Rickie Lee Jones | The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard

Anyone seriously listening to Beyoncé singing ”You must not know about me” and warning her beau with “I could have another you in a minute!” (does this woman really think that would solve her problem?) is most likely not going to enjoy Rickie Lee Jones’s latest release.

As I understand it, Rickie Lee hooked up with some L.A. musicians, one of whom has written a book, The Words, in which he makes his own personal interpretations of the words of Christ. Rickie read sections of his book while standing in a makeshift recording studio and listening to tracks these musicians had prepared. She proceeded to spontaneously sing her own lyrical interpretations of various passages. After some embellishments (and adding a few songs of her own) these tracks became the new RLJ CD.

This collaboration has produced a work of great integrity. It’s extremely creative and most definitely a rock’n’roll record. Patti Smith comes to mind in light of the poetic, somewhat political, and quite serious intent here, but this record is more about the politics, if you will, of a raw Christian view of the world. It often moves between modern western culture and a New Testament context . . . “now” becomes Roman-occupied Israel and that troubled era becomes now. We get a “timeless” sense of the follies and insensitivities of mankind.

A record like this can’t be made without a true artist present, one with a strong personal vision for the project and a good singing and/or reciting voice. Rickie Lee is such an artist.

Perhaps you haven’t tuned in to her various releases for a while, but the high points have been great—did you hear her early nineties album Flying Cowboys? Don’t miss its title track and “Away from the Sky”. Did you hear her take on “The Low Spark of Highheeled Boys” and “Showbiz Kids” on It’s Like This? How about her “Jolie, Jolie” on Traffic from Paradise? Her last CD, The Evening of My Best Day, should have been a big seller (check out “It Takes You There”) and should have won a Grammy for technical sound quality at the very least!

Rickie Lee Jones’s excellent musical influences abound on The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard—Van Morrison’s super-emotional LP, Astral Weeks, Sly Stone’s nonchalant cool on his hit “Family Affair,” Vini Reilly’s Durutti Column moods, The Velvet Underground, The Jefferson Airplane’s “Comin’ Back to Me” (which Rickie Lee covered on Pop Pop)--the list goes on . . . maybe even a little Adam Durwitz/Counting Crows.

“How do you pray in a world like this?” she asks in the voice of someone observing people starving outside a restaurant. “Comin’ into town on your donkey, but you’ll be goin’ out on a cross,” she whispers. If you weren’t particularly offended by Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, you may find you like the way this CD sets you thinking and feeling. The final cut, “I Was There,” is rather flimsy in its connection to the Jesus theme, but the rest of this thirteen-song (one instrumental) endeavor really does somehow reach something in the neighborhood of its very lofty goals!

Originally posted to SteveForbert.com in June 2007.