Flying Cowboys' simultaneously bears the distinctive mark of Rickie Lee Jones's wild, unruly talent and continues the steady process by which her art is achieving a stunning, mature force. While it explores a wealth of themes and musical styles, the album unfolds with the ongoing grace of one long song. What provides unity to the album's varied elements is its seductive rhythmic flow, the down-home surrealism of Jones's lyrics, the clarity and intelligence of Walter Becker's production and, of course, the sensual elasticity of Jones's extraordinary singing.

The album – Jones's first in five years – opens with the easygoing groove of "The Horses," a song addressed to a young girl, perhaps Jones's daughter, as well as to the young girl that Jones herself once was. Over simple, eloquent piano and percussion accompaniment, Jones begins the song as if it were a bedtime story – a story that evokes the twilight world between sleep and waking in which the willingness to believe and let go is all that separates a person from a realm filled with wonder. The song builds to a rolling chorus, and Jones assures the young girl: "We'll be riding on the horses, yeah/Way up in the sky, little darlin'/And if you fall I'll pick you up, pick you up."

In the song's concluding chorus, Jones wails with improvisatory fervor: "I was young myself not so long ago.... And when I was young, oh I was a wild, wild one." This acceptance of her past – and Jones has been a wild, wild one, indeed – at the same time that she assumes adult responsibilities toward the young girl makes for a human fullness that helps keep Flying Cowboys emotionally grounded even in its boldest flights.

"The Horses" also demonstrates the subtlety and appropriateness of Becker's production – and calms anyone who feared that the cofounder of Steely Dan might suffocate Jones's hipster looseness in icy musical perfectionism. No fewer than sixteen musicians play and sing on "The Horses," and the arrangement still seems open, comfortable and endlessly inventive. Working in the same manner as the record's themes, Becker's settings provide Jones with enough structure to make her vocal pyrotechnics meaningful.

Jones again recollects the wild days of her youth in the title track, a song that, like "The Horses," conjures up a vision of spiritual deliverance ("We come to the river/We'll walk away from all this now") from a world that is "a desert." "Flying Cowboys" is also one of the four songs on the album that Jones co-wrote with her husband, Pascal Nabet-Meyer. "Away From the Sky," a quiet meditation in which Jones's voice floats in a melancholy atmosphere created by two guitars and two synthesizers, and "Atlas' Marker," a jazzy number on which Randy Brecker plays trumpet, end the album on a note of yearning for a place that's "somewhere better than the world where we live."

But not all of Flying Cowboys, whose very title is a fusion of the ethereal and the earthy, is so deeply suffused with a desire for transcendence. The lazy, soulful saunter of "Just My Baby" – underscored by the fetching slur of Jones's vocal – suggests that physical attraction ("My heart's just flying when he walks by") is itself a kind of ideal.

The encouragement offered in "The Horses" finds more straightforward expression in Jones's stirring cover of Gerry and the Pacemakers' "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying," while "Satellites," with its Sixties-pop choruses, imagines two lovers "born forever ... twinned in a fugitive mind." Two reggae-inflected tunes – "Ghetto of My Mind," a jaunty street anthem in the manner of Jones's songs from a decade ago, and "Love Is Gonna Bring Us Back Alive," which foregrounds Jones's belief in the restorative powers of love – rock with a sunny exuberance. In fact, the album's only false note is the self-consciously eerie "Ghost Train," which revives the myth of the down-bound mystery train in a film noir setting to no particular effect.

Since her superb 1979 debut album, Rickie Lee Jones, and her powerful 1981 follow-up, Pirates, Jones has failed to meet her early promise, though she has never failed so totally as to call that promise into question. Now, with Flying Cowboys, she is back at the very height of her considerable powers, having crafted a record that makes an indelible impression on first listen and retains its ability to startle long after that. For fans who have hoped for just such an album from Jones, Flying Cowboys is her much welcome, long-awaited wild gift. (RS 564)

ANTHONY DECURTIS