JONES TO THE BONE

Three key shots from the Rickie Lee canon, by Alison Fensterstock.

THE INGENUE Rickie Lee Jones ##### WARNER BROS, 1979

The new starlet in town came from the shadowy side of Hollywood, where she’d prepared for her close-up with sharp, jive-talking hipsters such as Tom Waits and Chuck E. Weiss – the latter immortalised in her debut album’s big hit single, Chuck E.’s In Love. Rickie Lee Jones took the best new artist Grammy that year for her aching, playful and gorgeously vivid walk on the jazz side of life.

RICKIE GOES WEST Flying Cowboys #### GEFFEN, 1989

Hailed as a return to form, Jones’s fourth full-length long-player revived the romantic, impressionistic storytelling and jazz-flavoured pop that characterised her smash debut and its follow-up, Pirates. With Steely Dan’s Walter Becker as producer, she stretches musically and thematically, experimenting with reggae and the blues for a soundscape as warm and expansive as a frontier sunset.

SOUL SEARCHING The Sermon On Exposition Boulevard #### NEW WEST, 2007

On Jones’s noisiest album, the raw rock’n’roll bang and clang stands in counterpoint to its searching spirituality. Inspired by collaborator Lee Cantelon’s book The Words, which deployed Christ’s comments from the New Testament, Jones contemplates the meaning of faith and reaffirms that her creative powers are, at the very least, something to believe in.