Updated: May 12, 2020
RICKIE LEE JONES has spent a life time dancing with her muse. She is the most iconic American female singer-songwriter of her time, a woman who outlasted all her adversaries–including youth and self-destruction. A seasoned humility brings her performances an authenticity that only long-enduring musicians achieve.
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 JONES’ voice and songs, we saw smoky stocking seams, love being everything but requited. And it was during these years that RICKIE LEE’s 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. Shortly thereafter, Warner Brothers auditioned JONES and quickly signed her to the label.
Her 1979 debut RICKIE LEE JONES (Warner Bros) 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
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March 14, 2009

piano

voice / vocals

guitar

voice / vocals

organ, Hammond B3

voice / vocals
Artists who share similar musical characteristics to Rickie Lee Jones.