Rickie Lee Jones

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Ricky Lee Jones hit it big with her debut album in seventy nine. The following year, she won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, and over the course of the next four decades, released numerous albums that pulled inspiration from jazz, rock, electronic music, and even musical theater. In late April, Ricky released her latest album, Pieces of Treasure, where she sings songs from the American songbook with a jazz slant. Producer and legendary A and rman. Russ Titelman, who produced Ricky's first two albums, reunited with her on her latest and helped inspire Ricky to find a comfort in her lower vocal register. The result is an oftentimes sultry meditation on aging and survival. On today's episode, Bruce Heitlam talks to Rickie Lee Jones about her decades long fight to sing jazz, even though she's often viewed as an outsider. She also tells stories about leaving home as a young teenager and the abuse she endured while trying to survive on her own. She plays songs from her career, including one she wrote after seeing John Lennon appear to her in a dream, and just a note before we get started. This episode contains descriptions of sexual abuse and might not be appropriate for all listeners. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Bruce Hedlum with Ricky Lee Jones. I've always thought of you as someone who and I thought of this particularly on the new record. You're someone who is acting in the song in a strength. Did you always think of yourself as that one? I've just found the words to say that. But I've always put the song on and been inside of it, and I know everything about everybody in it. So if I sing something cool, I know where she's sitting, which she's wearing, where she bought it, everybody at the bar. I see it all. And I think that's what an actor does. They try to create everything about their character. But it happens to me instantaneously. I have a rich imagination, I guess, and when I sing, the tree instantly grows. And I started thinking this year, I'm acting songs, and there's a little difference between singing a song and acting. Being a song actor, it suggests on how that I'm not a real singer, which of course I am. A serious singer, but I think I'm acting, I'm being the song. It's closer to singers from previous generations were like that, like Peggy Lee or Julie London. Yes, people like that seem to kind of inhabit songs and become characters and songs. They were singers, not primarily songwriters, although Peggy did write some songs. But you you write them, so people think, oh, they must be confessions there pouring your soul out. Yeah, and you don't really pour your soul out. I'd like to write stories, and in this story might be some poignant, unresolved tear drop or something. That's the best way to show it in this way, as any writer does, you know, put their own emotion because that's the only palette we have right into what they write. And that thing again of the singer songwriter versus the singer how people see them, because after Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, it became crucial to be a songwriter. If you weren't a songwriter, then you're not really authentic. If you didn't write that song, then why are you even singing it? Kind of aditude, which I of course disagree with. To me, the interpreter, the singer, the bard is who matters. Yes, yes, I'm glad you wrote the song. But if there's no one to sing it, what does it matter. So Peggy Lee or me or anybody who loves the song and loves to sing and loves hear other people, you know, whether it's a choir or whatever, loves singing. That's what I like most. And when I had the ear of the press the way I did in the early eighties, I talk about Linda Ronstadt, for instance, who was not as in style now for a minute, because she wasn't punk rock and she didn't write songs. But I was like, but she's a great singer, and whatever it comes into fashion. And I'm glad knew things come into fashion. But you can't discard the meaning of a singer, I think, because when you came out, you don't sound like Joni Mitchell. Yeah, but you looked a bit like Jolie Mitchell. So everybody's, oh, she's influenced by Joni Mitchell. And then I'm reading your book and it's like Jimi Hendrix. Its west Side Story, which is a big thing for you. Yeah, and there's a very I won't give it away. There's a very lovely scene with that guy. I'll say his name, Tom. Wait's the only time I'm going to say it. Where you're outside of a bar and someone says a line and yeah, and then you all sing it. He gets the line wrong, I think too. But it's this beautiful scene because and it's real. It really happened, and people grew up, you know, back then, like people would have records. They might have the Beatles, but then their parents would have South Pacific Yeah, or Camelot or something, a sound of mute. Everybody had sound of music back then. You said you tended towards Laura Nero. What did you get from her? What was it that drew Well, I got that thing of these strange and I still haven't learned her songs, but these kinds of chords, right, and hers are much darker, but and they probably show up passing in Leonard Bernstein. So that's what she had. She had inversions that were magical to me, and I wanted to know them. She also happened to see her on public television at the same time I heard her, So to see her is something else entirely. She looked like a terribly mentally ill person who could hardly sit there to perform this song. And as a teenager, I really identified with that part because I felt pretty barely together myself. So I liked that there was somebody there who dared to show herself as she was. And she was also very theatrical, Yes that's a better word. She was creating scenes with her people know, wedding bell Blues, that's one of her big songs. But it creates a big it does. It's like a show number, something like the one about Tomcat. Goodbye is like its own piece of theater from top to bottom. She's a little bit of Gershwin's, a little bit of poorgambz and and a lot of motown soul. And she's made her own kind of music. I'm not gonna say brand, but she's made her own and you know, I think what I love is the sound of her voice. But that that she did, that probably was a map for me that I could also make my own room of my own imaginary people. What do you think are your songs that do that the best? What rooms do you go? I got that one? Yeah, the things from Pirates, I would say, um, and he's got one crazy act turns him into a kind too when pretty girls go by. Nothing here to do anymore, so he sits on the stoop all day. I guess something is waiting for cut finger. Louis picks up Betty in the alley. He likes to come here with them bus from that town. Everybody there looks like Frankie Valley and they're fluently blonde from her leg to a cigarette. And Louis told Eddie fix him up, but he ain't come back in now this rhyme Frankie Valley. I was originally trying to rhyme Eddie Briggotti because Eddie Brigotti is from the Young Rascals, and I loved the Young Rascals and especially you know his How can I be sure there's that? And I like the idea that nobody's written about Eddie Briggotti, but I couldn't find anything to rhyme with Gotti. More people would know who Frankie Valley was. It's a very one of my funny lines. I have a few funny lines, but I always feel like it goes right by people. They're enchanted by the start. What are you talking about now? Where everybody looks like raggy Valley, and then more trouble than it's worth trouble that is, oh wild, to tell him where you are? Oh wild. So that's one I think, tell him where you are, And then that one goes there, and there's another verse about the girl. Right. So those are the two boys Eddie and and oh and so those characters were inspired by my friend Sal Bernardi's childhood friends in Lodi, New Jersey. He had this one guy, um so he had count fingered Louis. But the other one was the guy with one crazy right that when he got nervous, it started spitting all around her. So so I brought his characters in and then so zero quiz cool. She lost her job again and her boyfriend beat her up and he won't let her in. She's walcome by this joint in her black and blue dress. She lookwellbones at you, says, don't tell me, let me guess. It's more trouble. It is worse. He's bore trouble it is word, Oh why? And then fashion west this way Lee. When you've got all these ideas, you'd never to any one, all these magnets, pulling each living, every story down to be the only ones. So in that part. Remember when you're in a movie and the newspapers go by and they're spitting by it into the exciting nme, That's what that was. Hey, Yeah, we're liveving Get up, woman, love, get up. YEA will liveingving it up. We liveing it up. YEA will liveving it up. YEA will liveving it up, it up. And then I think it was probably really inspired by my friendship with ling Eddy found the reason then in there carried her over the bridges and fluttering pages. They didn't kill this terminal where dreams that so many tickets through but strange looking faces and see somebody there. They knew you could meet me tomorrow when all of the lights side blooming green. Feel a little lonely, a little sad, a little mean, But remember this place, sadist hotel. You could do anything you want. You could never tell it's by trouble and it's worm, but trouble that it's worm. WHOA, Well, I won't you tell me where you are? Yeah? So I'd say more than any song I've written. That song answers Hers right, her song about her characters living in the darker part of the city. This one sets them free to go somewhere else. Always I don't always, but for a long time I felt it's a conversation we have when we're lucky enough to be writers of songs that people here and seeing we're all talking to one another and responding to one another. It's just a lie to pretend that you live in a vacuum and everything comes out of your own head. And if you're not being honest about it, then you're you're thief and you're you're stealing stuff. So we must learn from one another, and it has to be okay to say I learn from somebody else and then I made up my own thing. Yeah, I think so. You know, one of the things about that song you just played, you're constantly changing tempos. You know, you've stopped the whole band in the middle and then it starts back up again. Where does that come from? Is that from musicals as well? Yeah? Maybe so. I've always liked things that changed directions and changed and they did it in the pop stuff for a while, right Crosby stills in Nish It was exciting, but probably a musical theater does it first? Can you tell me about Away from the Sky that was inspired by the death of John Lennon I dream I had about John Lennon. I feel pretty strong today, so I can probably talk about it. But sometimes if I just talk about sad stuff, it's overwhelming. But not that long after he died, I dreamed of him. I've never been there, but on a British siege or riding his bike with a stocking cap and in like the three bears. In back of him was Yokoa and in back of her, who was shown each one is a little bike. And there was a pier. And as he turned to go into the pier, he looked at me. John is looking at me, join and he sang this. Let see there was a crooked man who lived on a crooked shore. But now he'll never have to go away anymore. Oh Ay from the sky, Oh away from the sky. And turned onto the pier and they followed him. Really when I woke up, because sometimes those things dissolve instantly. I don't know why, but that part never made it into the recording. I saved the real party saying for myself and I made up a song based on a Dylan Thomas short story called After the Fair. You know the thing on the record is my demo. So I'm just going boom doomed like it as minimal as it can be in then, And because I was probably half riding it as I recorded it. For all that it cost him, he never did complain. The chicken headed man there feathering the rain. But the last bassest tie. Everybody's gone. The horses are painted with the waiting of the law. Go from the rodeo god, from the tunrug gown. It's after the fair. That's when I see you. There she sleeps in the canvas. The fat man hollers, tender is the night I feel leading out of you. So come into my trailer. We can toast a little bread. Now. Look, you left a holel it on my bed, he said. But you keep what you can keep. And when you dive into the deep is yeah, after frozen you. That's swear saved you. Oh away from the sky, Oh away from the sky. Oh away from the sky, Away from the sky. But everybody's gone now. It's after the fair. The horses are waiting in the middle of the So you turn the carousel on. When the light's closed down, you can watch the ponies run through the middle of town. That you go, little girl. There you go, gone from the tongue rund. Now it's after defences, when I over the fences again and the vacuum and the hole and the planes up in the air. That swear I can hear your best boo away from the sky, Away from the sky, Away from the sky, Away from the sky. That was Ricky Lee Jones performing her song away from the Sky. We have to take a quick break and we'll be back with more from Bruce Headlam and Ricky Lee Jones. We're back with more from Ricky Lee Jones. It's interesting because I reread your your autobiography and now you moved so much when you were a kid, Yes, it seemed that you were always having to reintroduce yourself or introduce yourself, that's right. Although you always did it, it seemed to fill you with terror, the idea that he is and that terror of people basic mistrust and expectation that at some point don't do their worst. Stayed with me. The playground seems to be ever with us, all right, I could to say with me, but it does seem like that that scenario is playing out over and over again of a bully kids who want to follow the bully, just so they don't get picked on a couple of kids who are one's different or one's just poor, or it's always the same dynamic of who's on top and who's underneath. And and I think the fact that I was a little different, though I didn't think so, but I think I must have been gave me someone to be so that I wasn't anonymous, because I guess more than I hated being picked on, I hated being invisible. So I accepted that. But I really never understood why I'd look in the mirror and go, aren't I pretty? Why why don't they like me? And it's still a mystery to me, really. Yes, even later in your book, you're very critical of what was sort of late stage hippies, sort of the people you hung around with. It seemed that when you were traveling, and you started traveling I think at fourteen, I mean, just kitch hiking, and you know, you lived in a cave for a while. There were other people in the cave too, but I was still a cave, you know, it seemed that, you know, particularly a lot of the men you met were very the usury. They're very predatory, and they were they were the hippies. They were. They talked a good game, but a lot of them were very abusive. Well, I was really young, and I believed what I read, my impressions of what it would be like to be a grown up in that world, to be an active member of their idea of what life should be like. But those people were just greasers a little bit older, right, They were just the tough kids at school in nineteen sixty two, or whoever they were. I saw them as magically appearing with long hair like Christ. And so, you know, I was definitely needed a place to stay and needed something to eat, and the cost of that was my body, And you know, that was very hard. Sometimes I just wanted to be able to rest and not up to struggle with some guide. Would he relent and not try to put his dick in me? Or would that be the cost of having a night of food. I have never actually said that so starkly and truly, because it was so hard and a little kid, you know, And then getting up the next day, I'd be lucky if it's the next day and they and they don't want you there anymore. And I think every single guy I met, I thought, will he married me. Is he the one who loved me? Every one of them, and that was lots of disappointments. But I've, you know, have many years to think about it and thought I was really just a very little kid in a woman's body, in a costume that looked like old enough for them. I think some of them would have withdrawn if they knew my true age, but most of them know. I think it was kind of cool right to be attracted to a young teenager. They still sell that image a lot, school girl like hit Me Baby One More Time Britney spears. Yeah, she sewed that image as well. So as long as we let that image be sold and you know that stuff is going on in reality, I do want to talk about a nice guy. Yes, that's your producer on this project, Russ Titelman, who was one of your first producers. Yeah, my first, your first. He was your first. I had two producers, Lenny Warrant Kerr and Rosse Titelman, and I'd seen Lenny. I didn't know from producers, but I saw Lenny's name on the back of a Randy Newman record. It's about two years maybe before I got signed. Most people would have wanted to meet Randy Newman. No, you went into the small type. That's right. I've always known that's the way in. You can't go for the big, big thing because everybody wants to meet Randy. But if you find I was an infamous getter in Backstage Girl, and I'd I'd watch the secret way that nobody was going and just slip in that way. So there was the same philosophy of how to get in so anyway his name, and so we sent tapes around and to three or four people. He got one of them, and and I was exactly right. He was the way, and I pushed you know, when the record companies went to sign me, this little I think it was called Portrait or something. This little company made the best offer, and we went back to Warner Brothers, my lawyer, a big shot working for free. We talked to him and I'm gonna be a big shot and said, you know, she wants to go with Lindy. So if you'll meet the offer. I don't know if that's okay to tell that, but if you'll meet the offer, will come with you. And that happened exactly as it was meant to. So Lenny sent the tape to Russ because they were partners in production. Russ was working with George Harrison in England and he tells this story a lot now now that we're reunited. So when he heard Company, he called Linny and said, this girl is a singer. She's like roberta Flock, which is a pretty big compliment. And Linny said, I didn't really noticed. I was listening to the songs, so they were perfect. Addressing the songs, we got to put an accordion on the bridge because the Italians are there, and him addressing the singer, he got to go sing that line again, so that was good. Yeah, it's hard to imagine now just what a incredible period that was for you. You'd only been writing songs for a couple of years. Maybe you were living in la I was homeless in the months before I was signed. I just tumbled into having nowhere to go. What was it like, suddenly the record companies are bidding for you. Yeah, it felt as if it was always supposed to be that way. Did you always think that growing up that this was going to happen. No, but I always felt that I was going somewhere special. I always felt like I was always talking to the invisible world and God's cameras right about here is how I got to look up today. So it's hard to explain what I always thought, but I feel a constant connection to something that almost has no words but is ever present in here. But I can't say that I did. You know, my life was troubled and going nowhere. I didn't have any skills. I'd quit high school, but I had this. When I sang, it was all that I am. Anything I sang was totally emotional. And then I got this job as a singing way, and everybody else was so much louder than me. I thought, I'm gonna have to learn how to sing louder or I'm never gonna get a job. So I taught myself. There was a book, and I put my hands on my chest and found a way to put that sound in the bones and practice, and that was a That was the first, you know, because always thought it was a great singer. But the fact was I could be a great singer, better wasn't. So I taught myself to be a better singer. As soon as I did that, within a year, it presented itself to me. It was just life presented itself to me. Did you not know you wanted to be a singer before that? What made you finally focus on that? You know, since I was sixteen, I'd been practicing, you know, Sweet Duty blue Eyes and singing and play with my girlfriend Julie and playing everywhere. But when I was on my own and got to La, it seemed like that will never happen there. It's a townful of people trying to do it. And you're so weird. You're not like Joni Mitchell. You can't sing like Joe Bias. You're so weird right because you're different, and so somebody will come. They might not all, but somebody will come because you're different. They'll like that about you. And I had this natural thing for jazz. My father sang jazz and his father was a vaudevillian. And I began to you know, what I know how to do is my funny Valentine. And so I started singing the jazz ballads in Venice and when and nobody was doing it. So that felt powerful. I have something that's just mine and I did it really well, and the local snooty musician and suddenly were like, we like you come and sit in with us again. So I started to feel like I had a possibility at an identity. And then in a short time I had my own Friday night at a bar, and then a short time later I was making a demo for a record company. So once I set aside doubt and my mother said, I would say, Mom, I'm going to go to school and be a stenographer. I've only got to go eighteen months and I'll have a job. She said, but I thought you wanted to be a singer, imagine, And I said I did, but I just can't see how that would ever happened. And she said, don't you give up on your dreams. Interesting because your mother had had a very tough life. She'd been an orphan. Yeah, your father lost his mother very young as well, so they're both They had that in common. And she seemed to live a very controlled life, and she had to keep things. She kept things together for other people. It's interesting that she was the one who said to you, I thought she wanted to be said no, it was almost divine, like the other voice said, we got to speak through Betty right now, or she's going to give up. Don't give up on your dreams. Yeah, it was unexpected and so heartfelt that I thought, my mother is invested in me trying with all my might to make a dream come true. And it almost seemed like it was more she wanted me to try, But I thought, maybe she thinks I can do it too. She's not here, shouldn't see what's happening, but she believes me. When you got into the Student for the first time, you played with bands, and you had fabulous players. I did you and Steve gad Andy Newmark, Willie Wee, the incredible Victor Feldman who was in Miles Davis's band and did all that's Cheelee Dan work. So one of the things about when we were the top tier players is they're very kind. It's it's the other ones that jabby little. But the best players are very kind and they love making music. And so I couldn't write it, but I could sing it all. So I sang all the horn parts, and somebody wrote them down and they played them and they were exactly how I thought they would sound in my head. But the other aspects of recording, like Chucky's in Love and stuff, as it manifested into the physical world, it wasn't at all what I only ever heard my voice in me, so so the producers endeavored to bring to reality whatever feeling they thought I had, and their own, you know, how to make a good record. I think their choices were always much cleaner, tamer, precise than I might have gone. And I'm glad, you know, and I've known people like this about me best, I think than the more raggedy stuff. But they took me out gently, my get dar playing and put in Betsy. So so what was that like? That incredible year? You're signed, you make this record with these amazing players, You're on Saturday Night Live, you argue with them on Saturday Night Live, which I thought was pretty gutsy. They wanted you to do one song you wanted to do Coolsville. I did. Yeah, I remember seeing that Saturday Night Live. Everybody does it was you were suddenly huge? Yeah, and you had a check for fifty thousand dollars. That's right. Well, was what was the first thing you bought with that? Probably? You know, dinner? First of all, I had nowhere to put it. I didn't have a bank account, so when I got that check, I still had to borrow some money from Lenny because I didn't have a cache, and really I didn't know how anything worked and know how to have a bank account or how to tip or so what was that like? You know, it's almost like the whole life was holding his breath so for for a little while, everything was just shimmering and still and right, that's what it was like, I think, m but you beat the second album curse I did? I meant to too? Really were that. I was well aware of it, and I had met Bett Midler at a dinner was just before your record, Yeah, the first So because you thought about said, let me tell you what's going to happen. You're gonna put this one out and if it doesn't do horrible, they'll pick up your second one and not tell your third record will you have any kind of acclaim or success. And that was kind of what happened to most people, and that was I thought, nah, we'll see. I think my first record is probably going to do pretty good. So when we had the big success, so big, bigger than anything. Hard to find a woman who had had that kind of success coming out the gate, though you know, they probably weren't tallying it up in the sixties in exactly the same way but it was a very big thing, and it was a crossover kind of thing, and culturally, I got to expand the idea. You know, I was a singer songwriter, but I wasn't a hokey and these things sound small now, but they were big making people accept that it works and it'll make everybody money, and it is different than what was before. So I know I can't match this record in any way. I'm not the same person. I'm not as happy, and those are a lot of beautiful, happy songs, and I'm not on this side of the mountain anymore. So from the other side of the mountain, I will draw the picture of what I see fiercely, and I won't give one eyelash to the idea of a song that you'll play on the radio. And so a little bit of it is defiance, and that's okay. You can't help but not respond to what's happening. You know, if that hadn't happened, what would I have written? I don't know. But so what I wrote was what was happening to me. And I think that the incredible thing that happens with the recording is it captures more than in the song itself it captures your intention, and it captures your spirit. That's the inexplicable thing about a great record, as it has spirit, and people put it on the list of their important records. I personally think the first record is important, but I don't exactly know why Pirates matters more. I'm guessing people who put it on their favorite lists don't know as a SECO record, so they don't know it's overcoming expectations. But I like it. It's dreamy, It's remarkable in its musicality and sophistication for a girl who had no education. But I like a song I can sing, like I was saying, I like a melody that you remember. I don't know if anybody can sing the traces of the Western slopes, you know. So I don't mean to insult myself, but I'm glad that that it hit with people. But then the curse probably came some years later. I took a long time to make the third record. It was nineteen eighty four, I think, so I had gone in and out of heroin addiction, and a couple of times I had drunk on stage, not many, but the times I did. There was a big full length photograph in a newspaper, and the promoters, the promoters union exiled me from many stages. Guys did much worse, but I think that there was an expectation of proper Christine behavior from me because of the quality of the work. We don't like our girls to behave badly, and they want to think of of a woman as a tragic falling figure, and so many people want to disrespect to anybody instead of loving, forgiving, spreading that good will. So I was in a really defensive posture when I did the magazine. I was off drugs and I wanted everybody to know it, and I did a cover looking really off drugs, and everybody should very healthy, very healthy, and I was super healthy. But I spent some time in France and I was leaning towards a more classical kind of music. Now I'd heard Eric Sati and I was expanding in another way. So these are weird. This was the one album I wrote that I wanted to do theater with it. So this was the direction I would have liked to have grown in in some version of my life, to write a theater and act. But at that point I seem to be just collapsing emotionally the broken love affairs, the trail of dead, and the very beginning of living with Tom Waits for the rest of my life because nobody would stop asking me about him. In every interview Aside from that, it was kind of emotional. It's like, but aren't I a musician? You have no respect or interest in the person who's sitting in front of you. Now, if you want to talk to Tom, is a phone over there, call him, But why do you want to talk to me about that? So you know, there were years where I was resentful and angry and tell them if they mentioned that, they'll be escorted out, and all these things, till finally, I don't know, in the last ten years, I went, isn't that wonderful? We have lived together all our lives that brief time, that beautiful time that was so remarkable to audiences and so enchanting. We looked like we belonged together that song, and they won't let it go. Isn't that wonderful? And would have liked to have had some peace with him, but that did not and would never happen, And that was turned out to be just as hard as living with the questions. You know, twenty years ago but now I'm meaning with the unresolved. Yeah. And also the pain of this breakup was really hard. But to be reminded by every passing stranger who comes to talk, especially in Europe, they really want to know, poke at it all the time. And did you think that your persona became the kind of spurned woman or that the role people put you in bet you yeah, yes, spurned woman. That would be an assumption, that sure. But then when he became very popular, when the then it was more like we want to touch you because you're part of the purple of Tom Waits, the purple cloths. So at that point is where that would probably happen. No offense to Tom Waits. He's never been as popular as you were, though, oh so much more, sells so many more tickets, you know. I see him as more popular than Bob Dylan. You know, there are so many people copying his style. I'm just like in awe, how did how did that happen? That's that's what I saw. You didn't see that never had an album that was as big as your first couple albums. But I think some cultural thing. I remember the guy in nine Inch Nails talking about him when my daughter was so probably ninety five or ninety six, and he that was when he seemed to take on this other alternative world status of a golden god. And I was one of the women who had touched him. And that was the hardest part. That was the hardest time in the nineties when people were like, we don't know a written, but you were Tom Waits's girlfriend, and that we want to talk about. Whereas before it was like, we love your music and you talked to us about your broken heart. But now I go, look, it's part of the legend of human beings and when we're gone, we'll still be there together. We're one of the lovers. Isn't that wonderful? Come on, you gotta love that. We'll be back after another quick break with more from Bruce Headlam and Rickie Lee Jones. We're back with the rest of Bruce Hedlum's conversation with Rickie Lee Jones. Can we talk about a couple of your songs? Lets you mentioned Company, that that was the song that was that Russ that liked Company? Or was that that was Russ? What did he tell you he heard in that He said that Lenny sent this cassette to him, which was the demo I made at Warner Brothers, you know, to entice him to co produce, because I like, I said, I went with Warner Brothers if Lenny would produce me. So he said he, you know, he heard the first couple of songs Chuck is in Love, my dad's song the Moon Is Made of Gold, one that didn't get on the record called the Real Things Back in Town. And then Company, which I wrote with my the only co writer I think I've really had, which who was Alfred Johnson. He and I wrote that song one night together. The story of writing Company was so I had a job working for this gangster named Rocky Miller. Rocky was a real gangs journey and he'd show me his money in his sock, and he wore garters stays I guess their calling, I think. And he's a real creep. And he'd make me sit on his lap. He'd called me into the office and say come over here, and I don't want to come over there. He said, comorry or I'll fire you. And so I'd sit on his lap like an angry teenager, which is all you can do in nineteen seventy eight. And that was the terrible part of the job. But the great part was that I had access to a typewriter all day long. And when I had a typewriter, another kind of you know, it's like heaven, another kind of lyric came out. And so I sat there and wrote the lyrics to Young Blood and Company and the beginnings of something else. So I had my little notebook and files full of lyric ideas. And I met Alfred on the beach in Venice. He was playing some little feet maybe. I was standing there listening to him, and I'll sing a little bit, a bad singing with him. And he looked at me, kind of, he said, And so I said, do you know any lawyer? Nero? And little stars floating out of his eyes. And then he invited me over to his house, and I said okay, and I got in between him and his friend and we drove a mile down to Culver City and then we went into his house, which just like I stayed now in this motel right by where his house was. And as we walked in the door, there were dismembered dolls everywhere, dolls hanging from things and heads here, and right away I went, oh cool, And it was like I passed the test with them because I had. You had to decide right away, are you dead or is this some kind of goofy art installation? And there were two men, you know so, but I was pretty sure he was a kind of odd musician, and right away we had this powerful language together. And then a few weeks later we wrote Company together, which was kind of like having a love affair. By the end of the night we were done, but we wrote every single bar in twined together. And it's a beautiful, odd lyric. You know, when I reach across the galaxy, I'll miss your company. And in that way it was a little different than a regular you're leaving me song. That's one of the only straight ahead lyrics I wrote about you and what you're doing and how I feel. Normally I would have made up some guy somebody's name and how she feels. It has an old fashioned quality, though it has any for at that time, we, you know, we were writing thinking maybe we'd get these songs to famous people. Chuckie's in Love was kind of aimed at Bette Midler, and Company was aimed at Frank Sinatra. And when I got signed, I told Mo Austin who was a good friend when I was there, and Lenny, would you take this to Frank because they'd fly over to the desert for these meetings, you know, so they who were taking it to Frank and then they didn't tell me when. So what happened? Is he going to do it? And they said, you don't want him to do it? On said he can't hit those notes anymore. I didn't know if I say this in the air, but another one said, and anyway, he wants the publishing for anything he does, so I don't know if you wanted. He won't even consider doing it unless he has the publishing. Is that right? Yeah, well that's what they said, okay, because I guess he had his own writers. If anybody you know, it's it's greed. Yes. But when you're that powerful, if he records the song, the world will hear it. Yes, So what is a publisher anyway? They're the guy who's supposed to bring the song to the world, and they should get their half of the penny if they do that job. We folk, he's bought our own publishing. But also it didn't make our songs anybody, So you know, everybody had said you must keep your publishing as you age, it's going to be the only way you keep making money. And of course they were right, but I probably, you know, with Alfred's permission, would have given up the publish on that. If Frank, I mean that, at least it seems from here that I might. Now were you always a fan, Frank, Yes, oh, yes, yes always. My father was a singer. The timber and style of him is like the Mills Brothers and Frank Sinatra, and my mom had a you know, schoolgirl crush on him, so he, more than any other singer, felt like he was telling my story when he sing any woman, anybody until I heard the Beatles, whose collective harmony was otherworldly to me. But those were my two main guardian angels initially, and then you know, expanded throughout your career. You've done cover records, you tend not to mix them with originals. Yeah, you've done Rebel, Rebel, you did Yeah for no One. So tell me about this album, how it came about, Yes, why the songs? And is there a story you're telling with these songs. There's not a story of telling with them. They were picked because I could sing them well and I wanted people to know I was a jazz singer. But there was a journalist a couple of weeks. This is important to me because I hadn't really gotten this feedback. So clearly there was a journalist a couple of weeks ago. He said, I saw you in Cleveland in nineteen seventy nine and you opened with Chuckie's in Love and we were going, what is she got to do now? And then you introduced us to Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday and Seavon, and I was like, there, it is what I waited all my life to hear, and heard it here there. So that's just important that long ago and the long ago history. I was singing it peers or love it, but the jazz world said, you are not allowed in here, you cannot enter. Did you feel that you bet? You early in your career, and I've figured out I think partially, you know, because there are unusual First of all, women are the last person allowed in the room. Singers and women singers. But if you didn't only sing jazz, you can't come in. If you sang a pop song, you can't come in. You have to have exclusively devoted yourself to this one discipline. Or you can't come in. I called the jazz station and long beached in your skussard. Would you play Rickney Jones high lily highly said no, we don't play Rickey Jones. Okay, sad like on the wall behind you, we don't. I regularly did you picture with a big ax? Yeah? And you know it heard. It always hurts to people go where we've decided what you are, no matter what you do. So I did jazzy songs with some pop in him. I was mixed it up a little bit and after pop pop, which got a really weird reviews. You know, it was my fortieth birthday and one of the great beeball players, Joe Henderson, had played on two songs. He came to the party and in a moment, took me aside and said, I just wanted to tell you that I was sorry to see that you didn't make another record, because I really thought you were onto something. And it was a revelation because this is from a musician and you're listening to critics. Stop it. So it took a long time, and for whatever reason, I found myself thinking about rest titleman, and I need to be in the loving care of a real producer who not only knows what they're doing but loves the sound of my voice. And I looked him up. I was thinking we would maybe work on some of my new material, but he said, I want to do a jazz I want to do a jazz record. You have not done the American Songbook. That's what we're going to do. And so I said, oh, gay, and we began to exchange ideas. But what happened was I knew in the last two years that my voice has begun to change a little because of aging, not a lot, and I don't smoke it to take care of it. But it was thinning here and tired there. And jazz is the most demanding, I think, because you can in other things. You can yell, you put that up in the back of the throat and hit anything. But if you're gonna do quiet stuff, what seemed to happen when I started, is this this other quietitude that was a little bit, you know, saucy and sensual. She just stepped right up to the microphone and she knew just what she was doing, Like, who is this? I love her voice, it's got a lower thing. But right away I heard the command that I prayed i'd have and didn't expect, and there it was. So we made an extraordinary record that's kind of magic. We went full circle back to the time we left off our professional relationship at Pirates. It's not like Pirates, but something in the power of what happens when we work together was there. I think it stands well next to any beloved vocal work from the fifties or sixties here so because there's a feeling of sensual love and humor and all the things that you can get if you survive. I'm sixty nine this year. If you survive, you can bring all this stuff to your life and then bring it to the sound of your voice into music. And I think that's what's there, is humor and the love of life and the idea that we're singing, you know now, for ourselves anymore. We're not going to be here to you know, and maybe I will, but but I'm singing now for others and reaching out right. That's a great place to stop. Thank you so much. That was just wonderful. Thanks to Ricky Lee Jones for playing and reminiscing about her career with Bruce Headland. You can hear all of our favorite Ricky Lee Jones songs on a playlist at broken record podcast dot com. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. Broken Record is produced with help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrell, Ventaladay, Nisha vencut Georgie McMillan, and Eric Sandon. Our editor is Sophie Crane. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription service that offers bonus content and uninterrupted ad free listening for only four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions, and if you like the show, remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast stack Art thee Music's by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Michmand