Live albums can be spotty affairs, and even the finest performances will hold dull spots for some listeners. But Rickie Lee Jones has found a solution. Via her Web site, www.rickieleejones.com, the veteran singer-songwriter is offering MP3s of 136 selections from nine different performances, for fans to download, mix and match into a live album of their choice.

For instance, you might choose the full-band version of "We Belong Together" from a twenty-year-old Swiss show, a sparser rendition from Chicago, or both. Each song costs 75 cents to download (with a three-song minimum), and there are several versions of some songs to choose from.

"I make different versions because I like singing them," says Jones. "I guess different incarnations of a song might reveal different subtle meanings, although I suspect most people like the version they hear first best." In any case, fans can use this system to sequence twenty of their favorite songs for $15, producing a live album with no dead air.

The process is made available by Music Toolworks, developed by Jones cohort Barry Murry, an Olympia, Washington Web entrepreneur. Customers can hear the selections in their entirety through a standard media player before downloading, and can then check off their purchases from a list. Murry said that only three musicians -- Jones, Joe Jackson and the Wild Colonials -- are using the system, but he hopes to license it to other artists. (Artists like the Grateful Dead and Phish would be a natural fit.)

While Jones' own best songs turn up in multiple versions, this new oeuvre explores her talent for covers. "Europe 1982" contains Lowell George's "Long Distance Love" and Randy Newman's "Texas Girl at the Funeral of Her Father." Scattered across other shows are covers of Frank Sinatra, Marvin Gaye and Neil Young.

Jones' offbeat writing has always been augmented by such interpretations, and she landed a Grammy nomination for last year's It's Like This, her second covers album. "Some songs, they are just a part of you, it doesn't matter who actually wrote them," she said. "That's what songwriters do with scenes we all know, strange details of our lives, odd remote and abandoned places -- they keep them for us and make them three dimensional, and we go into them, in sound and story, and they are always the same, and they become ours, like books."

Jones, now affiliated with Artemis Records, says she is now working on some new music. For the time being, she is mining her past online and soliciting fans for tapes of live performances for inclusion on the site.

"Selling records over the Internet can be as personal or as impersonal as you want it to be," she said. "I find it very personal, because I can read the message board. It's kind of cool, as long as I don't start reading messages very often, which is kind of addicting."

CHARLES BERMANT
(June 22, 2001)