Rickie Lee Jones, c/d?

even thinking of 'We Belong Together' makes me emotional.

So this thread got me to pull out Pirates which I haven't heard in probably 25 years. I was blown away. It's such a miraculously lyrical mix of r&b, jazz, and traces of Springsteen/Van/Steely Dan/Joni. Love the intra-song dynamics. Pro tip, lyric sheet is essential.

I said fuck it and downloaded a copy of Pirates.

So this thread got me to pull out Pirates which I haven't heard in probably 25 years. I was blown away. It's such a miraculously lyrical mix of r&b, jazz, and traces of Springsteen/Van/Steely Dan/Joni. Love the intra-song dynamics. Pro tip, lyric sheet is essential.

otm and similar revelations await on at least her next two albums imo

even thinking of 'We Belong Together' makes me emotional.

also mega-OTM. if I go so far as to think "a promise that weeee belong to-gether" in my head I'm a wreck. what a tune

That's the only track I owned for years and it killed me.

hearing her interview that led to the sample in Little Fluffy Clouds brings me joy

First 2 are total classic, probably some sexism at play in the inevitable comparisons to Waits.
Magazine is a bit of a mess, but still has the gut-wrenching line on Gravity "I try to imagine another planet, another sun/
Where I don't look like me/And everything I do matters".

I'm a huge fan of Flying Cowboys, and The Sermon on Exposition Blvd works much better than expected.

Try to imagine another planet, another sun
Where I don't look like me
And everything I do matters

"Gravity" kills me, and this will be on my tombstone.

I keep coming back to start of Living It Up. It's a perfect brief characterization, wistful and kinda funny:

Eddie's got one crazy eye
That turns him into a cartoon
When a pretty girl comes by
And there's nothin' here to do anymore
He sits on the stoop all day
Like there's something he's waiting for

Of course the rest of the song is killer.

holy shit just heard we belong together for the first time...amazing

Alfred what did you think of the rest of the album?

Best album of all time is the correct answer FYI.

Her tribute to Walter Becker

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/read-rickie-lee-jones-poignant-tribute-to-walter-becker-w501078

love the way she writes

Calling shenanigans on that Orb reference - it looks inserted rather than what she said/wrote..

pirates is absolutely the best album ever made. i think i’m gonna make a poll

the first time i heard “we belong together” a few months ago i thought “this is sounds exactly like how i feel inside all the time”

it is utterly stunning

but "we belong together" will run the table on that poll like Minnesota Fats

lol yeah that’s what i was figuring

nb Fats loses in the end so who knows, Living it Up & Woody n Dutch might have a chance. iirc when the album was new my local critic was all "if there was more Woody n Dutch on this record it would be a better followup to the resplendent debut." fuck that guy forever btw

pirates is absolutely the best album ever made

◎ yes

^^^all polls shd take this form (including the same exact working)

s/b wording

concur

massively underrated album.

massively underrated album
artist.

love this record

autobiography out April 2019

http://groveatlantic.com/book/rickie-lee/

well holy shit this was amazing to stumble on on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_172cffdDJU

!!!!!

!

That's glorious.

I've totally missed (avoided?) Rickie for some reason and holy shit has the last few days been a revelation - to the point I've been afflicted with Nelson fever and will now declare Pirates the best album in the world.

IMDB trivia for "The Pope of Greenwich Village" - Rickie Lee Jones had originally written and recorded an instrumental demo as a theme, but it was rejected in favor of Frank Sinatra's "Summer Wind." The demo, which retained the title "Theme for the Pope" (because of the movie), wound up on her 1984 album The Magazine.

interesting -- I've been listening to The Magazine a lot lately but I wasn't aware of that. here's what Sal Bernardi says about it:

SB: I never wrote lyrics in French, but a few different people wrote French lyrics for a melody that I wrote ‘Theme for the Pope’ - a strange travel for that melody. Initially, a friend in Quebec wrote some lyrics and called it ‘Danse la Reve des Cleo’.

Several years later, there was a film called ‘The Pope of Greenwich Village’. I think the film people were seeking soundtrack music. Rickie and I had reworked the song a bit and made a demo without lyrics. It wasn’t used in the film, but Rickie released it on ‘The Magazine’, calling it by the working title for the film “Theme for the Pope”. For the European release of the album, a writer here in Paris wrote French lyrics and titled it ‘Marrant de Duece’, I think.

http://www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk/MagSitePages/Article/7823/Sal-Bernardi-Interview

I prefer the version with French lyrics that appears on the LP, and I'm not sure why they included a different version on the CD release. I assume the CD version is the original demo and the LP version is the demo with overdubbed vocals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGrEg9SdN3M

oops, that's the CD version but this is the LP version I meant to post:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aqp3z0sX5UI

excellent song selection for an ideal concert:
https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/very-good-trip/very-good-trip-11-septembre-2019

I really don't know much about Rickie Lee Jones, but I was listening to the radio just now and came across an interview with someone I didn't know. All I knew is that it was a musician, and that when they played bits of her music it wasn't that old, like '70s-now, but the person being interview sounded like she was in her 90s, which didn't add up. I was absolutely shocked to learn it was Rickie Lee Jones, who is only 66. Wow. I guess she lived hard.

she certainly doesn't look 90, her voice does sound a bit odd now though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOjAtmLzM6g

she can still sing pretty well, though her range seems to have narrowed a great deal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOjAtmLzM6g

It seems like there's always been a mismatch between her singing voice and speaking voice. I remember being truly surprised that the voice sample in "Little Fluffy Clouds" by The Orb was her. But then her speaking voice now sounds way different from her speaking voice then.

I just compared two interviews from 2015 and 1989, and I guess she always had a drawl. That does make her speaking voice now sound like an older person's.

She sounds much better in that clip, this thing I heard on NPR sounded old and raspy.

I've seen a few excerpts from her new memoir, mostly re heroin use to deal w biz stress, which itself led to more biz probs, "Watch out for the junkie," yeah they're so rare in the music biz, but might have been more to it than that---anyway, she's glad she kicked it, loves her daughter---and from late 70s coverage in Rolling Stone, I gathered that she had a pretty interesting life before getting much involved in the biz. For instance she made a habit of singing to her brother while he was in a coma, until he finally woke up and said."Witch. Which reminds me that I liked Ghostyhead: her voice suited trip hop pretty well. Have also come across some good post-peak live sets on the 'Tube (one thing that still grosses me out: Tom Waits was her boyfriend, way back there now, but yuuuuuck she too cuet for him)

This is what I heard, btw:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/segments/rickie-lee-joness-life-road

She is an absolute magician.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB89sotCQx4

Great song I haven’t heard in ages. Love when the other voices come in.

Finished the book last night and really enjoyed it. I was ~2/3 through it and realized, geez, she's only like 17yo to this point. She had a wild early life in all senses of the word. She saw the world, lived a lifetime before she was even 18. The last third goes by quick and is mostly her early career (which overlapped her relationship w/ Tom Waits), which took off fast. But everything that led up to that was in some ways more interesting. She's a great storyteller. Recommended!

I've listened a lot to Pirates and especially Flying Cowboys since starting the book. Beautiful albums and the production on both is fantastic.

listening to the magazine and flying cowboys for the first time today and while they're not quite as transcendent as pirates they're still really fantastic wow

"satellites"!

The Magazine in particular is just brilliant (love Flying Cowboys as well) but yes unfair to compare it to one of the ten best albums of all time.

Vaguely relatedly I lost my copy of Ghostyhead and it appears it is not on streaming services!?!?!