New Release - Rickie Lee Jones/Evening Of Best Day

[DudeAsInCool]

Rickie Lee Jones was one of my favorite artists of the 80s and the 90s--and now with this new album, she returns to form with a mixture of pop jazz, soul, and rhythm & blues. Heard a couple cuts driving back from Santa Monica tonite--musicianship was top notch as usual, and her voice still ranks with the best. And if you go to her site and join her humanitarian cause, you get the album! www.rickieleejones.com check it out. Here's a review of the new album...

Rickie Lee Jones turns ugly into beautiful with  Evening Of My Best Day

Rickie Lee Jones goes back to her roots with many of the tracks on Evening Of My Best Day. "It Takes You There" recalls the tender zing of Flying Cowboy's only radio hit "Satellites." And before everything officially began on EOMBD she joined herself with David Kalish, a close friend and accomplished guitarist who had worked with her on 1981's quaint masterpiece Pirates. And his influence is heard through many of the tracks. 

"I was preoccupied with life," Rickie Lee Jones says. "I was living in Washington, mostly tending to a garden and raising my daughter. I had neither impetus or inspiration to write. It was an empty slate and there was no sense that anything would ever be coming again." Rickie Lee Jones says of her six-year writing block. But EOMD, Rickie's latest lyrical masterpiece, proves that she has fully recovered. 

Not only that - she's as vital a songwriter as ever. It wasn't easy for her in the beginning and snapping out of her block required a lot of dedication.

Rickie recounts, "Every afternoon I would sit down to meet the song I was working on. The process of manifesting an emotion or a thought in a set number of lines and notes can be very difficult, especially if you haven't done it for a long time. Some of the material was as much as fifteen years, but I didn't just want to pat some clay on it and call it done. What was needed was patience and prayer to let the process unfold."

Rickie's unlikely inspiration was the election of George W. Bush and the passage of The Patriot Act. From the very first song it's clear that EOMBD is a politically charged protest album. "Ugly Man" starts the album out with a right hook to President Bush's gut. Rickie croons "He's an ugly man, always was an ugly man, grew up to be like his father..." with the accompaniment of a soft jazzy drumbeat and lulling trumpet.  The folk-infused "Tell Somebody" advises us to speak out and take a stand. Surely to become a protest classic for years to come.

They say an artist must have some sort of push and pull to work against. If you ever doubted that this is true, that indeed beauty can rise within adversity, Evening Of My Best Day lays to rest any doubt. It makes you feel good to know that at least something good came out of Bush's presidential term.