Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Rickie Lee Jones, the New Cat Stevens
Tuesday, February 6, 2007

What's with rock stars and conversions? First Garth Brooks, then Bono. Now Rickie Lee Jones. The NYT reports on the new album by Rickie Lee Jones, "The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard," which is based in part around the words of Jesus.

“Whatever it is Christ said doesn’t get a fair shake,” Rickie Lee Jones said. On a rainy December day, she was sniffling and coughing, fighting a bad cold and losing. “There’s not much written, it was done 150 years later, and it was used to create an empire. So can we get rid of all that and just see what the guy said?”

Ms. Jones was explaining the premise behind her new album, “The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard,” out today on New West Records. The project is an attempt to explore the words and ideas of Jesus in a contemporary context, backed by the most rocked-up music of her almost-30-year career.

In a taping at Sirius Satellite Radio immediately before Ms. Jones’s interview, the intensity of her relationship to this material was evident. With eyes closed, shoes off and raggedy socks rolled down to her ankles, Ms. Jones sang, gesticulated, directed and cajoled her four-piece band. She started the session crouched in a three-point stance — one fist on the floor, the other clutching a microphone — and proceeded to pace and stalk around the tiny studio, fully possessed by the music.

“Sermon” began in 2005 when Robert Lee Cantelon, a close friend of Ms. Jones’s, organized a recording of various people reading from his book “The Words,” a new translation of everything actually attributed to Jesus in the Bible, published in 1991. When it came time for her to read, she began to sing instead, improvising a complete song; that first, spontaneous take is “Nobody Knows My Name,” the album’s opening track.

The cutting out of Jesus' words sounds a lot like Jefferson's Bible.

Labels: The Bible in Pop Culture

Posted by B Feiler at 12:00 PM
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