The one thing I love about Rickie Lee Jones is her consistency for being inconsistent. For many artists, that is such a bad thing, because they can't maintain any talent. She's not of that ilk.
Rickie is not exactly all over the place as a recording artist, but she doesn't tend to do the same thing twice. Ever. But she always does a superb job at what she does release. So there's that.
For the longest of time "Chuck E.'s in Love" grated on my nerves (due to radio saturation), but the rest of her debut disk was stellar. It was with Pirates that I truly was enamoured of her though. Not a bad song on that disk.
She has since flirted with full-on jazz, standards, covers, religious, pop and spoken word music. You know my thoughts on covers, but man she does such justice to Traffic's "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys", it's worth the price of the disk alone.
No longer on a major label, her releases kind of fly under the radar now (not that there were huge pushes for them before). Her new one is just out: Balm in Gilead.
I can't really describe it, but I've never been able to adequately pin down Jones. Her voice, singing and spoken, is like no other. She weaves it around her words and her music in a way that is inimitable. She's not quite folk, not quite jazz - and yet she's all those things.
I could go on and on about the songs, but you'll really have to listen to them. I like "Wild Girl" a lot. Ditto with "Remember Me" and "The Moon is Made of Gold".
Not meaning to sound like a douche or anything, but Jones is really one of those unfound treasures that you have to discover. Or rediscover. She's made it a bit easier with Balm of Gilead.
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