The Gospel According to Rickie Lee Jones: A Heathen Explains

I saw Dame RLJ last night at Le Poisson Rouge. She's always amazing, but this was particularly good. She sang for two and a half hours straight. She sang selections from almost all her albums. Her band was great. She looked great. She sounded great. Her daughter flocked the stage for some inspired backup vocals in an otherwise solo version "Falling Up," which I actually didn't think was so great until I realized it was her daughter. What can I say? I love everything this woman does. She sounds like a siren, an original poet, she sings about big things—dark, heavy shit—in provocative, fleeting, and thoroughly artistic ways, and there's not a trace of a panderer in her. I'm certain that one day she'll be taught at universities, if not become a posthumous poet laureate of the universe.

Her last album is inspired by the teachings of Christ—based on Lee Cantelon's The Words—but she still maintains her agnosticism, and I've found that her breed of spirituality has informed mine. Her faith is probably much more sophisticated than how I describe it here—I really have no fluency in religion at all—but I think this, from "Where I Like It Best," which aims to reclaim prayer from much of its current political misuse, sums up something substantial:

God . . .
You are the prayer . . .
Those words you want to speak
They are the prayer
That dance you make
When you're by yourself
Just before your mother calls you on the phone
You are the prayer

I like how she reduces the individual to a collective, rather than the other way around: that the prayer offers the thread of united consciousness, and results in an omniscient (though perhaps self-defined) God. Heathen that I am, I can't tell you if this is generally understood to be the purpose of prayer, but it reminds me of yoga and for that reason I like it.

And given my curiosity about death, I'm also going to share her theory. It might be a Buddhist principle—again, the yoga thing—because it's the idea of a fixed quantity, a single vat of recycled energy: dying is no more than being dumped back into that vat and squirted out again for new life with the elements redistributed:

The golden thread of nature of this is:
Simply that we are a part of everything
That will ever exist.
To be loved is why we've come.
Every drop of rain that fell or falls
is always falling
on and on and on and on.
("A Tree on Allenford")

Which is a more cheerful way of saying this:

What you have will never be enough.
You will always want more.
But lift me out, over one more night.
All I want is what I was before.
("It Takes You There")

And then here, we have the "transition" taking place, the reduction/submission of the body into senses (this is an unbelievably gorgeous song, one that you play either while you're under influences, before you go to sleep, or as you go to sleep, wondering meanwhile if you'll ever wake up again). I don't know if this song in particular fits into the RLJ gospel, but in the off chance that someone reads this and is inspired to listen to her music, I can't recommend this one enough:

A distant light
that binds me.
A distant sound
that finds me,
When I'm through.
("Vessel of Light")

I mean, please: