The devil, drugs and George W. Bush

She battled her demons when she kicked the drug habit that nearly killed her. Now Rickie Lee Jones is squaring up to a far more public enemy. Simon Hattenstone reports

Rickie Lee Jones is angry. Make no mistake. She's bloody angry. So angry that she's calling her fellow Americans to arms. For the past six years little has been heard of the singer-songwriter. There was nothing to say, nothing to write. Sure, she was busy living life, bringing up her daughter in Washington state, calming down after the years of drugs and drink and self-conscious coolness that almost destroyed her. Sure, she won back her self-respect, learned to take things in her stride, even recorded lovely albums of covers and acoustic classics. But there was an emptiness. In a way life was better, calmer than she had any right to expect, but there was something gnawing away at her soul. A part of her felt she had given up on life, that she had settled for the banal domesticity of middle age. But then along came George W. Bush.

Now she has written her first album of new material since 1997, The Evening Of My Best Day, and she's burning. She has never sung protest songs before. She used to think politics was not a fitting subject for music - it was crude and transient, and she wanted her lyrics to last. Now, though, she is singing about the ugly man with the ugly father who is blighting her nation, the two senators killed in mystery plane crashes and the need for Americans to tell the world what is happening in the US (in a song subtitled Repeal The Patriot Acts NOW).

Jones is 48 and looks weathered but surprisingly healthy. She is wearing jeans, a shirt and, of course, cowboy boots. Her body is big and strong-looking, so different from the waifish Rickie Lee who appeared on the cover of her first, eponymous album, in 1979. That picture became iconic: the hollowed cheeks, beatnik beret, dangling cheroot. She looked so cool. She was compared to Joni Mitchell, and it's true she had long blond hair and big teeth, and she was a bit folky, but she was really very different.

She was ballsier and more vulnerable, sexier and more seedy. And the music went in all directions: jazz, blues, soul, country, scat and rock 'n' roll. Her voice could be so languid that the words lapped into each other until they stopped making sense. And she could do anything with that voice: she crooned and whispered, bayed like a dog and impersonated roaring traffic.

Back then her songs were character-led short stories - sometimes even fragments of stories - about lazy days filled with casual menace and cheap love, populated by bums and drifters, including, of course, Chuck E. The new album could not be more polemical. "I hope it wakes people up. You know, people in America are afraid to say anything; they are afraid of George Bush, afraid of the police, afraid of being fined, afraid of being accused. I feel I'm in the right place and right time spiritually to stand up, and say, 'But you don't have any clothes on.' "

Her voice is so strange: little-girlie sweet, sleepy and nasal. She stops, tells me she shouldn't say this because she'll be quoted on Fox News, then goes ahead anyway, directly addressing the subject of her bile: "You're an ignorant, low-class, opportunistic man, both personally and politically, who does everything for political gain and nothing for the well- being of the people, and you should not be in office, and the kind of fascism you're perpetrating on our country we don't want, and you're out. We're done with you. Ffffhgggmm." She snorts to clear her nose. "He's come from millions of dollars, and no matter how much money he has, he's a low-class human being. I just really think it's not going to take very much for a whole bunch of people to stand and drive him away."

Jones has always had a complex relationship with the US. She spent years away, living in Paris, where she met her former husband, Pascal Nabet-Meyer, a musician and the father of her daughter. France made her more aware of the US imperialist presumptions so rarely reported back home - its activities in Latin America, for example. Despite that, she missed the rhythm of US life, its creativity, and went back, to California, then to Tacoma, in Washington. Now, she says, this is a country she barely recognises.

She believes the bombing of the Twin Towers has politicised a politically apathetic generation in an alarming way. "I think 9/11 gave this generation an identity, and its identity is potentially fascist. My skin crawls when I think of the first week after 9/11. I was looking out of the window and there were people marching down the street carrying flags. It reminded me of spontaneous, angry Nazis, and I thought, oh, man, we are in a lot of trouble. There's a whole bunch of people who have flags hanging from their cars and who are mistaking fascism for patriotism."

Then there's the strange notion of bombing countries into a sense of responsibility. "Look at Afghanistan and Iraq. Pound the shit out of them, then bring them democracy because it's for their own good, right?" It's the hypocrisy she finds hardest to cope with. "I would have probably made peace with the idea of this right-wing Republican presidency if at any point after we were bombed - because we were devastated, we were terrified and broken-hearted - if he had said, 'I'm so pissed off, I'm gonna go and blow up the whole fucking Middle East. I hate 'em and I'm blowing 'em up,' we would have gone, OK, right on, but he didn't. He said: 'We're looking for bin Laden and we're bringing democracy.' Every single aspect of his response has been evil, thus making us into the evil thing we didn't know we were. Ffffhgggmm."

I ask whether she has a cold. "I have really bad allergies. For the past seven years. They come and go. I've been tested and there's nothing to account for it. I think it's a hurt inside . . . maybe my emotional state."

Her voice on the new album is as strange as ever, still bruised, but unearthly. The song Ugly Man may be a hate letter to Bush, calling for revolution, but it hates in a whisper that almost washes over you. And she hopes more than she despairs. She is convinced things really are going to change - that there will be a glorious revolution, a counter to Bush's bloodless White House coup.

She whinnies like a horse when I give her one minute to plot the revolution. Would she be willing to take Bush out for the benefit of democracy? "I guess the question is, would I kill anyone? And the answer is no. But would I feel sorry if someone killed him? No, I wouldn't. It would depend on who killed him, I guess."

All this seems such a change from the Rickie Lee of 1979. Back then, she looked so happy, hazily cocooned in her own-world smiles. "In 1980, I was totally inward and insecure, and everything that happened to me was personal. I didn't really see anybody out of my experience. So if you were the waiter and brought me food and didn't smile at me, I would think you didn't like me and I might be discourteous to you in return. Maybe now, if you didn't smile, I'd think perhaps you're having a hard time, so I'd try to be kind."

It's hard to believe she was so insecure. After all, everybody wanted to be Rickie Lee with that jazzy, boho life and Tom Waits for a boyfriend. "Did they think that?" she asks. You know they did, I say. "Yeah, well, the image was true. That's how I was outside. But it's not how I was inside. And the songs weren't saying I'm cool and confident, they were saying the opposite."

People tend to think Chuck E's In Love (about her friend the musician Chuck E. Weiss) is a happy song, she says, but it's not, it's desperate. And she starts to sing it quietly, slowly, paraphrasing. " 'How come he doesn't come and hang out with me any more . . . ' That's how that started. I saved it at the end, but most of the song is a lament." She saved it by revealing that Chuck wasn't coming round any more because, in fact, he was in love with her: "Chuck E's in love with the little girl who's singing this song / Chuck E's in love with me." Perhaps this was the pride of the younger Rickie Lee. Perhaps if she wrote it today, he wouldn't be coming round for the more likely reason that he was in love with someone else.

I ask if she always wanted to sing. Yes, she says, in her home everybody sang. She was born in Chicago in 1954 to a "lower-middle-class-hillbilly-hipster" family. She tells me about her grandfather, a one-legged vaudeville dancer called Peg Leg Jones. "I have the old reviews, and they loved him. And the grandmother was a dancer on the chorus line. I never met them - they were all dead before I got there. And the grandfather on my mother's side was Irish and died young, but the stepfather played saxophone in Paul Whiteman's band - he was a popular big-band leader. My father was a songwriter and singer, and when my uncle came to visit he played guitar. It was really cool."

There was also tragedy and disappointment in her family. Both her parents had been raised in orphanages. Her father, Richard Jones, was constantly on the move, trying to make a name for himself, and the family followed. They settled, temporarily, in Phoenix, Arizona, when Rickie was 10, and she loved the life of cowboys, rodeos and horses. But along the way her brother Danny lost a leg in a motorbike accident, her parents split up, her father became a hopeless drifter and she was kicked out of high school for being a hippy-haired rebel. At 14, she ran away to a Californian rock festival, only to be returned to her father a month or so later. The next summer she ran away again, then left home for good at 18, following a boyfriend to Orange County. At 19, she found herself in Venice, Los Angeles, hanging out with Weiss and Waits and hanging off the latter's car bonnet for the cover of Blue Valentine, his 1978 album.

"Hey, how's about going for a walk?" she says. We head off for Hyde Park. Earlier on, she had said she felt she was now in the right place spiritually to stand up and be counted. Did she always know where she was coming from spiritually? No, she says; there was plenty of religion in her childhood, but that's different.

She was brought up a Catholic and felt guilty about anything and everything. "My relationship with God was so threaded with guilt. Jesus suffered so much that it was impolite to ask for anything." She giggles. It's only recently, on her trip-hoppy 1997 album, Ghostyhead, that she found the courage to use the word "prayer" again. She doesn't go to church services, but she likes to visit churches and pray in her own words. "There is no ritual. I just say, hi, how ya doin'? Hope you're doin' well, I'm thinkin' of ya, thank you very much. Ffffhgggmm."

On the production notes to the new album, she says she prayed to be restored. To what? She talks about all those years of not writing songs, how barren she felt. "I thought it was over. And so that was probably the focus of a lot of prayer, to be restored and to write again and to serve. Two years ago, I felt so thrown away, so unneeded and unwanted in business . . . .I wanted to be relevant again."

But it was her decision to retreat from music and devote herself to her daughter? Yes, she says, and the years at home with Charlotte, now 15, and the poodle and the English bulldog and the turtle and the goat called Goaty were rich in so many ways, but domesticity has a price. "We can get attached to so many things as adolescents, then afterwards we pick a family and go inward and we don't care. I wanted to come out and be with humanity one more time." Only one more time? "I don't know - I thought one more time."

We sit down on a bench. She looks at my cigarettes. These days she can't even stand being in a room of smokers, although she does occasionally treat herself to a cigar. So how would she feel if Charlotte said, "Right, Mom, I'll be off now, leave home and do all the things you were doing at my age"? "You mean the bad parts of what I've done? The self-destructive behaviour? Because taking drugs and stuff like that is not the end of the world, but if you're self-destructive, everything you do you'll use to see how close to death you can come."

What did she take? "I was a heroin addict for two years, then I took cocaine for six months, and that's what almost killed me - luckily, because that ended my drug-taking career." She says cocaine made her psychotic: hearing things, seeing things, invariably bad. "It's an evil, evil drug. It's the best argument for the idea of a devil, because it opens the door to the worst parts of the human spirit and mind. All the things that are delicate about us are eaten away, and all those things that are insecure and cruel are magnified."

She's rubbing her fingers, silent, thinking. "You know, I was ashamed and disappointed." She blurts it out like a confession. "The shame that was attached to my drug use was so consuming . . . . I must have felt people were disappointed in me." Parents? "Other people. I think people wanted me to be the thing . . . and I have the clear impression that, if I hadn't been a drug addict, I could have fulfilled somebody's idea, and that I had let people down, and perhaps let myself down, and I'm just not able to say that." Personally or creatively? "As like a destiny of great success." She pauses, psyching herself up for what she's going to say. "As the queen - the queen of music." She laughs through her snuffles and repeats it slowly because it sounds so nice.

But wasn't there always something in her that resisted the idea of being the queen, something that thought it was just totally uncool to be a huge commercial success? "Exactly," she says. "That's exactly how I felt." Was that the self-destructive impulse or snobbery? "Probably both those things. Things don't go in boxes." So, to return to the original question, what if Charlotte said she was heading off to live her mother's life? "I'd say, no, you're not." She bursts out laughing.

We start making tracks back to the hotel. Close your eyes, I say. Picture happiness: what comes to mind? "The first thought is my daughter. I know if my daughter's not happy, I can't be happy, and if she's happy, then all kinds of things can come my way." Actually, she says, all things are coming her way at the moment. Yes, she is angry about Bush and what he is doing to her country, but even here she is sure that things are going to sort themselves out, that a huge positive force will wipe him out in one way or another. And that is the amazing thing about her new album: despite the call to arms, there is a calmness, an ease with herself and her place in the universe.

"Here's something that happened recently." She doesn't know why, but she thinks it's important. "In April, I went to Hawaii. There were some shadows underneath a bush . . . . This sounds funny now, but the shade under the bush was the same shade that was under a bush when I was little, and I said, Charlotte, something's happening. The past has some roots coming right here to where I'm standing now. I can see them and feel them, and something is going on." You can never run from your past, she says, but you can embrace it.

- Guardian service

The Evening Of My Best Day is on V2