Her new record, “The Devil You Know,” due September 18th from Concord, returns her to interpretive territory, with a set of intimate, sometimes stark, versions of songs that she loves—and, consequently, that she loves to sing. The album kicks off with Jones’s take on the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” and moves through Van Morrison’s “Comfort You” and Donovan’s “Catch the Wind,” Rod Stewart’s “Seems Like a Long Time” and Tim Hardin’s “Reason to Believe.”
Jones agreed to discuss the album, its predecessors, and the art of the cover song.
You’ve come back to these interpretive projects throughout your career. Are they all motivated by the same impulse, or do you think of them each very differently?
They are part of the same overall project. When my career started in 1979, the division between singer-songwriter-dom and singer-dom was a wide abyss, and singer-songwriters were not allowed to cover songs. Before I got signed, when I played live, I would do some of my own songs and also songs that I loved, like “Makin’ Whoopee” and “My Funny Valentine.” All those songs, the originals and the others, were part of me. And I got lots of flak. I’m not sure why, exactly, but there was a strong belief that singers should only sing their own songs.
Why do you think that was?
Singing other people’s material was perceived, I think, as a weakness of my persona. The effect, though, was to make me dig my heels in and try even harder to combine the two. There was a moment when I was doing jazz, with “Something Cool,” from “Girl At Her Volcano.” But I didn’t follow up on it right away. I went back and recorded originals, other albums. Then Linda Ronstadt released those records arranged by Nelson Riddle. So, when I decided to return to it, I was talking it over with Don Was, who was my producer, and I wanted to do a guitar-based record. He suggested the bandoneón, which is how that record, “Pop Pop,” ended up with this Left Bank, café sound. I thought if I did a piano record it would bury me. It almost buried me anyway. The L.A. Times did a review with two journalists on the same page, a pop writer and a jazz writer, and the jazz writer tore me apart. What was happening? Was I being punished?
Part of the dynamic with recording other people’s songs, though, is that a listener is automatically going to compare your version to what’s already known, and it can either seem like you’re revealing something new or tampering with a treasured memory. Take “Sympathy for the Devil,” which is an iconic Rolling Stones song. You open this record with your version of it, which is completely different in arrangement and feel.
In my mind, I guess, I see a group on the right side: those are the die-hards with their hands folded who see any interpretation as tampering. On the left side there are the people who say, “Hooray, whatever you do is great.” I have to say that I am hardly aware of the people on the right side. They feel that they are holding a line, I guess. I am not sure why. Mick Jagger already recorded that song. What would be the point of doing it the same way, with the same drums and the chanting? There’s no point in competing with that. It’s definitive and it exists and it was a long, long time ago. The only point in singing it, for me, is that the way I’m singing it now is new. In this case, I was part of a tribute to the Stones at Carnegie Hall, and I got to play “Sympathy For the Devil” before I recorded it. I walked out and sat in a chair and started to play rhythm guitar and I felt the audience gasp. Their reaction was like sucking in air. They held their breath and then, about eight seconds later, most of them were totally with me.
by Ben Greenman, New Yorker | Read more:
Photograph by Myriam Santos
