Rickie Lee Jones - Atlas Marker

Note: ...in a perfect world will be on break for the Christmas holiday. New posts will resume on Monday, Dec.29. Enjoy whatever season you happen to celebrate happily and safely, and thanks for reading.

The first moment I heard the song "Chuck E's in Love," a tune Rickie Lee Jones wrote in honor of musician Chuck E. Weiss, a mutual friend of her and her then-boyfriend Tom Waits, I knew I had to hear more music from this remarkable singer/songwriter. She packed so much emotion and attitude into every performance it made her impossible to ignore. Her voice was so distinctive, as was her songwriting style...a sort of a bohemian sensibility informed her music, making it somewhat exotic, a throwback to an earlier era.

Born in Chicago, the Jones family moved to Arizona when she was five and then to Olympia, Washington when she was 10. Her father abandoned the family at about this time, leaving them on their own. Rickie dropped out of high school in the 11th grade, opting to take the GED to finish before enrolling in college in Tacoma. At 18, she pulled up stakes and headed south to California, first to Huntington Beach and then Venice, where she studied at Santa Monica College.

From her website:

Rickie Lee Jones - biography and timeline
Biography, by Hilton Als

Think of what you are about to read as a documentary film of sorts, replete with close-ups and fade-outs, starring the premiere song-stylist and songwriter of her generation, Rickie Lee Jones.

In this film we see: Rickie Lee Jones’ face, her distinctive mouth, and her thick, beyond shoulder length blonde hair as she walks down a road in a bucolic section of Tacoma, Washington, where she currently resides. It is springtime. She does not wear shoes. She carries a guitar. The sky overhead is as shiny as mica. As Jones searches for a place to sit and play in the sun, we see various aspects of her contemporary life come into frame, engaging Jones’ attention as she smiles, and listens, and reflects. We see her daughter, Charlotte Rose; Jones’ mother and siblings; various friends. All of these people come and go, passing in front of, and behind, our primary focus: Rickie Lee Jones playing her guitar and singing any number of her award winning songs: "Chuck E.’s in Love," or her interpretation of the classic, "Making Whoopee," for which she won a Grammy® in 1990.

The brilliant characterizations she builds are amplified by her voice, which, at times, has the lonesome sound of a train whistle on a wind swept prairie and, at other times, sounds like nothing so much as laughter winding down into a whisper, or a sigh. Jones was fast becoming a poet of the disenfranchised who eschewed any purely commercial considerations when it came to making a song. Ironically, Jones has always had a strong and solid fan base that has always purchased the album Rickie Lee Jones means them to have.

After high school in Olympia, which she had returned to in her mid-teens, Jones began singing more and more. She also wrote lyrics in a little notebook she kept. Sometimes, she’d sing the entire score of "West Side Story," to amuse herself.

By the time she nineteen, Jones was living in Los Angeles, waiting tables and occasionally playing music in out of the way coffee houses and bars. All the while, she was developing her unique aesthetic: music that was sometimes spoken, often beautifully sung, and while emotionally accessible, she was writing lyrics as taut and complex as any by the great American poet, Elizabeth Bishop. In her voice and songs, we saw smoky stocking seams, love being everything but requited. And it was during these years that Jones’ song, "Easy Money," caught the attention of one musician and then the music industry. The song was recorded by Lowell George, the founder of the band, Little Feat. He used it on his solo album, "Thanks, I’ll Eat It Here." Warner Brothers auditioned Jones and quickly signed her to the label.

Her debut on Warners, "Rickie Lee Jones," released in 1979, won the Grammy® for Best New Artist. She was hailed by one critic as a "highly touted new pop-jazz-singer-songwriter" and another critic as "one of the best--if not the best--artist of her generation." In addition to the album’s brilliant songs--including the exceptional "On Saturday Afternoons in 1963," the haunting "Last Chance Texaco," and the popular "Chuck E’s in Love"--Jones was becoming a figure whose life was bearing a great deal of emulation by young women and men who found, in her deep and personal and idiosyncratic life and work, a model for the new generation of hipster: She was heralded as a trendsetter in dress (beret, sundresses, heels) and in lifestyle, given her by then famous relationship with two boys she helped to make famous, too: Chuck E. Weiss, a Los Angeles character, and the singer and songwriter Tom Waits, about whom Rickie has said: "We walk around the same streets, and I guess it's primarily a jazz-motivated situation for both of us. We're living on the jazz side of life."

Today's featured song, "Atlas Marker'," is from her album "Flying Coyboys," which is described in her bio:

"Flying Cowboys," on the other hand, is the work of what initially seems like an entirely different person. On it, Jones has become wedded to the world. She is not as isolated as she’s been before. Prior to the album’s release, Jones married the French musician Pascal Nabet-Meyer, whom she met while on holiday in Tahiti (they have subsequently divorced). She also gave birth to her child, Charlotte Rose, for whom Jones wrote the moving "The Horses," just as Richard Loris Jones had written "The Moon is Made of Gold," for his daughter years and years before.

It's a great recording, and I've listened to it many times over the years. It never gets old, and "Atlas' Marker," the final song on the album, is a perfect closer.

Maybe you want another world
One where heaven doesn't weigh so much
Maybe you'll find another girl
One you can feel when you do not touch
Well, I've got something
Warm inside me,
It won't let you
fall 'til I see
Somewhere better than this place
Somewhere better than the world
 where we live...

"Atlas' Marker," written by Rickie Lee Jones