•
Rating:
Among various reasons, almost all sentimental, that lead some like me to prefer the dear old vinyl to the cold CD, there's also the opportunity to truly admire the album covers. In the years when LPs reigned, the illustration of the covers, think of progressive records for example, had become a true art form, a sort of iconic preface to the album that, in the most successful cases, was capable of revealing the deeper meaning of the work. And if that's true, covers like the one of this famous Rickie Lee Jones album, "Pirates," manage to reflect its content in the best possible way.
Brassai, the great Hungarian photographer, famous for capturing the Parisian nocturnes of the '30s and their composite "fauna," captures the moment when a man and a woman meet in a suggestive nocturnal twilight. She holds her arms around his neck; he remains with his hands in his pockets, a masculine composure betrayed by a hint of a smile. It's not possible to know if they are saying goodbye, planning an escape, or if it's a fleeting or mercenary encounter. The feeling, however, is that two solitudes have crossed paths; two "losers" who don't think much about the future, but only about making their precarious human condition at least bearable with a bit of love.
"Pirates" is precisely about this: bohemian, wandering, Bukowskian life, or better yet, Waitsian (Rickie was also Tom's woman and appears in the inner cover of "Blue Valentine," where she tries to support her partner probably knocked out by too many libations).
The stories alternate between ordinary despair ("Skeletons") and disarming romanticism ("We Belong Together"), naive vital bursts ("Pirates" - "...I'm trying to have fun/ while I wait for the Pirates to come take me away...") to corrosive and very feminine irony ("A Lucky Guy" - "...yes, quite a lucky man/ doesn't worry about me... okay, he's not the only one/ but what happened to the others?/ They worked hard/ until they annihilated themselves for a lonely girl./ Now I'm a lonely girl").
But such tales wouldn't be so incisive, wouldn't remain so impressed in memory if it weren't for Rickie's unmistakable voice interpreting them and, above all, her piano's music capable of sketching nervous, syncopated melodies, straddling tradition and innovation, between jazz, rhythm and blues, and folk, as thrilling as they are sophisticated. But it's not just her and her spleen; the success of the venture involves a bunch of great musicians, Steve Gadd, Dean Parks, Randy Brecker, David Sanborn, even Donald Fagen, who makes an appearance with his synth in the title track (a few years later his buddy, Walter Becker, will be the producer of another recommended album by the artist, "Flying Cowboys").
Rickie Lee Jones is a class act artist, a model for a generation of singer-songwriters who, in the years when this work was published, surfaced in great numbers on the scene. And this work, even if it didn't achieve the great success of her debut, fully does her justice and is perhaps the best way to approach her and her restless sensibility for the first time.
Tracklist Lyrics Samples and Videos
01 We Belong Together (05:05)
I say this was no game of chicken
You were aiming your best friend
That you wear like a switchblade on a chain around your neck
I think you picked this up in Mexico from your dad
Now its daddy on the booze
And Brando on the ice
Now it's Dean in the doorway
With one more way he can't play this scene twice
So you drug her down every drag of this forbidden fit of love
And you told her to stand tall whet you kissed her
But that's not where you were thinking...
How could a Natalie Wood not get sucked into a scene so custom tucked?
How now look who shows up
In the same place
In this case
I think it's better
To face it ---
We belong together
We belong together
Once Johnny the King made a spit ring
And all the skid kids saw a very, very proud man
And he entwine her in his finger
And she lay there like a baby in his hand
And climb upon the rooftop docks lookin' out on the crosstown seas
And he wraps his jacket across her shoulders
And he falls and hugs and holds her on his knees
But a sailor just takes a broad down to the dark end of the fair
To turn her into a tattoo
That will whisper
Into the back of Johnny's black hair
And now Johnny the King walks these streets without her in the rain
Lookin' for a leather jacket
And a girl who wrote her name forever
A promise that ---
We belong together
We belong together
Shall we weigh along these streets
Young lions on the lam?
Are the signs you hid deep in your heart
All left on neon for them?
Who are foolish
Who are victim
Of the sailors and the ducky boys who would
Move into your eyes and lips and
Every tear
That falls down on the neighborhood now
I said "Bird, we just gotta tell them"
And they turn and ignore us
And the only heroes we got left
Are written right before us
And the only angel who sees us now
Watches through each other's eyes
And I can hear him
In every footstep's passing sigh
He goes crazy these nights
Watching heartbeats go by...
And they wisper ---
We belong together
We belong together
Loading comments slowly
Other reviews
By robycorgan
Pirates confirms itself as the dark summa of all her work, her most obscure album and somehow also sweetly unbearable.
It is somehow still an album made of rain.
