Rickie Lee Jones reveals herself through the characters in her songs - the same characters she sometimes hides behind.

"I think I need to express myself through things like that," Jones says. "I don't think I'm that good of a writer when I just talk about myself and how I feel. I need to express it in other shapes. I think like a fiction writer. I just like to write fiction. And that's how the truth comes out for me."

Grifters, hustlers, lovers, and losers have all come to life or found a voice in Jones' music. Her big hit, "Chuck E.'s In Love," was written about hipster drummer Chuck E. Weiss in 1979, when Jones, Weiss, and Tom Waits (Jones' flame at the time) lived at The Tropicana Motel in Los Angeles. Flash-forward a couple decades and her 2007 CD "Sermon On Exposition Boulevard" stars Jesus.

"I'm not a Christian," says Jones. "I don't like Christian churches. But I thought that the old rabbi doesn't really get a fair shake in our Christian society. ‘For a thousand years I've been here, then I've been there, I walk among you but you still don't see me.' I think it was what he always said, just said in my words. It wasn't really religious. It was a kind of an expression of the Christ story within myself. It was another piece of art... funny and smart and sweet."

Musically, Jones has always lived near the corner of jazz and pop. Her music sashays and swings with a breezy seduction. Tin Pan Alley ain't too far off, and neither is the blues. Her characters hang there as well. Their starkness, their frankness, and their naked honesty are all sweetened by Jones' coquettish voice, laconic phrasing, and wry humor. She breaks it to you gently, but you still might get a splinter, or a bruise.

But before her real or created characters began to make the scene, there was music. Echoes of "Day-o" reverberate in her skull as one of Jones' earliest musical memories is Harry Belafonte's "Banana Boat Song." And of course, she says, "The Beatles really took over my existence for a few years."

"I always sang," says Jones. "My father was a singer and songwriter, my grandfather was a vaudeville star, my grandmother was a dancer. I grew up blessed because nobody considered music a silly pastime. It was taken really seriously when it was discovered I could sing. They took me to auditions, I was in the little theater, so it's as much a part of me as anything could be."

When she was 15 and living in Olympia, Washington, Jones went to the Salvation Army and bought two albums that changed her life. One was a record by Coleman Hawkins, "Who I'd never heard, but I wanted to know what jazz was," Jones says. "And I got something called the something -ville Squirrel Barkers, and it was the most incredible Appalachian music. So I just wanted to know and be able to sing every kind of music."

Almost every kind. Jones finds it difficult to sing country

"Well, country music - real country music - they do a kind of break in their voice," she says. "A kind of yodeling thing which I have really worked to not have. And reggae is about the only thing that I feel sometimes I don't belong there. I don't know why, because I gravitate toward it when I write."

"Chuck E.'s In Love" put Jones on the map, but she's moved on. A hit song is a gift and a curse. "I've suffered a bit," she says. "I think, as far as being able to be marketed well. So it's hard to put me in a place. Listeners need to be - forgive me - a little more sophisticated in their ability to enjoy. They gotta just like music. But sometimes people question your authenticity if you like to do different kinds of music. You can't tell people stuff. They have to come to their own conclusions about me basically having one hit. It's impossible to debut twice."

"You know what's good about my age?" she asks. "The AM radio that we listened to was so eclectic. You'd hear Bob Dylan on the same station you'd hear Peter and Gordon. You'd hear ‘Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head' then you'd hear ‘Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man.' It just wasn't genre-divided. I grew up with pop singers singing songs; just music. And I've tried to hang on to that."

Jones clings to classic composition as well.

"Having grown up with The Beatles, I write a song that way," she says. "I have a bridge, I have a point. I get it said as quickly as I can. I'm old school in this way. Sometimes I write a long, meandering song, but for the most part the respect and love of songwriting hasn't left me."

Jones sets to prove that with the release of her next, yet-to-be-titled album.

"It's songs I wrote over the past 25 years," she says. "Some of them that didn't get finished. Sometimes you have to know who you're talking to when you write your lyric. Finally I knew who I was talking to and was able to finish it."

Jones' live set as of late features a few new songs, then something from just about all of her 14 albums - albums from a singer/songwriter whose consistency as an artist has rendered her essentially her own genre.

"I think every record is different," she says. "It's hard to see me from the outside. But there must be some things that are consistent about me. I don't go that far out. There's a reason I'm still making records 30 years later."

Rickie Lee Jones

w/Dr. John, The Lower 911, Hard Logic, Coupe de Villes

Saturday, May 9

Highland Bowl, South Ave

2 p.m. | $15-$20 | 244-8709

rickieleejones.com