Reveling in her own visionary individuality since her debut in 1979, Rickie Lee Jones sings with the lean elegance of a street gamine. Her music, a blend of bravado and vulnerability, wavers on indefinable borders. She isn't really jazz or rock and certainly not folk. Rather, Jones skitters along in her own private bohemia, a spiritual kin to Jack Kerouac traveling down a thousand open roads.

That beatnik freedom flourishes on Traffic From Paradise, her seventh album. Unlike the pungent, brassier Flying Cowboys (1989), Traffic From Paradise is a series of floating ruminations, embedded in subtle, sometimes sleepy melodies. It is also a logical next chapter in Jones' romantic evolution. Jumping from the irrational twists of falling in love (and avoiding love) on The Magazine (1984) through self-discovery and motherhood on Cowboys, Jones has wound up on her knees in Traffic – grasping for the scattering straws of an uncertain relationship.

"Pink Flamingos" opens with the intensity of a nightmare. Yet the guttural vocals, creaking dulcimer and shivering guitar melt into a sweetly sung carousel of womanly frustration ("Why does he stick to my fingers?/Why does this feel like his soul?"). The sigh of "Stewart's Coat" seems a sad answer to The Magazine's "It Must Be Love." Although echoing that song's hypnotic phrases of desire ("I remember walking in the rain/Rain was falling on my hands"), "Stewart's Coat" is cast with more pain than passion ("And if you let me/I will keep you here inside the stars/I will love the sound of my sheets/For you have moved beneath them").

Though Jones doesn't play the victim, she tends to lose herself in love's ongoing yin and yang. "Running From Mercy," co-written with Leo Kottke (who plays acoustic guitar on most tracks) and featuring Lyle Lovett on backing vocals, questions the comfort that Jones seeks from her own heart. "Don't you stop her! I know where that door is!" she mutters, before plaintively whispering, "Just come on with me." "Tigers" again has Jones walking out the door ("I tried to leave, but you sent all the cars to bring me back"), and her coy cover of David Bowie's "Rebel Rebel" teeters ironically between accusation and autobiography.

Sparer in its production than Cowboys, Traffic is rich with guests – Kottke is a strong presence, as are long-time friend and co-writer Sal Bernardi, bassist John Leftwich and drummer Jim Keltner. A host of singing companeros – Lovett, David Baerwald, Syd Straw, Brian Setzer and David Hidalgo – also turns up. Characteristically, Jones explores a range of musical styles, from the rollicking Cajun kick of "Jolie Jolie" to the Leonard Cohen-like rumble of "Altar Boy."

Jones is a song stylist in the classic sense – Edith Piaf with a guitar and a swagger. Her vocals bleed beauty and turmoil from the simplest of phrases. She doesn't need grand statements to make her point – and Traffic From Paradise is more a quiet storm of acoustic daydreams than a collection of singles. Hitching onto life's ride like a dharma bum, Rickie Lee Jones journeys down her endless highway, seeking no destination, offering her heart to the skies. (RS 668)

KARA MANNING