Being a longevous, ‘real deal’ music artist requires many things, but being pure in heart is certainly one. And there are few people on this earth as pure in heart as Rickie Lee Jones. Back with confidence on the jazz side of life, welcome to renaissance of Rickie Lee!

With the completion of Last Chance Texaco in 2019 (her brilliantly evocative and critically revered addition to the vast ‘rock memoir’ library) Rickie Lee Jones permitted herself to look back to those early days and draw new inspiration from them. 

“Before I finished that book, I was burdened, but when it was done I began to shed my fears. I am 68 years old and you cannot scare me any more”.

The resulting first studio album release since then is Pieces Of Treasure, Rickie Lee’s versions of a selection of American songbook classics including Nature Boy, September Song, Sunny Side of the Street and no less than two iconic Sinatra numbers. The success of this album is in the way Rickie Lee finds her way to occupy these well-travelled songs. Speaking of the song All In The Game for example:

“Every time you sing the song, you can go right back to that house of feeling and it’s a safe and wonderful place to go…that’s the fun of making music for me”.

The interplay between Rickie Lee and the players throughout make Pieces Of Treasure a true jazz record - and a potential classic at that. It’s a wonder then why Jones felt she had not earned the right to make it, until her collaborators put her straight. 

“I wasn’t expecting any love at all from any of the musicians, but they all told me one at a time, what an honour it was to play with me. I haven’t gotten a “wow” in a long time and it made me feel so whole and ready to do my job”. 

Pieces Of Treasure is something special, not only for the new found confidence and form of Rickie Lee herself, but also the music supervision from her old collaborator Russ Titleman and the group of exquisite musicians that he brought together for the project. 

“The connection between this record and those early years is inexplicable, even though people might be feeling it, because it’s just a collection of songs. But there is something powerful about it, something confident. Russ Titelman and myself are our best selves when we work together”. 

Their partnership created one of pop music’s most phenomenal “post-genre” debut albums in the golden year of 1979. And then of course, she followed it up with a bona fide classic in 1981 with Pirates. The 80s saw Rickie Lee firmly established as one of music’s true pioneering female artists. 

But, this being The Art of Longevity, I want to know about the bad times as well as the good. And Rickie Lee Jones has had more than her fair share of years in the wilderness. By her 90s records (Pop Pop, Traffic From Paradise and Ghostyhead ) Rickie Lee’s career showed the classic curve for established artists, of high critical acclaim but steadily reduced commercial success. 

Even after a minor resurgence in the 2000s (beginning with the superb Evening Of My Best Day), a further decade of being largely forgotten left Rickie Lee broke and unable to find a record label to release new music. How did she get through that time?

“You are not in a spiritual position of power. I wanted to learn humility, but humility doesn’t help an artist manifest their persona. If you are too meek, you can’t make your best music”. I wish I could say the circumstance I was in didn’t matter [to the music I made] but it really did”. 

By 2015, for The Other Side of Desire - she crowdfunded that album - a somewhat shocking state of affairs for such an accomplished artist. That project was also very much a mixed success. “I made good songs, in bad keys!”. 

We recorded this episode the day after International Women’s Day 2023, When thinking about women in music and the role particularly of the female troubadour (actually truer to say trobairitz, since the word troubadour is of distinctly male origin) the contribution to the genre by Rickie Lee is nothing short of phenomenal. Reading Last Chance Texaco (alongside the memoirs of some of her contemporaries - Chrissie Hynde, Deborah Harry et. al.) one is overcome with a constant sense of the danger and manipulation, in which she and other women blazed the trail through the music industry of the 70s (and 80s, 90s and 21st century for that matter). It’s a big scary world for any young woman to venture into and a long, long journey to the destination of fearlessness. 

To come through that - full circle to a place of artistic confidence, is really something to enjoy. Freshly into a new label partnership (inevitably with BMG, the label of choice it seems for resurgent artists of longevity) and sharing new material that she is clearly proud of with the world it is great to hear that Rickie Lee is once again ready to earn the eyes and ears of new audiences. She and we deserve each other. 

Last word Rickie Lee:

“All you can do is be a human being that loves your life and if you can do that, people will come and be healed, be joyful and go back to a better day and that’s my job”. 

Pieces of Treasure is released on BMG April 28th pre-order here. See the livestream preview April 8th.