Rickie Lee Jones returns with an album that stands up to anything she has released before and in the easy cool of her jazz sound she rages at her President...
Never has anything so sweet-sounding packed such a punch as Rickie Lee Jones' first album of new songs since the electronica hip hop experiment of 1997's Ghostyhead. On The Evening of My Best Day we are back to the trademark Jones, the gentlest, lilting jazz-tinged piano, that caressing bass groove and those vocals that are languishing in laidback lazy lusciousness. Jones' covers album, It's Like This, may well have been a holding exercise while she went through writer's block but it was maybe a good little exercise in reassessing her songwriting. This is as good an album as she has released since her self-titled debut or its follow up, Pirates. Interestingly, the guitarist she worked with, David Kalish, was the one she used on Pirates.
Musically we kick off with the drummer's brushes but if you check out the lyrics page on www.rickieleejones.com, you find that there is nothing restrained about the lyrics as you get the visual impact of George W. Bush, the "Ugly Man," "son of another ugly man claims our cute little voice." A judgment of serial lying and an ugliness inside warns those of us within the Church to not be so quick to pray for a Christian President; you never know what you'll get! There is a bee under that fashionable little bonnet that Jones wore on the cover of her eponymous debut nearly a quarter of a century ago.
Not known for her political polemic the last couple of years in America has apparently enraged Ms Jones and she joins an ever lengthening list of dissenters concerned that the land of the free is trying to liberate the rest of the world and making itself a police state. "Tell Somebody (Repeal The Patriot Act)" is again not as subtle a title as the music on which she sets her call for an evangelistic verve to make the dissenter's voice heard. She concludes, "The depth of our democracy/is only as good as the voices of protest she protects/voices of protest - rise!"
In interviews and promotional chat Jones is talking a lot about how prayer was a factor in the songs' creation and also at how she was in a right place spiritually to make these statements and this album. Though she does not deny that it was those election results in 2000 that provoked her to write again and that she has no fear of the backlash for becoming a protest singer so late in the day, the album title suggests that Jones is not all doom and gloom and either is the album.
"Little Mysteries" is the third broadside at the Bush family but elsewhere there are the more personal politics. "A Tree in Allenford" is a sad and beautiful song about us loving and being loved, of being loved and loving. "It Takes You There" seems to be about those who end up on the street and includes the Proverb-like wisdom, "What you have will ever be enough/you will always want more." There is also a lovely little picture of heaven where, "We all live in a house on a hill/nobody has to say a word." In the title track there is a setting free of regret and a sky almost blue.
On her web page, which is a wonderful place to surf into with a wide array of interesting stuff about Jones, music and politics, there is a quote, "This record is the culmination of a great deal of spiritual energy, of me wanting to have this rest of my life be a good life and write a great record that cannot be denied. As I went to make it, I was aware that records can heal, they do a good work. That's what I wanted to do, to make a good work." Without doubt this is a great work and the content has more chance of doing a good work than most albums released this year!
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