I used to be a huge Rickie fan but had kind of lost track of her over the years. I just got her new album, "The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard" and I am back on the wagon again, big time. It reminded me what an amazing artist she is and made me pull out my old albums and sure enough, I still got chills listening to some of the songs. I also just found out she will be here in Salt Lake City on the 27th and I would not miss it for the world.

Anyway, I thought I would share this following review with you all.

THE SECOND COMING of JESUS JONES by Jim Walsh

There's an exciting new lyricist coming out of Los Angeles and here, there, and everywhere, whom everyone will be talking about in a new way in a couple of months. He's got as many pseudonyms as he does myspace pages but you probably already know him as the son of God, the prince of peace, the reason for the season, the scapegoat for the war, etc., but with the exception of, say, The Gospel Of Thomas Aquinas, we've never heard him like we're about to hear him.

"Do you know my name?," he sings on his new record The Sermon On Exposition Boulevard , in the same sexy mofo voice that all the cannibalistic Catholic girls -- all those hot vampirellas who grew up drinking all that blood -- wet their pants over when they heard him sing in the '70's rock opera that bears his superstar name.

Yes, my brother, we know your name. Your name is Jesus, and sexy is back. In the form of you in me, us, and Rickie Lee Jones.

Jones' new album won't be released by New West Records until February 6, but I've been playing it non-stop since I received it a few days ago. It's a breathtaking work, sure to be one of the most discussed and ingested records of next year (if only by serious music listeners), but at the moment I'm happy to simply report that it melds gorgeously with all the Christmas music in the air; all those beautiful underground sentiments about Jesus and love.

"Music is love," Jeff Tweedy once said, which is what I've always believed, just as so many have believed "Jesus is love."

Jesus and music. Combine the two without the ball and chain of the Christian dope show or numbskull preaching -- as Jones and her collaborators does on every track of Sermon -- and the result is something so rare it feels historic, necessary, and distinctly of its time, the way other classic mystic-beatnik albums like Horses and Astral Weeks and Nighthawks At The Diner and Late For The Sky screamed out of the sky with something important to say.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but this Sermon is important: The lyrics to all 13 songs are Christ's words, and, as we hurl towards doomsday and another 30,000 troops in Iraq in the name of someone else's god, hell if they don't sound like Barack and Beck and the Mountain Goats riffing together.

From the press release on Rickie Lee's myspace page.

"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 --and let them do the talking.

"When Rickie Lee arrived to record her spoken work track, the project was to take an unexpected turn. Instead of reciting the text, she improvised a stunning 'sermon' that was to change the undertaking in a wonderful and personal direction. 'Nobody Knows My Name' set the pace for what was to become THE SERMON ON EXPOSITION BOULEVARD -- and it appears on the record exactly as it was delivered that day. And the fact that she had not even heard 'Nobody Knows My Name' when she began to sing was no less remarkable. She found a niche by improvising off the texts to tunes she had -- and had not -- heard, and the resulting songs are truly inspired."

"How do you pray in a world like this?," sings Jesus-Jones, forlornly, but also putting into practice what a teacher of Travis's Fran Healy's once told him: "When you sing, you pray twice." God knows Jones does as much on "Where I Like It," one of the most amazing vocal performances-slash-channelings you will hear in this lifetime. Then when she sings, from the gutter and the gut, "I'm down here, too; I'm down here, too," she is both Jesus Christ weeping in the garden, and Rickie Lee Jones begging God the father not to forsake her.

"I wonder why there's so much suffering," she sings. "It hurts to be here," she sings. She's pissed at him. She's a reluctant servant. So when she goes, "Thank you, thank you, thank you," she does so with a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I sarcasm, as if she feels blessed for her life and all her gifts but she can't shake the trials and tribulations of others, and so s/he's questioning the very existence of a higher power, wonders if He even hears her/us, with all the resignation of a jilted lover who has spent way too much time throwing prayers out to the universe but never gets a callback, no, no, no, and so she sounds like she's going crazy, like we all do I suppose, like we're all just hanging on by the hair of our chinny-chin-cobwebs of hope.

"I tell you what, you gotta take it back from them," she/he instructs; talking here about faith and love and weathering the storm, staying strong, and reclaiming all the good stuff from the creeps who have co-opted it. In the end, that's the main point of this sprawling Sermon , which suggests that love has much more to do with you and I than with a toy baby in a manger or some dead guy on a cross.

-- Jim Walsh