Rickie Lee Jones – It’s Like This (Ultra Tape)

Rickie Lee Jones approaches It’s Like This as an interpreter with a songwriter’s instinct for hidden angles. The repertoire ranges from Steely Dan and Marvin Gaye to Broadway, jazz standards and the Beatles, yet the album never feels like a random collection. Jones makes the songs meet inside her own world: conversational timing, sudden flashes of humour and a voice that can turn a familiar line into private thought.

“Show Biz Kids” is stripped of its original studio sheen and recast around the lyric’s cool contempt, while “For No One” becomes an intimate account of separation. The long melodic span of “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” gives Jones room to drift between narration and reverie. She can also inhabit an older standard without treating it as period decoration. In “I Can’t Get Started,” the pauses matter as much as the notes, and “One Hand, One Heart” closes the sequence with disarming emotional clarity. Acoustic instruments, restrained rhythm parts and occasional brass or reed colours keep the focus on phrasing and meaning.

This edition: Ultra Tape, and what you need to play it

Analogue Productions issues this recording in its Ultra Tape series: a ¼-inch analogue tape running at 15 ips with IEC equalisation, in two-track (half-track) stereo. Each copy is made in real time from a copy of the original analogue master tape, transferred on an ATR-modified Ampex machine with flux magnetic heads, and it arrives in a custom slipcase.

Playing it needs a reel-to-reel machine that runs at 15 ips and reads two tracks. The format leaves out the steps a record takes between master tape and groove, which is the reason collectors reach for it.

Customer question: Buying Analogue Productions records in Europe