Rickie Lee Jones has just released a new album, The Sermon On Exposition Boulevard, which also marks her first for her new home on New West Records. From the onset of her long career, Jones has been both a musical chameleon and rogue champion of genre exploration.
Exposition Boulevard further cements her reputation as an adventurous songwriter willing to follow her muse no matter where it may lead. In the case of Exposition Boulevard, that muse has led her into the often misguided territory of writing about Christianity and the Bible. Not surprisingly, Jones handles the material with both class and grace churning out as experimental and exciting an album as she has released in years; it is in a word, fascinating. Well done.
RIYL: Lucinda Williams, Jim White, Victoria Williams
Download:
MP3: Rickie Lee Jones :: Falling Up
MP3: Rickie Lee Jones :: Tried To Be A Man
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myspace ++ newwestrecords.com
Thank you for your website and review of The Sermon on Exposition Blvd. It was a joy to work with Rickie on this project, which began as a spoken word/punk rendering of the words of Jesus. I started out with Mike Watt, and later with Peter Atanasoff. When Marc Chiat offered us his art studio, we enlarged our scope. Rickie came in to read from the book, but sang instead. That first track, Nobody Knows My Name, changed the project and it became an album of (her) songs. Notable for an artist of her history, is that Nobody Knows My Name, Where I Like it Best, and I Was There are all straight-through improvisational recordings. Rickie made up the melody and lyrics and these were put on the album without further tweaking, or minimal tweaking, since Rickie did add some ambient guitar shounds to I Was There after it was recorded.
All the best,
Lee Cantelon
NYC
great, smart music–impressive and I hope it is a hit
Lots of good stuff on this album. Rickie Lee Jones would definitely connect to generation y…blogs like yours give people a chance to hear her