Rickie Lee Jones: 'I Wasn’t Afraid To Be Different'

It was there in some of the first songs anyone heard her perform in Los Angeles.

It is at the heart of her first album, Rickie Lee Jones, the one that announced her to fans around the world, and has never been far from the surface in her music ever since.

Not that Rickie Lee Jones ever called herself a jazz singer or thought anyone else would. Maybe it was the beret.

“That was the look of me, which came from women in the ’40s,” she says, talking from her home in New Orleans. “It was no Farrah Fawcett thing. I had the beret, and that helped accentuate the idea I was a jazz singer.”

The beret she wore on the cover of that 1979 debut set the scene for the music within, a world apart from the other new music then topping the charts. She already knew that was vital if she was to have lasting success.

“If you had listened to the music without that, I don’t know if you would have said, that’s jazzy,” Jones says. “To be honest, it is part of the whole person. Jazz was part of how I sang. But how would you know unless someone told you?

“It probably started with my dad and his singing, his timing. That’s probably the thing that sets jazz apart from all the others in Western music - that the singers sit comfortably in the back of the beat.”

Jones’s instinct always was to go somewhere apart from the crowd. That might have upset a few record executives, but it has served her well in the years since.

The urge to keep moving was imprinted young in her bohemian childhood. There never was much time for looking back, although she did that with her 2021 autobiography Last Chance Texaco and on her latest album, Pieces Of Treasure, where she covers jazz standards.

Last Chance Texaco took seven years to write – no ghostwriters were involved – and the characters and scenes from her personal story are just as vivid as anything in her songs. All the foundations were there in her childhood for the songwriter she became.

“Last Chance Texaco is the story of my family, and we were a wild, unpredictable bunch. So out of that fire, I came,’’ she says.

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“I tell their story with respect. I don’t pull any punches, but there is no villain in my book. Everyone is treated compassionately. People in trouble are not like they would be if they weren’t in trouble. That was the story I was trying to tell.”

The book concentrates on her early life before capturing the flavour of Los Angeles in the ’70s, friendships that included songwriter Chuck E. Weiss (referenced in her first hit, Chuck E’s in Love), her romance with Tom Waits, and the inevitable struggle to follow your own path when you fly so high so young. She was 24 when her first album was released.

“When I [first] submitted my book to the publisher, they wanted an exposé. They thought what was interesting was drugs and Saturday Night Fever. After some years of writing and rewriting … I don’t even know if they liked it. But once it came out and received such wonderful reviews, then they went, I guess it’s good we didn’t fire her.

For Pieces Of Treasure, she reunited with Russ Titelman, producer of her first two albums, Rickie Lee Jones and the equally extraordinary Pirates.

You feel every ounce of emotion in Jones’s performance of standards like They Can’t Take That Away From Me and All the Way. She felt her father near during the recording. Some songs she learned from him as a child are Nature Boy, On The Sunny Side Of The Street, and September Song.

As she did with the book, she treats the treasure of the past with care but tells the story in her own way.

And what does she think of those precocious first two albums now?

“Russ says it’s like I came out fully formed. I’m not sure why. When I started moving toward the stage, I knew just what I wanted to do. I wasn’t afraid to be different. I knew that I had to be different to have a career that would last more than three years. Aside from that, there was some dumb, incredible luck that happened too.

“I was signed to a label that wanted to spend a lot of money on the artist, not just promotion, and I was lucky to have that. I heard Young Blood (from the first album) the other day and I went, just listen to that. Hearing it fresh, I was really impressed.

“With the second record, Pirates, they, whoever they were, the critics, were trying to knock you down. ‘See, you could only do it once.’ I was busy trying to write a record that would be as unique as the first one. To throw it all up in the air and have something new come down.

“What I was trying to do was have a career!”

She laughs, as well as she might. She still has the career.

We will fly, way up high…

When a writer sends a song out to the world, no one knows how high it will fly or where it will land.

Rickie Lee Jones co-wrote The Horses with Steely Dan’s Walter Becker for her 1989 album Flying Cowboys. It wasn’t released as a single. In Australia, Daryl Braithwaite recorded it as a last-minute inclusion on his 1990 album, Rise. The song went to #1 in Australia and has been an inescapable part of Australian pop culture ever since.

“Nobody here in the US knows how big that song is. And most people in Australia don’t associate me with that song. But I just think, isn’t that fantastic? I wrote the song for my daughter when I was still pregnant, so for me, it’s kind of magical; it’s mystical.

“There’s the line I wrote in it, ‘I hear all the people of the world in one bird’s lonely cry.’ Now I think, all these people are holding on to the song, and it’s like they are all holding on to her. That was the one thing I wanted to do when I was going to be a mother. I thought, if ever I don’t make it, if I’m not here… I wanted the whole world to go; we’ve got your back. In a weird way, with that song, it’s like they did it. It’s really something.”

Pieces Of Treasure is out now via BMG Modern Recordings. Rickie Lee Jones will appear at Bluesfest 2024 and on the following Australian headline tour dates: