Oh Rickie, you're so fine

ROB ADAMS makes Celtic connections with secret bagpipe fiend Rickie Lee Jones and a family whose singing is almost spiritual

Trust one of the supposed "outsiders" to give the definitive Celtic connection: the weather. Rickie Lee Jones is in her house in Tacoma, Washington. Outside it's foggy and cold. Finger-hurting cold. Boy, is she going to feel at home in Glasgow next week. Jones, still best known for one of the coolest debut albums ever released and its offspring, the unavoidable hit of 1979, Chuck E's in Love, feels at home in Glasgow anyway.

"I've been there a few times," she says."I liked it, though I have a little trouble understanding what the heck the people are saying. Actually, Glasgow rather resembles the town where I live. A dock city, working people, gangs. Happy lives, unhappy lives, it's the same all over. Except, you got a wind over there that's been hanging around for about 400 years, and when it hits you it is the coldest and heaviest with spirit I have ever felt. Such perilous beauty in the invisible world."

If all this reads a little like creative writing rather than a verbal riposte from the hippest of the hip, that's because it is the written rather than the spoken word. Jones has an aversion to interviews, although she's quite happy to e-mail back generous, freewheeling answers to questions. She's not too keen on music critics either.

"If only there were no reviews," she says in response to a question about her creative processes. "How anybody writes a song after the first year or two is beyond me. Must be a little masochistic. Well, not really. The great elation one feels when one gets the picture, when the thing presents itself, it's just so wonderful."

Jones was almost 25 when that first album came out and had already lived enough for more than one life out of a Beat novel. With a history in vaudeville, her family were restless and rootless, and at 14 Jones ran away, hitch-hiked to California, and wound up living in a cave with some hippies.

After dropping out of university she got a job as a waitress, shared a variety of crash pads, then started singing in Venice Beach's less salubrious establishments - places, she recalls, "full of bikers, degenerates, drunken men, and toothless women". The cast that peopled her early songs was assembling.

The first album cover she appeared on was her then boyfriend Tom Waits's Blue Valentine. A year later, having snared a recording contract after Lowell George of Little Feat covered her Easy Money on his Thanks I'll Eat It Here solo album, she was sucking a cigarillo on her own album cover and Chuck E's in Love was all over the airwaves.

Fame and money followed. But fame didn't stop her from being lonely (Waits had moved on) and money bought lots of things, but most of all it bought drugs, which initially were fun. "But because I was self-destructive, in just a little while it became a tool for my demise," she says.

In the end, though, she didn't want to die. She had music to make, songs to write, a stage performance to devise around her 1984 album, Magazine.

Lonelier than ever, she decided to marry the next person she saw - and she did. It didn't work out, but it did produce her daughter, Charlotte, with whom, two years ago, she moved far away from the "boy's world" of the music industry in California to Tacoma.

Here she seems content. Although scathing of the star-making machinery behind the popular song, as another fiercely independent female singer-songwriter put it, she feels that, over all, she has been blessed.

Since her initial success, her recorded output has been steady and never short of spirit or character or the willingness to take risks.

Her latest album, It's Like This, her tenth, is a collection of cover versions, including songs from movies, a Beatles song (For No One), and a brilliant reading of Traffic's Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys, and boasts the kind of diversity generally which makes it one of the few albums, surely, to draw on the songwriting talents of both Marvin Gaye and Charlie Chaplin.

"I guess something in me is suspicious of trying to duplicate, to imitate," she says. "I see the cover songs no different from my own, and do not want to limit the package. I write whatever comes to me. I sing whatever I like. Difficult to market, I guess, to an audience that has been marketed to so much. But some of us have to do this.

"It's hard for me to apply singing to the songs I write because I can't listen to the thing objectively and improvise. I know the melody, and that is the only way I can do it, mostly. Whereas with songs I have learned, rather than made up, I am looser and lighter, I think. In the end, the idea is that they are all just fine, fine songs." Being familiar with Glasgow, she is really looking forward to experiencing Celtic Connections, both playing and listening, because she has a secret love that's no secret anymore: the bagpipes.

"I find that one of the most soothing of earthly sounds," she says. "I hear people say they hate it, but I can't really understand how that could be. Somebody starts playing them and I am sleepy, floating above my body, at ease."

* Rickie Lee Jones plays Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Wednesday, January 24.