Rickie Lee Jones begins our conversation with a story about a dead cow. “I went walking by the river in Louisville,” she says, “and a big dead cow floated by.” She laughs like this isn’t an odd way to start an interview, and honestly, for Jones, it’s not. Her world has always existed somewhere between the spiritual and the surreal — a cigarette haze of jazz, poetry, and improbable beauty, where even livestock can drift through like a metaphor.
She’s talking to me about Pieces of Treasure, her latest record — a collection of American Songbook standards that, in her hands, sound reborn rather than recycled. Jones has covered other people’s songs before, but this time she went straight into the heart of the canon: the 1940s, 1950s, the era of tuxedoed heartbreak and cigarette-burned ballads. “Because I’m American,” she says dryly when asked why she finally went full Tin Pan Alley. “And because I wanted to do it for Russ.”
That’s Russ Titelman — the producer who helped shape her first two albums, Rickie Lee Jones (1979) and Pirates (1981), both of which still hum with the jittery romance of post-bohemian Los Angeles. Titelman also worked with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and just about everyone who’s ever had a gold record in the ‘70s. “The moment I met him again,” Jones says, “I saw how full of music he still is. It was time for me to stop running everything and just be the singer.” She pauses, then adds, “That’s my best role.”
If that sounds like humility, it’s the kind born from a lifetime of wrestling her own legend. Jones, now in her late 60s, has survived the kind of cultural distortion that turns truth into folklore. “History,” she says, “is written by people who don’t know you.” She’s spent recent years reclaiming her story — first with her memoir Last Chance Texaco, then with this record, which revisits songs once owned by men and reframes them through her lens. “A lot of those lyrics came from a masculine place,” she says. “So I had to find a way to make the complex emotions my reality, not just some guy’s glib goodbye.”
Take “There Will Never Be Another You,” which she calls “dismissive on the surface — but maybe he’s heartbroken. Maybe she left him.” Jones doesn’t so much cover the tune as inhabit it, shaping it like an actor who’s decided the script needs a rewrite. “Singing a song,” she says, “is like acting. I know what she’s wearing, where she’s sitting, who she loved. Once I commit, that character stays with me forever.”
If she sounds theatrical, that’s because she’s always been. From the beret-tossing beatnik of her debut to the mystic wanderer of The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard, Jones has built a career out of playing herself in a dozen disguises. On Pieces of Treasure, she swaps the streetwise swagger for something closer to reverence — though she can’t resist bending the edges. “I want to make people uncomfortable,” she laughs. “If you leave too much space in a song, they don’t know what to do with it. That’s where the magic happens.”
She credits Titelman with helping her chase that restraint. “We’d record, then leave space for the Ood,” she says, referencing the haunting Middle Eastern string instrument that opens her version of “Nature Boy.” “The player came in and did three solos, and we said, ‘Let’s just have him play.’ It sounded like traveling through the Casbah. Strange and enchanting — exactly what the song needed.” She lets out a pleased sigh. “Russ said, ‘I’ve got it. Ood.’”
The tracklist reads like a crash course in pre-rock romance: “All the Way,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” “Just in Time.” But for Jones, they’re personal artifacts. “My dad taught me a lot of these,” she says. “He’d sing them when I was little. So when I do them now, all of that history — the afternoons, the auditions, the people who came before — it’s still there. It’s not nostalgia. It’s memory in motion.”
Even the album cover carries that ghostly echo: a black-and-white portrait from her early 20s, taken before she was signed. “It was in a drawer all these years,” she says. “I looked at it and thought, ‘That’s her. That’s me. That’s who sang these songs before I ever knew them.’” She grins, self-aware enough to know how mythic that sounds. “Why do we do covers anyway? So people will look.”
Maybe that’s the secret to Pieces of Treasure: she’s not reviving the past — she’s haunting it. The jazz phrasing is pure Rickie, the phrasing loose but lethal, the melodies full of quiet confidence. “Something fantastic happened beyond our control,” she says of the sessions. “It grew into something really beautiful.”
By the end, she thanks me, tells me to “watch out for floating cows,” and signs off with that half-smile you can hear even without seeing it. Rickie Lee Jones remains a national treasure — pieces and all.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
