Rickie Lee Jones Pirates

After years out of print, Rickie Lee Jones' stunning first two albums - 1979's self-titled and lauded 1981 follow up Pirates - will receive long overdue vinyl reissues in January 2019. The Gold-certified Pirates was an even darker, deeper, and richer affair than her debut, and included the haunting "We Belong Together," and "A Lucky Guy," which Jones has said grew out of her life with Tom Waits. The brilliant characterizations she builds in the lyrics for "Woody and Dutch on the Slow Train to Peking," and "Traces of the Western Slope," are amplified by her voice, which, at times, has the lonesome sound of a train whistle on a wind swept prairie and, at other times, sounds like nothing so much as laughter winding down into a whisper, or a sigh. The album confounded expectations and Jones fast became a poet of the disenfranchised who eschewed any purely commercial considerations when it came to making a song.