“Oh! I don’t like doing interviews because I will tell the truth on any given day,” says Rickie Lee Jones, the American singer and songwriter who has over the years gained a reputation for telling like it is – or at least, the way she sees it. She doesn’t allow honesty to be subverted or spun out of control, she says, because truthfulness has always been part of her character. She looks out through her computer screen, her voice slight and reserved (she is saving it, says her manager, for imminent tour dates, one of which is in Dublin next weekend).
Being assertively honest “was exacerbated when I was younger because I was a bit offensive, kinda scared, but I’m not so nervous about things any more. Ultimately, you live and die and for the time you’re here it’s best to tell the truth. I see no point in trying to manipulate things and being afraid of what people might say. Be the best you can be but tell the truth, so that when that marker goes on your grave people will know exactly who you were.”
There is no fear of anyone mistaking Jones for anyone else – she is as singular as they come. Her recent memoir, Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour, contains all the details you need to know, but, in short: born into an unsettled family, at the age of 15 she ran away to join life’s circus. Liberated, bohemian, an aspiring jazz singer, a drifter, an artist, a misfit, it took most of the 1970s to shape her into something that record labels might chase – but chase they did.
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One episode of her life that she outlines in her memoir is priceless: as she was trying to make enough money during the day so that she could sing originals and American Songbook standards in Los Angeles bars at night, she once had a job as a bogus secretary for a gangster, during which time she wrote out lyrics on the office typewriter. I make the mistake of asking her if this actually happened, and wasn’t just her being creative with the truth.
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“Yes, it did – it’s in the book, isn’t it?!” It isn’t a bark but it’s close to it. That was an amazing year, she continues, “when I was homeless, a guy had left me, I met that pimp, and I got a job through the unemployment office or maybe I went door-to-door – I don’t remember any more. Anyway, whatever he was doing in that room with the boxes I’ll never know, but I was just supposed to sit in the front office and type up these labels. That lasted a few months, long enough for me to last to December and start to write more songs. Of all the things you could make up, you couldn’t with this guy – he still wore garters on his socks!”
When we started to record the new album, it was like we hit this vein of a type of character, sultry and soft, to do with age and the command of the voice and of the musicians
The end of tapping keys for gangsters and starting life as America’s Duchess of Coolsville (so named after one of her songs) occurred when Jones was signed by Warner Bros in 1978. Her self-titled debut album was released the following year, the same time that she split from her equally boho boyfriend Tom Waits. The album’s lead single, Chuck E’s in Love, became, for better or for worse, her signature calling card, and try as she might she has never escaped its grip.
The 1980s were uneven: moving to Paris, a four-year break from recording, and then two Grammy awards – in 1989 (for best jazz vocal performance, woman) and 1990 (for best jazz vocal collaboration). From then to now, her career has been fitful but very much, she admits proudly, of her own making.
“I’m a non-linear thinker,” she offers as part of the reason for this, “but I also think my career has been mismanaged. More importantly, however, hitting it so big and so fast with Chuck E’s in Love meant the only way to go was down, so where do you settle? What kind of thing do you want to have when that happens? Do you want to stay as busy as you can for a short while, or have a longer career? The only real pressure on me was to be a kind of superstar, to stay in the realm of where the likes of Michael Jackson lived, but I just couldn’t do that. I was invited into that area in so many ways, but it just wasn’t in my nature.”
“I’m an odd girl,” she adds with a grin and a show of hands. “Every time I step on stage, I can’t do what I did the night before. I think that disappointed some record company people, and I know they would say in the back of their minds, after I ignored their career guidance, ‘Well, Rickie, what happened?’ The truth is that nothing happened. What occurred instead was a concerted and controlled effort to have a career in which I could do anything I wanted for all of my life and to pay the rent. And be respected, which was the most important thing to me.”
Jones’s latest album, Pieces of Treasure, is one more step towards being given due regard as a jazz singer. Tackling tracks from the Great American Songbook, she views it as a conscious attempt to be recognised within the jazz world as a jazz singer, yet she is acutely aware that such expectations “can quickly become pressure, under which I fold. I’m under intense pressure now and again, and I hold it together when there are problems, but creative pressure is very hard on me.”
With respect to Pieces of Treasure, she says the reason why she hasn’t recorded a bona fide jazz album in many years “was that it felt disingenuous. Recording is a creative process, and if there’s a decision beforehand to make something definite, then to me it isn’t real – that was my thinking when I was younger. When we started to record the new album, however, it was like we hit this vein of a type of character, sultry and soft, to do with age and the command of the voice and of the musicians. I don’t know how we did it, but I think we got there – the result is what I had always hoped a classic jazz album would sound like.”
Music is what she is made of, she intimates, and the sustainment of her extraordinary if erratic career continues because of her commitment to that, and not to any music industry notions. “It’s my nature to be outside, it really is,” she accepts. She says she doesn’t care about her age (68), and thinks that artists and singers should continue with the work – the writing, recording, singing, touring and TV shows – for as long as they can.
“It’s physical labour,” she concludes with a crackle in her voice. “When you can’t do it any more, just stop f**kin’ doin’ it.”
Rickie Lee Jones’s latest album, Pieces of Treasure, is out through BMG Modern, and is also available on streaming services. The memoir, Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour, is published by Grove Press. Rickie Lee Jones plays Dublin’s NCH on Sunday July 9th
Jones on Joni Mitchell: ‘Joni was one of the great singers, but she’s an awful jazz singer’
“There are figures like – erm, should I say this out loud? – Herbie Hancock, who will never acknowledge my work; they kind of do a thing where Joni Mitchell is the only possible singer-songwriter and there is no other, black, white, young, old – it’s only Joni Mitchell in all the world. When you give Joni an award for an album like the one she did of her old stuff, the one with strings [Travelogue, 2002]... I mean, she couldn’t sing at all, so it seemed that what people loved about it was that she couldn’t sing. Joni was one of the great singers, but she’s an awful jazz singer – she took terrible care of her voice, she smoked it away and it dropped three octaves. She should be given an award for being a great, important woman in music but to remove all other women, great women who were also there… I guess it’s a real sore point for me that I was not acknowledged as a singer in the ‘80s, and it probably doesn’t look very good but it’s the truth.”
