It seems there was no choice for Rickie Lee Jones but to be an artist. Born into a troubled, itinerant family, Rickie Lee was already a runaway by the time she was fifteen, with a vagabond lifestyle and a kid’s dream of liberation, illuminated by the twilight of the ’60s. In the mid-’70s, she was living in Venice Beach, working as a fake secretary for a gangster and writing lyrics on his IBM typewriter. She knew she was destined for something true and artistic. At a desolate bar, she figured out what her voice could do, performing jazz while the rest of the world turned its attention to antic disco. In 1978, Rickie Lee was the object of a major-label bidding war, and her uncanny, singular, stylish debut album vaulted her into the mainstream. There she arrived, fully formed, understood as what she was and still is: an iconoclast. Dubbed the Duchess of Coolsville, she wrote unconventional songs that bent and strayed out of pop convention and doubled back through jazz phrasing and American songbook; what came out of the speakers was always Rickie, wholly and truly. Her music was a dare to go further. A pop star who was undeniably her own girl, Rickie endowed a legacy that was later taken up by Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, Sheryl Crow, and others of the “to thy own self be true” kick. Her debut “Chuck E’s in Love” became part of the Top 40 canon and put her on the cover of Rolling Stone twice in two years. She was always in her trademark beret, a sensual wild girl, divining a pure musical fate. 

Landmark albums followed, like 1981’s Pirates and 1989’s Flying Cowboys, as did a grip of Grammys, and the acclaim continued through the eclectic sprawl of Pop Pop, Ghostyhead, and The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard in the ’90s and ’00s. Her inimitable voice has stretched across five decades. Her songs are full of curious characters, molls and dolls, girls tossed by fate, truest lost loves, death wish abysses, humor, and heavenly connection—and all are luminous with desire and full of life. Her work is vast, gloriously unpredictable, ever-evolving, steadfast in its vision. Which is to say, Rickie Lee is a treasure; her life’s work is a master class in being a free woman. Her recent memoir, Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour, is now out in paperback.