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This beautiful disc needs only her sweet muted-trumpet voice and optimistic viewpoint to sail gracefully through its 10 songs.
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The 10 songs course through the highs and lows with equanimity, from the pride and hope in Charlotte she expresses to the kindheartedness she displays for those acquaintances who've moved on.
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FilterThis is not one to be missed, kissed with the promise that beauty and depth in songs still matters. [Holiday 2009, p.102]
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Jones' faith in her own creative judgment is well-founded, and this is a work whose modest scale belies its emotional strength.
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It's roughly an album of two halves, the first warm and folky, the second soft and shimmering. While the latter section gets a bit droopy, the album as a whole rarely fails to beguile.
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Like its namesake, this music has healing properties: the beauty of its melodies and the wisdom of its words soothe the soul and remind us what a peculiar treasure Jones is, a fact too easily forgotten in the rush of passing fashions and the wake of the artist’s own pocked path.
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30 years on from "Chuck E.", it's a stunning testament to the vitality of her vagabond muse.
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The largely self-produced Balm in Gilead plies a folksy yet soulful jazz-country sound that showcases both her inimitable voice--with its playful meter and peculiar grain--and her studio prowess.
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MojoIts follow-up features a batch of songs Jones has lived with and reworked over 20-plus years, and the material radiates with a well-worn intimacy. [Dec 2009, p.90]
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Q MagazineThirty years since first making her entrance as the distaff Tom Waits, Rickie Lee Jones still sounds utterly unique. [Dec 2009, p. 126]
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The most familiar stuff here is ultimately the least successful.