Rickie Lee Jones

‘The days with you really were magical. Thinking of Rickie makes me smile, and reminds me of the wonderful time I had.’ Many famous artists contributed comments to the booklet of Rhino's three-CD Rickie Lee Jones anthology Duchess of Coolsville in 2005, but Chuck E. Weiss's words carry particular weight. The opening song on this album, one of her signature numbers, is about him. His comment, from the ‘Chuck in Love’ who supported Rickie early on, seems to lend a further depth to that complete anthology, its quality and presentation alike.

Rickie was born in Chicago in 1954, into a family whose circumstances were far from smooth. She moved to the West Coast with her mother but repeatedly ran away from home from her early teens, stepping into life's darker side. At 19 she arrived in Los Angeles and, while working as a waitress and beginning to write songs, fell in love with Tom Waits. A photograph of her young self appears on his 1978 Blue Valentine sleeve.

This debut, reaching No. 3 in America, sings of the young Rickie's memories: riding a train with her mother soon after birth in ‘Night Train’; the deep night of the city where she arrived in ‘Young Blood’; earning small change in ways open only to a woman in ‘Easy Money’; and making merry with friends in a bar in ‘Danny's All-Star Joint.’ In the masterly ‘Company,’ everlasting love is desired. Her singing is endlessly free, in its phrasing as much as in musical genre.

The music offers the ultimate form of the Burbank sound pursued by Lenny Waronker. Put simply, it is sophisticated yet nostalgic. Norman Seeff's sleeve photograph of Rickie and the childhood photograph on the back symbolize those two sides of the album. The orchestrations by Nick DeCaro and Johnny Mandel are incomparably wonderful too.