a very dark time for my ego and my spirit. Now it does suddenly feel better. It feels like we’re paving the path for the future. It seems to alter the way the path is viewed, and maybe even alters the path itself. I feel like some redemption is taking place.
Or vindication perhaps?
I like vindication. That works! (laughs) Oh God, I hope so.
So what are your goals at this point in your career?
I do have some goals. I’d like to have some money in the bank. I’d like to have some recognition. But you have to just live for the hour. You get up and go to bed and you do have to do it all over again tomorrow. I mean it sounds like a cliché, but you have to be in the here and now and be grateful for your life.
How about artistically?
When I started out, I went to see Frank Sinatra in concert, and Sarah Vaughn opened for him and I just went, “I want to do this when I’m sixty. I want to be standing in front of a crowd of a couple thousand people,” and so that’s why I opted for a longer journey.
Ultimately, you could have stayed on the safe and narrow path and perhaps doing oldie shows now?
I did think about that at the time. It’s not a horrible thing to say lets make a million and get out of here. But that’s not what I was meant to do.
