Traffic from Paradise

In 1979, Rickie Lee Jones singlehandedly made the singer/songwriter genre popular again. Then she grew into a kind of pop expressionist, but as her sales numbers shrank her listenability didn't. On this hugely underrated 1993 album (her seventh and last for Geffen), Jones scamps and croons from corners of pop and jazz and blues, and the songs go from beautifully hummable epistles of the broken and damned (“Beat Angels”) to poppy shuffles about ever-elusive happiness (“Jolie Jolie”) to prayerlike pieces (“Pink Flamingos”). She straddles the delicate balance between innocent yearning for love and its security (“Stewart’s Coat”) and outright sullied adulthood (“Tigers”). Her themes canvas places where dreams can either live or die, where you either soar or fail or come to a dead stop. The songs are sometimes as open-ended and ambiguous as the placement of tarkas and French horns and eight-string guitars, but you see vividly the indecent ghosts and the archipelagos and the animals and the girl brushing her teeth with licorice seeds. And Jones' perfect folksy-pop take on David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” adds vulnerability to its androgynous sass.