RICKIE LEE JONES
''THE DEVIL YOU KNOW''
SEPTEMBER 18 2012
42:19
1/Sympathy for the Devil
Mick Jagger / Keith Richards/6:27
2/Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Neil Young/3:53
3/Masterpiece
Ben Harper/4:27
4/The Weight
Robbie Robertson/6:31
5/St. James Infirmary
Traditional/2:18
6/Comfort You
Van Morrison/3:12
7/Reason to Believe
Tim Hardin/5:17
8/Play with Fire
Mick Jagger / Brian Jones / Keith Richards / Charlie Watts / Bill Wyman/3:44
9/Seems Like a Long Time
Theodore Anderson/3:54
10/Catch the Wind
Donovan Leitch/2:36
DJ Bonebake /Vibraphone
Jamie Elman /Piano
Larry Goldings /Organ, Piano
Sheldon Gomberg /Bass, Producer
Ben Harper /Bass, Drums, Guitar, Organ, Percussion, Producer, Vibraphone, Vocals (Background)
Jesse Ingalls /Piano
Rickie Lee Jones /Guitar, Percussion, Piano, /Vocals, Vocals (Background)
Chris Joyner /Organ
David Lindley /Violin
Jason Yates /Organ
REVIEW
by Thom Jurek
Rickie Lee Jones' The Devil You Know is a collection of classic rock cover songs that follows the intimate -- and excellent -- Balm in Gilead. Jones has performed covers since she began singing in dive bars in Los Angeles in the 1970s. They've made steady appearances in her recording career: Girl at Her Volcano (1983), Pop Pop in 1991, and It’s Like This (2000). Jones is a truly gifted interpreter. She takes songs inside herself, pulls them apart, reveals previously hidden meanings, and imbues them with new shades of meaning while transforming them into something of her own. Ben Harper, who collaborated with her on Balm in Gilead, produced the set. He gets it exactly right: the instrumentation is sparse, leaving lots of space for Jones' voice at the forefront. Ultimately, The Devil You Know is about Jones' voice and the journey it takes through these songs. So intimate are these proceedings, the listener may feel she is eavesdropping. In Jones' voice, "Sympathy for the Devil" is no longer a swaggering statement of rebellion, but an exposed view of the heart of the being who boasts. Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" sheds the innocence of the original and imparts experience, wisdom, and scars from love's battlefield without bitterness or cynicism, only tenderness. Her reading of Van Morrison's "Comfort You" is proof. She takes the songwriter's sense of want and expresses it as a pure intention in spite of its cost. The two seeming oddities here -- Harper's original "Masterpiece" and the standard "St. James Infirmary" -- add striking depth and dimension. The former is obviously modeled on Morrison's Astral Weeks period and as such, Jones gives it that anchor. Her take on the latter tune strips away the decades of nostalgia and brings it right back to the blues. Her emotive resonance brings back the depth of emotion the song was meant to convey. Jones' version of Tim Hardin's "Reason to Believe" and Ted Anderson's "Seems Like a Long Time" both appeared on Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells a Story. Jones adds a different kind of authority to both. Her voice, while less grainy, is more world-weary, more broken, but more convincing in its resolve. Between them is the Rolling Stones' "Play with Fire," its refrain is a warning (once more stripped of its boast), an act of simple, dark truth-telling. With its restrained arrangements and spacious production, The Devil You Know allows Jones' enigmatic voice the room it needs to rise and deliver these songs, not from rock & roll history, but from her heart, marrow, and bones.
BIOGRAPHY
by Jason Ankeny
Once touted as the natural successor to Joni Mitchell, singer/songwriter Rickie Lee Jones proved no less idiosyncratic or mercurial; like Mitchell, Jones experienced significant commercial success at the outset of her career, but a restless creative spirit -- combined with a stubborn refusal to fit comfortably into any one musical niche -- sealed her ultimate destiny as that of a highly regarded cult heroine.
Jones was born on November 8, 1954, in Chicago, but the volatile relationship between her mother and father resulted in an upbringing that led her everywhere from Phoenix, Arizona, to Olympia, Washington, where an expulsion ended her school career. As a teen, Jones left home and began drifting up and down the West Coast before settling in Los Angeles in the mid-'70s. There she worked a series of waitressing jobs while occasionally performing in area clubs, where she sang and honed her unique, Beat-influenced spoken word monologues. She also began a relationship with fellow boho Tom Waits.
Her first measure of success was as a songwriter; after her friend Ivan Ulz sang Jones' composition "Easy Money" over the phone to Lowell George, the ex-Little Feat frontman included it on his album Thanks I'll Eat It Here. Then in 1978 Jones' four-song demo came to the attention of Warner Bros. executive Lenny Waronker, who enlisted Russ Titleman to co-produce her self-titled 1979 debut LP. Spurred by the success of the jazz-flavored hit single "Chuck E's in Love," Rickie Lee Jones became a smash both commercially and critically, earning praise for Jones' elastic vocals, vivid wordplay, and unique fusion of folk, jazz, and R&B.
With 1981's follow-up, Pirates, she gave early notice that her music would not sit still; employing longer and more complex song structures, her lyrics tackled themes of evolution, change, and death. Two years later, she returned with Girl at Her Volcano, an EP collection of live jazz standards and studio outtakes; with 1984's The Magazine, she made another left turn, teaming with composer James Newton Howard for her slickest, most synth-driven outing to date.
After taking a few years off from recording, she resurfaced with 1989's sterling Flying Cowboys, produced by Steely Dan's Walter Becker and recorded with the aid of the wonderful Scottish trio the Blue Nile. Don Was took over the production reins for 1991's Pop Pop, on which Jones covered ballads ranging in origin from Tin Pan Alley to the Haight-Ashbury while backed by jazz players including Charlie Haden and Joe Henderson. After 1993's Traffic from Paradise, she embarked on an acoustic tour; Naked Songs, a document of those unplugged shows, followed in 1995. Ghostyhead was released in 1997 and the standards record It's Like This appeared three years later.
She returned to original material in 2003 with The Evening of My Best Day, an album that expressed her anger with contemporary American politics. During the summer of 2005, Rhino released the three-CD anthology Duchess of Coolsville. Two years later, The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard, a stunning collection of songs based on friend Lee Cantelon's 1997 book The Words, came out. Balm in Gilead followed in 2009. In 2012, Jones returned with the Ben Harper-produced covers album, Devil You Know.
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