(New West Records) -- RICKIE LEE JONES will reemerge February 6, 2007 with her debut album for New West Records, THE SERMON ON EXPOSITION BOULEVARD—a work that's soul-satisfying and sonically unique.
Heading down some mighty interesting roads and discovering new magical essences, RICKIE LEE sounds like she's going through a transformation throughout the album in a way that's reminiscent of Van Morrison's performances on his classic album Astral Weeks. There's RICKIE's spellbinding performance on the eight-plus free-flowing minutes of "I Was There," the illuminating first single "Falling Up" and other highlights, including "Where I Like It Best," "Gethsemane," "Circle In The Sand," "7th Day," "Elvis Cadillac" and "Nobody Knows My Name."
What will certainly be most striking to some fans about THE SERMON ON EXPOSITION BOULEVARD is that it rocks harder than any album the two-time Grammy Award winner has ever recorded. "Nobody Knows My Name," the striking opening track, might best be described as "minimalist pure pop punk rock," and the evocative, riff-'n'-hook-filled, stream-of-consciousness rant titled "Falling Up" follows in a similar decidedly art-rock manner. What's ultimately just as fascinating as the remarkable music on the new album, however, is that all 13 songs are inspired by the real words and ideas of one Jesus Christ.
Essentially what RICKIE LEE JONES and her collaborators have done on THE SERMON ON EXPOSITION BOULEVARD is to put Christ's words into a modern-day context, portraying those words in a way that anyone can understand. Hence, "Elvis Cadillac"--which not only talks about cruising around Heaven in the King's most famous vehicle, but also mentions the late, great Janis Joplin. After all, if anyone in recent history can be considered a secular Jesus, it would have to be Mr. Presley, arguably one of the "Christs" walking among us for that generation.
The recording began in a painter's loft on an abandoned industrial street in mid-L.A. in the summer of '05. Lee Cantelon, who can best be described as a modern renaissance man, originally conceived the project as a lo-fi, low budget undertaking, a spoken word interpretation of "The Words," his book of Christ's teachings. Cantelon had created beds of music with guitarist Peter Atanasoff ("The Velvet Underground was the name that seemed to come up most often," recalls RICKIE LEE), and Cantelon's initial plan was to recruit friends and associates--running the gamut from punk icon Mike Watt to a homeless man he encountered every day to RICKIE LEE--to do the talking.
The project changed direction, though, when RICKIE LEE showed up to record her part. Instead of reciting the text, she stunned everyone in the studio by improvising an entire song to a track she had never heard. "Nobody Knows My Name" is that first recording. So began the inspired musical and textural improvisations that would become THE SERMON ON EXPOSITION BOULEVARD.
When circumstances put the recording on hold for half a year, the project seemed in danger of being abandoned. Ms. JONES hired producer Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, The Vines, Beck) to put the project back on track. Rob took RICKIE LEE and her crew to Hollywood's legendary Sunset Sound. Peter and Lee kept the 'Sermon' focused by using the same musicians throughout the recording. The new sessions would also find RICKIE LEE contributing musical ideas--adding her own bass and guitar parts--as well as lyrical ones, including such latter tracks as "7th Day," "Tried To Be A Man," "I Was There," and "Elvis Cadillac." Within six weeks the 'words' project was completed, and THE SERMON ON EXPOSITION BLVD was born. Besides the aforementioned songs, the album includes "It Hurts," "Where I Like It Best," "Donkey Ride," "Road To Emmaus," "Lamp Of The Body" and "Circle In the Sand" (originally written for the recent indie film Friends With Money).
"If you just have faith and try to believe and don't control it, it will unfold and reveal itself to you," says RICKIE LEE, who also fashioned the arresting multi-media collage on the album's cover. "In life, that's true--but it's especially true in art. If you don't try to control it, you'll find that you've delivered something way beyond what you could've mapped out." She elaborates: "I love what I was able to do with it, putting myself in the skin of Christ and all the characters walking with him on the sand--in my mind, that's what I was doing. It's still hard for me, two thousand years later, to come to that stuff and those ideas and read them. But what you get out of it is how little there actually is--there were very few words. And that Jesus was a rabbi, a teacher you can go to for wisdom. And it seems that the real story of Jesus is lived over and over again in each generation but no one ever recognizes the Christ that walks among us."
"It would be great if you could dip your hands into any spiritual path and find what's actually there," she notes." People today can't even hear the name Jesus without tensing up because they don't want to be associated with the TV evangelists and that lot. I just wanted to level the playing field a bit."
A two-disc DELUXE EDITION of THE SERMON ON EXPOSITION BOULEVARD will also be available with a 24-page booklet and six-panel Digipak, featuring additional art and photography from the recording sessions. The package will include an SACD with higher resolution Stereo and 5.1 Surround mixes of the album and a DVD with over a dozen short film "chapters" documenting the recording sessions, RICKIE LEE's international tour performances, and more. The DVD will also contain 256k MP3s of the entire album for higher quality downloads to portable devices such as iPods.
