Singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones has long been celebrated for her chameleonic mix of jazz, pop, and rock styles. On her latest album, Pieces of Treasure (out on April 28 via BMG Modern Recordings), though, she channels pure jazz, interpreting Great American Songbook standards and putting her own uniquely emotive twist on the material.
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Working on Pieces of Treasure has, Jones says, helped her refocus on her creativity after she’d begun to worry that she was letting the business aspect of her career take over too much. “I feel like I’m restoring my relationship with my work again,” she explains with a smile, during a Zoom video call from her New Orleans home. “So I’m singing all the time. I’m writing all the time. And I love it.”
For this album, Jones reunited with producer Russ Titelman, who’d also worked on her immensely successful first two albums, Rickie Lee Jones (1979) and Pirates (1981). (Titleman has also worked with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Paul Simon, James Taylor, and Neil Young, among many others.)
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After writing some new material, Jones thought to ask Titelman if he might like to work with her again—but, she admits, “I had some trepidation about it. You always want to not be nostalgic and hook up with him because we had success decades ago.”
In the end, Titelman’s talent overrode her initial hesitation: “I know that he’s a great producer, and he listens.” So she made the call, and Titelman agreed to work with her—and suggested that it was time for her to make an album of jazz songs. The idea immediately intrigued her.
“His confidence in me and in this direction were so profound that it began to feed a confidence in me,” she says. “A producer brings out something in you that you couldn’t have dreamt up by yourself—so there’s something in talking to somebody, singing to somebody, having somebody as the reason you’re telling the story. Whereas, when I’m producing myself, I’m singing to a general picture of who might be there.”
Inspired, Jones and her band set about recording jazz standards from the Great American Songbook that are especially meaningful to her, such as “There Will Never Be Another You,” “Nature Boy,” “One for My Baby,” and “September Song.” The instrumentation is spare, allowing her voice to take the spotlight as she conveys the lyrics with a certain intimacy (and, sometimes, humor). It was, she says, a revelatory experience.
“In the studio, something extraordinary happened to me,” she says. “I was a little apprehensive about my aging voice. But it was like this woman that I am, but a different one who is so confident and knows just what she’s doing, was waiting in the studio for me. And as soon as I sat down to sing, there she was—and sang all these things the best way that she and I can sing at this age. And so discovered a new voice. So there was a feeling of being a beginner, just a little bit.”
There was also, she continues, “a lot of tears. There was so much feeling happening. It’s not a bad feeling; it’s just a lot of emotion. The resonance of sound on your skeleton is kind of an overwhelming physical thing that happens. And when you’re controlling your voice and telling a story, or all the things I experience as I tell the story, I am this person now where it’s easy for me to weep about the simplest thing. So there were a lot of tears, but they were good. It was powerful.”
Though some of these songs are already well-known because they’ve been sung by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Jones didn’t worry about emulating those versions or sticking to tradition. “I’m not here to honor the legacy of the song. I’m here to make it my own,” she says. “The song is not sacrosanct. It is the singer that brings it to life, and each new singer who does that has as much right to sing. Sometimes, it sets the bar. Sometimes people don’t hear that. But you bring the best you can to the world, and hopefully, your music and your art are a reflection at all times of the person that you are.
“I feel other people’s songs just as much, and sometimes more, than my own,” she continues. “I don’t think that a performance is more authentic because the person wrote [the song]. I value great singers and people who can make a song come alive, too. So when we do any kind of cover, we’re singing the songs because we love them, and they serve some part of my story at this time. You can put yourself in the suit of any song, like an actor, and make it as real as anything you write yourself.”
Even so, there’s no denying that Jones has been widely lauded as one of the finest songwriters of her generation. Her 1979 self-titled debut album earned her a Best New Artist Grammy. She also won a Best Jazz Performance Grammy for her 1990 duet with Dr. John, “Makin’ Whoopee.” Her very first single, “Chuck E.’s in Love,” was an international hit, and she’s gone on to release more than a dozen critically acclaimed albums.
But it wasn’t always clear that Jones was destined for a career as a singer. At fourteen years old, a friend recorded her singing the 1967 Moody Blues song “Nights in White Satin”—and when Jones heard the playback, she was horrified.
“What I heard in my skull would have had the maturity of Janis Joplin; she was my hero,” Jones recalls of that moment. “But when I heard myself [singing], I probably cried. I think I was devastated. I sounded like Michael Jackson, really. I had a high, childlike voice that wasn’t what I thought I sounded like at all.” In time, though, she came to appreciate her voice because it makes her so unique.
It also made sense that Jones would eventually find her footing in music because it was, in a sense, her family’s business—two of her grandparents performed in vaudeville, her uncle was a guitar player, and her aunt was a jazz singer. Her father was a singer, trumpet player, and songwriter, and he was a particularly big influence on her, introducing her to a wide range of music, from jazz standards and ragtime to the Beatles.
After moving to Los Angeles, Jones finally felt ready to launch her career when she was in her early twenties. She paid her dues performing at coffeehouses and small clubs, but it wasn’t long before she landed the major label record deal that launched her to stardom.
Jones went on to become recognized as one of the foremost singer-songwriters of the past half century, though she says she doesn’t adhere to a consistent songwriting process. “There are years I don’t write at all,” she says. “I think that when I am grieving or overwhelmed by circumstance, I do not write. My writing is a process of joy. So right now, I seem to be very happy because I’m always singing.”
Anyone aspiring to have a career like hers should, she says, “Be confident. Stand there naked and let [people] take a look, and say all your truths every day—and how lucky you are to have people listening to your truth.”
Photo by Astor Morgan / Kid Logic Media
