The Welcome everyone to another episode of Soda Jaker on songwriting. We're positively careering towards the half century and joining us for the 48th edition of the show is a truly one of a kind artist, a consummate, versatile, limitlessly creative singer and songwriter whose music has bewitched fans and critics alike for over three decades,

as well as influencing several generations of performers.

It's the Duchess of Kulesville herself, Ricky Lee Jones.

We're thrilled that Ricky agreed to chat with us.

She's an artist of rare integrity with a singular approach to her work.

She's really plowed her own furrow from the get-go and that's something to be celebrated.

So that's why we're here today.

Ricky's also a great interps with other people's songs or song stylist, as she's been called.

She seems to uncover hidden depths to these compositions, which perhaps the writers are unaware.

She really seems to get right inside a song when she performs it. She positively lives and breeds it, in fact,

and that goes for her own music too of course.

Indeed.

Ricky Jones was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1954 and had something of an itiner in childhood

having lived variously in Chicago, LA, Phoenix and Olympia, Washington by the time she reached

adolescence. She became interested in music through her father, Richard, who was a singer

and songwriter himself.

Didn't he pen The moon is made of gold?

That's right, yeah, which Ricky recorded herself later on as he wrote it as a lullaby for her.

Oh right, yeah.

Ricky's interest in singing grew throughout her teens and while still at high school she began writing her own lyrics.

She also absorbed the pop and rock music of the day as well as developing a love for

musicals like West Side Story and singers like Frank Sinatra.

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