| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| lemonade kid |
Posted - 10/11/2011 : 18:29:09
Pirates
The Age (Australia), Aug.6, 1981 - "On Pirates, Rickie Lee Jones executes a brilliant artistic leap which not only outshines her Grammy-winning debut album but establishes her as one of the most important singer/songwriters of the decade."
The album is partially an account of her break-up with fellow musician Tom Waits after the success of her debut album. The cover is a 1976-copyrighted photo by Brassaļ.
Track 1) We Belong Together...just brilliant as it builds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUjq57rSQEM
"We Belong Together"
Here, Jones appears to lament the end of her relationship with Waits, populating her narrative with intriguing bohemian characters such as Johnny the King. The song also references movie icons Marlon Brando and Natalie Wood. Jones plays an elegant piano melody with the arrangement building around her.
Pirates is the second album by Chicago-born singer, songwriter, and musician Rickie Lee Jones, released in July 1981, two years after her eponymous debut Rickie Lee Jones. The album is partially an account of her break-up with fellow musician Tom Waits after the success of her debut album. The cover is a 1976-copyrighted photo by Brassaļ.
Overview
Jones relocated to New York City after her split from Tom Waits, and soon set up home with a fellow musician, Sal Bernardi from New Jersey, whom she had met in Venice, California in the mid-1970s, writing in their apartment in Greenwich Village. Bernardi, who had been referenced in the lyrics to "Weasel and the White Boys Cool" from her debut, was to become a frequent collaborator with Jones, and they composed the epic eight-minute suite "Traces of the Western Slopes" together.
Jones started writing the first songs from the album - "Hey Bub" (unreleased until 1983), "We Belong Together," and "Pirates" - in the autumn of 1979.
Elsewhere, the music on Pirates is often cinematic, with influences ranging from Leonard Bernstein to Bruce Springsteen and Laura Nyro. The album is more musically ambitious than its predecessor, and explores elements of jazz, R&B, bebop, pop, and Broadway, with multiple changes in tempo and mood within most songs.
Success
Pirates was well-received by critics, achieving a five-star rating in Rolling Stone magazine, which featured Jones on the cover of the August 6, 1981 issue for a second time. The album also became a Top 5 US chart success, and remained on the UK album charts for three months without the aid of a major hit single.
In recent years, Pirates' reputation has grown considerably, with British-based music magazine Word magazine proclaiming it as one of pop music's 25 Most Underrated Albums of All Time in 2005.
Reviews
Rolling Stone (US), Sep.3, 1981 - "It's Rickie Lee Jones' voice that carries Pirates to the stars and makes her whole crazy vision not only comprehensible but compulsive, compelling and as welcome as Christmas in July."
Time (US), Jan.4, 1982 - Best of 1981 - "Tales of lovers, losers and wanderers, delivered with a bopster's inflection and the sidling sensuality of a carhop."
SONGS
"We Belong Together"...above.
"Living It Up"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opCekF8J-KI
One of the last songs recorded for Pirates, "Living It Up" details the lives of a succession of bohemian street characters, with Jones introducing Louie, Eddie, and the down-and-out teenage domestic violence victim Zero. Jones' jaunty piano melody is embellished by sweeps of orchestration, lavish vocal harmonies, and tempo changes.
"Skeletons"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yetsIayMLvs
Along with "The Returns," the first song to be recorded for the album on January 30, 1980. The song, delivered solo on piano with a string arrangement, is based on the true story of a man who, in a case of mistaken identity, was killed by police in Los Angeles while taking his wife to hospital to give birth.
"Woody and Dutch on the Slow Train to Peking" (Jones, David Kalish)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CW3LbonRGg
Co-written with David Kalish, this is a bebop tribute to 1950s R&B icons, with a finger-snapping guitar riff and an in-studio male vocal chorus. It is one of the album's most upbeat songs and one of the few not to feature significant tempo/rhythm changes. The rhythm of the song is driven by a funk style bass line played by Chuck Rainey and percussion boxes and thighs played by Steve Gadd.
"Pirates (So Long Lonely Avenue)"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT-NNFmCZ3E
Another ode to Waits, this references "rainbow sleeves" in its lyrics; Waits' song "Rainbow Sleeves" was later to be recorded by Jones on her EP album Girl at Her Volcano. The song begins jauntily with a jazz horn melody before the horns fade out, making a return for the coda.
"A Lucky Guy"
http://vimeo.com/22114376
Along with "The Returns," perhaps the album's simplest song musically, here Jones appears jealous of Waits' apparent ease to get on with life at the end of the relationship ("he's a lucky guy/he doesn't worry about me when I'm gone.")
"Traces of the Western Slopes" (Sal Bernardi, Jones)
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xehf6z_rickie-lee-jones-1981-07-traces-of_music
Co-written with then-boyfriend Sal Bernardi, this is an eight-minute epic again detailing bohemian nightlife and referencing Edgar Allan Poe.
"The Returns"
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xehf6c_rickie-lee-jones-1981-08-the-return_music
A soft, simple ending delivered solo on piano with string arrangement, much like the closer to the previous album, "After Hours." It is also the album's shortest composition.
Track listing
1. "We Belong Together"
2. "Living It Up"
3. "Skeletons"
4. "Woody and Dutch on the Slow Train to Peking" (Jones, David Kalish)
5. "Pirates (So Long Lonely Avenue)"
6. "A Lucky Guy"
7. "Traces of the Western Slopes" (Sal Bernardi, Jones)
8. "The Returns"
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Rock and roll never sleeps, it just passes out.
-George Thorogood |
| 1 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| lemonade kid |
Posted - 08/03/2013 : 17:00:48
Wild Girl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFJpOr-BXrE
Captain Beefheart was known to playfully admonish fans shouting out requests at his shows by saying, "You know I'm gonna do exactly what I want." No one has documented Rickie Lee Jones saying the same thing, but in the course of a recording career that's just entered its fourth decade, she's made it clear that she shares the same philosophy, and she's bravely followed her muse wherever it chooses to go, rather than rehashing the sound and style of Rickie Lee Jones and Pirates, the acclaimed early recordings which made her a star. Jones certainly hasn't lost her love for the blues and jazz flavors that dominated her best-known work, but on 2009's Balm in Gilead (the title is drawn from a traditional spiritual), there's significantly less flash and swagger in her music; instead, these performances speak of an intimacy and warmth that befits the lyrics, which concern themselves with love, family, friendship, and the stuff that makes up everyday lives (something of a switch after the broadsides of The Evening of My Best Day and the spiritual mysteries of The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard). Jones duets with Vic Chesnutt on two numbers, the country-influenced weeper "Remember Me" and a spectral gospel variant, "His Jeweled Floor" (which also features Victoria Williams), and these two gloriously idiosyncratic talents bring out the best in one another, discovering a compelling mystery in their rural inflections that's an ideal match for the material. Ben Harper also lends his talents to this album, and his duet with Jones, "Old Enough," is a blues-infused tale of a busted romance that has a bit of the sass of "Chuck E.'s in Love," but half a lifetime's added depth and subtle detail. Jones opens the set with "Wild Girl," a song written for her daughter, and it's one of the most heartfelt and simply affecting moments on this album, along with "The Moon Is Made of Gold," a sweetly swinging lullaby that was written by her father when she was just a girl. And if songs like "Bonfires," "Eucalyptus Trail," "The Gospel of Carlos, Norman and Smith," and "Bayless St." don't lend themselves to simple categorization, they're all quietly beautiful and filled with a gentle passion that never sounds anything less than fearlessly honest. Rickie Lee Jones sounds less like a Hipster Chick and more like an Earth Mother whose experience has brought her plenty of wisdom on Balm in Gilead, and that's clearly just the way she wants it; Jones' faith in her own creative judgment is well-founded, and this is a work whose modest scale belies its emotional strength. -allmusic
Eucalyptus Trail
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPNkvJLj4CQ
Old Enough
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOyzAgtPSk4
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Old hippies never die, they just ramble on.
-lk |
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