WHEN Rickie Lee Jones moved to New Orleans nine years ago, she did so because she found the city met her temperament; easygoing, a little eccentric, perhaps, and still richly steeped in music. She lives in the Marigny neighbourhood, downriver from the fabled French Quarter and famed for its jazz clubs, night market and Creole cottages. There is a different rhythm down here; fewer stag parties, more bohemians. In the evenings, bands play in the bars all along Frenchmen Street.
In the heady days of the pandemic, Jones offered a glimpse of her life here through a series of streamed at-home concerts. There was her living room, musket on the wall, tall vase of white calla lilies in the window and a selection of portraits hanging behind her. The camerawork was exquisitely rickety, but Jones, at one point resplendent in a pink polkadot dress, played songs from across her career, accompanied by anecdote, aside and backstory.
Today, she sits in that same living room, over her shoulder a view of a fireplace and the long necks of several string instruments. She is engaging and generous company; that broad smile, that elastic voice, a sense of something gleamingly conspiratorial. The day we speak, Burt Bacharach has just died, and for a while we talk about his songwriting, and why, for all her reputation as a great interpreter of song, Bacharach’s material has never quite appealed. “His songs are very complicated and they’re hard to sit around and play,” Jones says. “I sing them a lot all by myself, or if they come on the radio. But they’ve been done perfectly and I don’t know if there’s another way to do them better.”
She thinks for a moment. “Maybe ‘24 Hours From Tulsa’ you could do in a new
