my friend Paul Zollo is a great interviewer of singer/songwriters
http://bluerailroad.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/rickie-lee-jones-the-bluerailroad-interview/SHE SPEAKS SOFTLY, not unlike the way she sings – soft, soulful passages, almost like secrets to the closest of friends, punctuated by bursts of exultation. Which makes transcribing an interview with her a challenge, but makes her records a joy.
One is reticent to use phrases like “her best album in years,” as it implies something diminished about the others. But her newest, Balm In Gilead, contains so much of what she does best, and what people love about her, that such a statement makes sense. From the pure, naked heartbreak of “Bonfires,” one of the most loving songs about lost love ever written, to the wise, knowing elation of “Old Enough” to the beautiful “Wild Girl,” which celebrates the 21st birthday of her daughter while simultaneously reflecting on the unchained fervor of her own wild days, it’s an album both orchestral and sparse, ranging from deepest sorrow to purest joy.
Like Judy Garland, Billie Holliday and other singers who invested the fullness of their soul and its sorrows into every song, Rickie encompasses a miraculous range of emotion in her work – “that’s my gift,” she allows – but unlike the others, she is also the songwriter of these songs, so the closeness to the bone we feel is ever more intense knowing it’s genuine. These are not interpretations (although she’s great at singing other people’s songs), these are songs straight from the songwriter’s soul. And in her work – unlike that of her famous paramour of the past, Tom Waits, and those who followed in his insalubrious footsteps – she did not wear masks or hide behind characters. Every song she wrote, to quote Waits, was “one from the heart.” And that reality – that lack of distance between the singer and the song – is what gives her work so much poignancy, and so much power.
For years, she lived in the heart of Los Angeles, in and around the streets of Hollywood, taking it all in. These days she lives high – way, way up high – up above this vast city, up steep winding canyon hills over Malibu in a cottage with lots of land around where she can keep her horse. It seems a good place for those mythic flying cowboys she wrote about years ago to embark on a voyage. It’s from here she embarks on her journeys – and does so with surprising speed, as one who tried and failed to follow her down winding hills to the Malibu flats knows well.
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