When you settled in los angeles, you were able to collect unemployment from a job you'd been fired from. You gave yourself that six months to either have a career in music, or youwoud have to go home. One of the first songs you wrote at that time was one that ended up on your first album,. It's a song called company. And you talk about writing it in the book. I don't remember the exact word that you used, but it sounded like, or it felt like, it was an excruciating process at the time to write that song.
Long a believer in the impossible, Rickie Lee Jones has lived an extraordinary life of song. Here, she reflects on five decades of making music.