There are albums that feel less like they were recorded and more like they were found, like someone left a window open in 1981 and this whole broken, beautiful thing just drifted in.
Pirates is Rickie Lee Jones’s second record, and it is one of the strangest major-label releases of its era — a suite of songs about loss and longing and the specific gravity of people who have already left, made with the patience of someone who had nothing left to prove and everything left to say.
The Room It Was Made In
It was recorded at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, engineered by the late Val Garay, who had just come off producing Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes” and knew exactly how to make a room sound like a room. The production credit goes to Russ Titelman and Lenny Waronker, two Warner Bros. lifers who understood that Jones needed space more than she needed polish.
The personnel reads like a session musician dream — Dr. John plays piano on several tracks, which tells you something about the mood they were after. Victor Feldman handles vibraphone and percussion, lending the record that cool, after-hours shimmer. Fred Tackett, later of Little Feat, plays guitar throughout. These weren’t names dropped for prestige; they were the right people for the temperature of these songs.
Drummer Jeff Porcaro plays with the kind of looseness that only sounds effortless because he was genuinely that good.
What the Songs Actually Do
Jones is twenty-six when this comes out, and she sings like someone who has already lived three different lives. “We Belong Together” opens the album and it is, without qualification, one of the greatest album openers of the decade — a slow, aching ballad that establishes the record’s emotional key before you even realize you’ve been tuned.
“Woody and Dutch on the Slow Train to Peking” is nine and a half minutes of jazz-inflected spoken word and melody that shouldn’t work and completely does.
“Living It Up” has a looseness that sounds spontaneous, which almost certainly means it took many careful hours to achieve. That’s the trick of the whole record — everything feels accidental, offhand, the musical equivalent of a story told in a bar at closing time. But Garay’s engineering is meticulous, every ambient detail considered, every piano note given room to decay properly.
The orchestral arrangements, largely handled by Tom Scott and others, could have tipped the whole thing into smooth-jazz softness. Instead they feel like weather — something you’re inside of rather than listening to.
A Record That Lives in the Dark
I’ll say this plainly: Pirates is a better album than the debut. The debut was hungrier, more urgent, and that urgency is real and worth having. But this one is deeper. It knows things the debut was still learning.
It also flopped, commercially speaking. The debut had “Chuck E.’s in Love” and a cultural moment behind it. Pirates had no such hit, and radio didn’t know what to do with it, and the industry moved on quickly. Decades of critical rehabilitation followed, as they always do when something arrives too complete for its moment.
Put this on after the house goes quiet. Don’t look at your phone. Let “Skeletons” find you somewhere in the second half of the record, and see if you can explain what it does to you.
I can’t, and I’ve been trying since I was nineteen.