There is a moment near the end of “Danny’s All-Star Joint” where Rickie Lee Jones scats a line so casual and so utterly her own that you forget she was twenty-four years old and had never made a record before.
That debut landed in the spring of 1979 like someone had left a stranger’s diary on your doorstep — intimate, littered with invented slang, smelling faintly of cigarettes and the Sunset Strip at two in the morning. Nobody sounded like this. Nobody had thought to.
The Sessions
Lenny Waronker produced it at Warner Bros. Recording Studios in Burbank, with Russ Titelman co-producing several tracks. These two had a gift for knowing when not to touch something, and they applied that gift liberally here. The core rhythm section was the kind of thing you only assembled in late-seventies Los Angeles: drummer Jeff Porcaro, who was already doing sessions that would define the era, and bassist Willie Weeks, whose pocket is so deep on “Chuck E.’s in Love” it nearly disappears into the floor.
Dr. John sat down at the piano on “Easy Money,” and his presence is felt the way a bar regular is felt — he belongs there, nobody makes a fuss, the room just settles.
Becker and Fagen contributed backing vocals. Lowell George played slide on “Easy Money” as well, one of his last significant sessions before he died that summer. The record is haunted by that now in ways it wasn’t meant to be.
What She Actually Did
What’s easy to miss, because the arrangements are so warm and lived-in, is how formally strange this music is. Jones wrote in meters and phrases that break where you don’t expect them to. “On Saturday Afternoons in 1963” barely has a pulse — it floats like a memory half-retrieved, Nick Martinis’s brushwork barely touching the snare.
Her voice moves between registers without announcement. She’ll drop into something almost spoken, then reach for a note that has no business being there, and find it. Lenny Waronker’s genius here was keeping the microphone close and the production out of the way.
Russ Kunkel handled drums on a handful of tracks — the record used multiple rhythm players across different sessions, which is part of why it never settles into a single groove. It keeps you listening for what comes next.
“Coolsville” is the one that gets me every time. Short, nearly wordless in its middle section, built around a walking figure from a piano and a mood that has no precise name. It sounds like the end of a night that was better than you expected.
The whole thing runs just under forty minutes and feels both longer and shorter than that — longer because the world Jones builds is dense enough to wander in, shorter because you’re never ready for it to be done.