Rickie Lee Jones' Pirates arrives like a cloudburst in the desert of Eighties formula pop music and recycled heavy-metal rock. Explosively passionate and exhilaratingly eccentric, this freeform, piano-based song cycle compares with Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, Bruce Springsteen's The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle and Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark in the bravura way it weaves autobiography and personal myth into a flexible musical setting that conjures a lifetime's worth of character and incident.

Pirates is a lot more daring than 1979's Rickie Lee Jones, on which the artist emerged as the most scintillating pop singer of her generation. Whereas the first album worked as a dazzling showcase of Jones' singing and writing, the new LP builds a deeper romantic mythology in somewhat less commercial terms. There are no pop-soul struts as concise as "Chuck E.'s in Love," no future cabaret classics like "Company." Indeed, Pirates isn't so much a pop record as a musical novel with a spiritual twist.

Though it doesn't follow a strict plot line, Pirates' core–an ill-fated love affair–suggests Jones' version of West Side Story. Set in standard Rebel without a Cause territory, the "Lonely Avenue" on which she and her band of outsiders swagger and fret is Los Angeles' La Brea Avenue. Here, Rickie Lee Jones cozies up to a gang of drifter-dreamers, whom she dubs the "Wild and the Only ones," in a variety of alter egos–as the high-school dropout Zero in "Living It Up"; as the widowed wife of Bird, who's shot down by the police while driving her to the hospital to have their baby, in "Skeletons"; as the girl holding on to her pirate lover's "rainbow sleeves" in the title tune. Since Jones and her alter egos are the only women in this macho-hipster world, she can be all things to all men: gang moll, Juliet, madonna and earth mother.

In revamping Romeo and Juliet, however, the artist doesn't merely repeat the doomed-lovers myth. Instead, she carries the story beyond the grave into a spirit world where the lovers' voices chase each other in a lonesome game of hide-and-seek. In the first album's "Company," Jones promised she would someday "reach across the galaxy" to her man, should they be permanently separated. In Pirates' "Traces of the Western Slopes" and "The Returns," she does just that in spacey pop-jazz flights.

So much metaphysical heavy breathing might seem foolish if Rickie Lee Jones hadn't developed a fusion of poetry, popular music, rock & roll and jazz that brilliantly weds thirty-five years of pop genres to the intensely rhapsodic diction of the Beat Generation. The climax comes in the eight-minute "Traces of the Western Slopes." A collaboration with Sal Bernardi (who sings the opening verse), this marvelous fantasia depicts a bohemian limbo of "Lolitas playing dominos and poker/Behind their daddys' shacks/Vacant-eyed, glue-face boys/On a pearl splashing glass." Musically, the cumulative effect of such an ethereal patchwork of harmonized vocals and be-bop band arrangements sounds like Laura Nyro arranged by Steely Dan and then some.

Pirates sports several highly unusual musical juxtapositions. The Bob Dylan-like ballad "Living It Up" builds to a Broadway bop chorus reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein's "Cool." Would any other writer even attempt to relate Dylan to Bernstein? "We Belong Together" strings a Bruce Springsteen-style chorus between verses of pure Beat rap. On a less surprising level, "Woody and Dutch on the Slow Train to Peking" and "Pirates (So Long Lonely Avenue)" reprise the funky be-bop of "Danny's All-Star Joint."

Lyrically, Rickie Lee Jones takes imaginative leaps that make most of today's songwriters seem pathetically timid. In the soulful stroll, "A Lucky Guy," the singer thinks about how fortunate her ex-lover is, because he's not as obsessed with her as she is with him. Then suddenly, in the last verse, Jones becomes the man, boasting, "Hey, I'm a lucky guy." This artist's romanticism actually allows for the transfusion of souls. In "Skeletons," one of two sketchy torch songs with exquisite orchestrations by Ralph Burns, Jones visualizes the son of the dead Bird trying to contact his father by flying model airplanes. To the young widow, the planes look like skeletons.

Until Pirates, I'd thought that rock's prepunk rebel tradition had pretty much exhausted itself. I was mistaken. Though Jones' Beat Generation literary manner may be derivative, her slightly mad romantic vision of contemporary street people searching for their extraterrestrial soulmates is an entirely new variation in pop music. In Rickie Lee Jones' compositions, every image has a metaphysical echo. By imposing her mastery of jazz and theater, she's revitalized the alienated, wild-in-the-streets role that's been based mostly in books, movies and self-referential rock & roll lore (Dylan, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Springsteen, et al.). In a way, Tom Waits and Bette Midler have attempted a somewhat similar feat, but Waits (obviously Jones' main muse) is a jazz naif whose voice can barely rise above an evocative growl, while the campy Midler is neither an accomplished songwriter nor a particularly versatile vocalist.

But Rickie Lee Jones can sing up any number of storms. When I saw her at Carnegie Hall two years ago, I was amazed at her emotional and stylistic range, which encompassed Billie Holiday's guttural purr, June Christy's elegant cool and Laura Nyro's torchy street wail, sometimes all in the same song. Yet Jones is certainly no imitator. From her influences, she's forged a slurred, feline cry for love that has both the defiance of rock and the sophistication of jazz. And I've never heard any singer (outside of grand opera) who can sustain such a high level of intensity for so long. It's Rickie Lee Jones' voice that carries Pirates to the stars and makes her whole crazy vision not only comprehensible but compulsive, compelling and as welcome as Christmas in July. (RS 351)

STEPHEN HOLDEN