Rickie Lee Jones's debut album was about as cool as it got in 1979. She wore a beret, she smoked some kind of cheroot and her association with Tom Waits ensured further late night credentials long before she even opened her mouth. She was also a bit of a musical mystery - her lyrics were good, she had a beautiful voice and yet her delivery and phrasing didn't always make it easy for the listener. What's more, it was never entirely clear what she was on about. That was 20 long years ago, Chuck E's In Love was a hit and her music was quite essential to anyone out to create a little after-hours West Coast essence.
But while that image at the time was very much that of a female version of Waits, Jones quickly developed a following of her own. Here was a serious artist with much more to offer than some romantic glimpse of Los Angeles after-dark. Here was a singer in the tradition of Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro and with more than enough musical quirks to suggest that she was in for the long haul. The precise starting point, however, had been in Chicago. She was in the third grade.
"My dad played trumpet and when he discovered I could do harmonies, he taught me My Funny Valentine, Ragtime Cowboy Joe and Sunny Side of the Street. The first time I recorded was with him. It was You are My Sunshine and Side By Side and he let me do the harmonies. Before that, my parents had that Harry Belafonte record and I used to listen to that over and over again. And an Andy Williams record with Moon River on it. And there was jazz stuff too like Nina Simone, but I didn't really like listening to that stuff at all. Then the Beatles came out and that was the first thing for me. I started writing just because the Beatles wrote songs and I wanted to be just like them. It took a long time before I could play the guitar - probably not until I was about 15 or so, and then I started writing songs."
By 1979, Jones was a well-known and successful singer-songwriter. Pirates (1981), Girl at Her Volcano (1983) and Magazine (1984) confirmed her reputation as a jazzy pop writer - her odd vocals meeting the slickest of musicians in a combination that was not always to everybody's taste. But for those who loved Rickie Lee Jones, she was one of those musicians whose work became somehow personal to them. From bedsits and beyond, there was a certain time of night, every night, for Rickie Lee Jones. Like a Cohen or a Dylan she found herself with an extremely devoted cult of devotees.
After a five-year gap, the album Flying Cowboys appeared in 1989. Pop Pop (1981), Traffic from Paradise (1993) followed, and two years later a sort of unplugged called Naked Songs re-introduced some of the old material in a different setting. The next album, however, was to be real surprise.
Ghostyhead (1997) was full of loops and drumtracks and amounted to a quite experimental collaboration with Rick Boston. With Ghostyhead it was immediately clear that she was not merely passing the time - this was a very different record and critics and fans alike were impressed. Jones herself was not at all surprised by the results however - as she puts it, "I made it and it's not like I suddenly heard it." The whole process, she says was both natural and very exciting.
"I think sometimes I've tried to do it like a Tin Pan Alley thing where we'll sit and exchange ideas. I haven't done it like that in a long time but actually you could probably write a really great song that way. When I collaborated on Ghostyhead it was really so exciting because it was just pure inspiration. I listen to your drum track. I make up a melody. You answer that and we do it very fast. It has to happen really fast for me because I lose interest in what I'm doing really fast."
Rickie Lee Jones talks enthusiastically about writing. She loves to write - songs lyrics, poems, short stories, letters, faxes and essays all feature on her website. A Long Letter About Neil Young, Women in Business and At A Motel Near The Airport are among the musings on offer. She loves words and is interested in the differences between songs lyrics and poems.
"I was thinking about this yesterday. There's like a really simple line like "I'm standing on the corner" and when you sing it, it becomes so beautiful - but if you read it, it wouldn't mean anything. That's the art of writing a song - when you sing something simple and it becomes so beautiful because there's a melody you've given it. Also I think that sometimes people try to stuff poetry into songs and it suffers. I like to write and I want to do both more writing and reading out loud. That way I don't try to stuff the wrong kind of thing into a song lyric. I want to keep the lyrics separate."
As for the songwriting process itself, Jones has nothing to say. She is one of those artists understandably unwilling to analyse too closely what she does. What system there is, if there is one, is far too delicate for that.
From Chicago to Phoenix, from Washington to LA and from New York to Paris, Rickie Lee Jones has lived in many places and probably written about most them. And yet, for her, physical location is of no real importance in terms of creativity. For someone whose early image was very much that of West Coast cool, these days she is not so much concerned with the workings and characters of an actual place. For Rickie Lee Jones there is now, artistically, only one place worth exploring.
"I just live in my head. A physical place might make it easier for you to stay home. But basically the room you live in is in your head."
Rickie Lee Jones plays HQ, Dublin on Tuesday