Flying Cowboys' simultaneously bears the distinctive mark of Rickie Lee Jones's wild, unruly talent and continues the steady process by which her art is achieving a stunning, mature force. While it explores a wealth of themes and musical styles, the album unfolds with the ongoing grace of one long song. What provides unity to the album's varied elements is its seductive rhythmic flow, the down-home surrealism of Jones's lyrics, the clarity and intelligence of Walter Becker's production and, of course, the sensual elasticity of Jones's extraordinary singing.
The album – Jones's first in five years – opens with the easygoing groove of "The Horses," a song addressed to a young
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girl, perhaps Jones's daughter, as well as to the young girl that Jones herself once was. Over simple, eloquent piano and percussion accompaniment, Jones begins the song as if it were a bedtime story – a story that evokes the twilight world between sleep and waking in which the willingness to believe and let go is all that separates a person from a realm filled with wonder. The song builds to a rolling chorus, and Jones assures the young girl: "We'll be riding on the horses, yeah/Way up in the sky, little darlin'/And if you fall I'll pick you up, pick you up."
In the song's concluding chorus, Jones wails with improvisatory fervor: "I was young myself not so long ago.... And when I was young, oh I was a wild, wild one." This acceptance of her past – and Jones has been a wild, wild one, indeed – at the same time that she assumes adult responsibilities toward the young girl makes for a human fullness that helps keep Flying Cowboys emotionally grounded even in its boldest flights.
"The Horses" also demonstrates the subtlety and appropriateness of Becker's production – and calms anyone who feared that the cofounder of Steely Dan might suffocate Jones's hipster looseness in icy musical perfectionism. No fewer than sixteen musicians play and sing on "The Horses," and the arrangement still seems open, comfortable and endlessly inventive. Working in the same manner as the record's themes, Becker's settings provide Jones with enough structure to make her vocal pyrotechnics meaningful.
Jones again recollects the wild days of her youth in the title track, a song that, like "The Horses," conjures up a vision of spiritual deliverance ("We come to the river/We'll walk away from all this now") from a world that is "a desert." "Flying Cowboys" is also one of the four songs on the album that Jones co-wrote with her husband, Pascal Nabet-Meyer. "Away From the Sky," a quiet meditation in which Jones's voice floats in a melancholy atmosphere created by two guitars and two synthesizers, and "Atlas' Marker," a jazzy number on which Randy Brecker plays trumpet, end the album on a note of yearning for a place that's "somewhere better than the world where we live."
But not all of Flying Cowboys, whose very title is a fusi
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