With her latest album,The Other Side of Desire, released this week, and Rock’s Backpages revisits a piece originally published in the NME in 1979 About the crassest tag anyone has tried to hang on Rickie Lee Jones is that she’s “the female Tom Waits”. It is also the kind of tag that will probably cause the recipient a good deal of discomfort over the next year or so.
Unfortunately,it’s also kind of apt. The similarities between Ms Jones and the aforementioned Waits are more than a limited marked. Both gain a basis in 1940s jazz nostalgia, both seem to be trying to turn themselves into characters from some Beat Generation/Damon Runyon world where Nick the Greek slips through the shadows and Jack Kerouac could indicate up any moment in a beat-up Hudson.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com