MOG

I thought I'd go through my list of artists and write a little something about each of them. I have a blog elsewhere in which I write a bunch of things, so I'll confine my comments here to music.

I might as well start with Rickie Lee Jones, since she is apparently at the top of my music collection. And besides, I've already written a lot about her elsewhere.

So here's a bit of something I wrote about her music just over a year ago, right after Duchess of Coolsville: An Anthology came out. (It's a good compilation if you don't have anything from her. Mostly stuff from her first five or six studio albums. Some rarities and unreleased versions, too.) Anyway, what I had written:

Rickie Lee Jones... The first song of hers that I had heard, really heard, was "Satellites"... From that song was born a character... "Ice was reading fortunes by the moonlight // casting runes on the rooftops and alleys"... I wouldn't write stories with Ice as a character for nearly ten years, but he was born my freshman year of college... That makes him older than J.B. Nimble... Which is something... I heard the song around October, I think. The video had snow falling and the like. And soon the snow was falling outside, too. And I listened to that song over and over again around the holidays. So Rickie Lee Jones will forever be associated with winter in my mind...

She is one of my top five favorite artists. (I keep saying things like that. I should actually write a top five, or probably top fifteen, list.) If you haven't heard her, I can't imagine recommending her enough. Her voice is complex (not beautiful, exactly, but totally mesmerizing). Her music somewhere among jazz, folk, r&b, and rock. It's just great music to read, write, or even think to.