Other voices
Boho free spirit rifles through the great American songbook.
Rickie Lee Jones ★★★ Kicks OSOD/THIRTY TIGERS. CD/DL/LP
IN 2012, Rickie Lee Jones released The Devil You Know, an album of songs by, among others, Neil Young, The Band and The Rolling Stones. Its sleeve showed the singer photographed against a nighttime city skyline, but with her head concealed by what appears to be a cushion with a cat’s face on it. The message seemed to be: Don’t look at me, I’m hiding behind other people’s songs.
Next came 2015’s The Other Side Of Desire, Jones’s first album of all new material in nearly a decade. In Rickie Lee World, this was an event. Four years on, though, and she seems to have retreated again. The selffinanced, self-released Kicks is a covers collection, with a more eclectic mix of songs than The Devil You Know. This time, Jones is absent from the cover. Or is she? Instead, there’s an arresting illustration of a swimsuited woman wearing boxing gloves and a diver’s mask.
Rickie Lee has described Kicks as “a musical smile”, which makes perfect sense. Its 10 songs span four decades, from the 1940s to the ’70s, encompassing FM rock, psychedelia and big-band jazz. These are songs probably heard during a childhood moving between states with her rootless family; in the coffee bars she played as a teenager, or drifting from a half-tuned radio in other-half Tom Waits’s room at Hollywood’s Tropicana Motel in the murky ’70s. This is Rickie Lee Jones’s life in other people’s music.
What ties it all together is that singular voice and her New Orleans backing band’s wonderfully-measured arrangements. On My Father’s Gun, they dial down the big, pianopounding sound of Elton John’s original for a gentler, gospel-flecked reading. Likewise, blokey ’70s rockers Bad Company’s selftitled signature song is stripped of its machismo but none of its menace.
Jones takes a similar approach on Lonely People, a 1974 hit for folk rockers America, which gradually dissolves into a shimmer of vibraphones, tinkling percussion and mellifluous strings. This and a pleasingly sparse version of Steve Miller Band’s Quicksilver Girl are arguably the best songs here.
Kicks becomes less persuasive when Jones tackles the old Dean Martin-sung standard You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You and the 1928 knockabout big-band tune Nagasaki, later made famous by the Benny Goodman Quartet. She adds little to the originals, and a new take on The End Of The World only reminds the listener of how good country singer Skeeter Davis’s original was.
Then, just when you think she’s done, there’s Mack The Knife. Here, Jones does away with the finger-snapping, wise-guy aura surrounding Bobby Darin’s version, and reimagines it as a sleepy jazz shuffle with half-whispered vocals. Who saw that coming? Kicks is an up-and-down affair but Rickie Lee Jones remains pleasingly unpredictable.