Rickie Lee Jones Comes to Terms With Success : With her personal life on track, the 34-year-old singer-songwriter finds work’s demands less disturbing

“Please don’t make this a rebirth story,” requested Rickie Lee Jones in anticipation of the way “Flying Cowboys,” her first album in five years, is likely to be interpreted by the press. “I get weary of reading about rebirths because we’re all growing all the time and it diminishes the life you’ve lived if you say ‘I’m a new person.’ I’m not a new person. It’s still me but I have a lot of fresh air and fresh ideas.”

Though she may not be keen on dwelling on them, the changes in Jones are fairly profound and certainly invite “rebirth” treatment. Skyrocketing to stardom in 1979 with the hit single “Chuck E.’s in Love,” Jones established herself as a master of the modern American song, and her writing has grown increasingly rich with each of her three albums.

Rooted in jazz and incorporating elements of R&B;, pop and Broadway, her music won her a devoted following, but alas, the lady had a tough time learning how to handle all that attention. Well-publicized bouts with drugs and alcohol dogged her from 1979 to 1986, as did disastrous love affairs and a reputation for erratic performances. Mostly, however, she was plagued by her own inability to accept her success.

Those days look to be behind her now. Happily married, the mother of an 18-month-old daughter, healthy and straight, Jones at 34 has come a long way from the painfully fragile girl who couldn’t bring herself to trust the good things that came her way.

“You have to go through a long journey to come to terms with your career, and though I still have sleepless nights, I feel much less ambivalent now,” said the singer during an interview at a West Hollywood hotel.

“I’m much more solid and grown up. Having a family takes a lot of the weight and importance off show business, and doing things like interviews can be fun now because I have a life and a home and this isn’t my life. When I was single my career was my life, so everything I did was of grave importance and was greatly disturbing.”

Central to Jones’ new-found peace of mind are her husband of three years, French musician Pascal Nabet-Meyer and her baby daughter, who accompanied her mother to L.A. from their home in the mountains north of Santa Barbara for the day’s interview. Dressed up for travel and well behaved, Charlotte is clearly the apple of Jones’ eye.

“Having Charlotte has been the high point of my life thus far,” she beamed. “She’s given me confidence and lots of happiness, and my husband is one of the kindest men you’d ever want to meet.

“After my last bad love affair I decided I just wasn’t gonna do that any more,” she said of the change in her personal fortunes. “I said that’s it, I’m serious, I’m gonna get married and things are gonna go right. I decided to learn to meet somebody halfway--and I was only able to do that because my husband is willing to do anything for me. I’d never encountered a man willing to love me this way before.

“One of the great things I’ve learned from him is patience,” she adds. “When I met him I was still a pretty angry person but I’ve learned how to cooperate. In a sense I left one behind and a new one came. For a while I hated the old one and didn’t want any part of her, but now I’m able to remember the good stuff she did and accept that she’s still a part of me.”

A Chicago native who grew up in a troubled, nomadic family, Jones escaped the hard times of her childhood via her extraordinarily fertile imagination. Her ability to enhance reality--to fictionalize it completely when necessary--led her to become a narrative writer with a talent for concisely drawn character sketches.

Like the work of former beau Tom Waits, Jones’ early songs were peopled with vagabond hipsters who were frequently short on cash but always long on street smarts and style. Jones tempered the showy strut of the street life she depicted with an undercurrent of profound loneliness, and melodically her music is haunted with a melancholy yearning for some distant, faded American Dream that puts one in mind of George Gershwin.

Whereas Jones’ music once seemed to be struggling towards the light--a struggle that was occasionally lost--”Flying Cowboys” resonates with a sense of transcendence over the forces that seek to keep one’s soul earthbound. A song cycle that kicks off with “The Horses,” written for her daughter, the album includes four songs Jones co-wrote with her husband, a cover of the ‘60s pop hit “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying,” and a song co-written with Steely Dan’s Walter Becker, who produced the album.

“The fact that I’m much happier now is reflected in the record,” said Jones. “It’s there in the context of the songs, the way they’re resolved and what they have to say. Though the writing is sophisticated, it’s a very unslick, straightforward record, and I think the intention I had when I began comes through clearly.”

Though she’s pleased with the results, Jones confesses that the making of the record wasn’t too pleasurable.

“I didn’t really enjoy making the record because I had to be away from the baby. She was only six months when I went to work and at that time I would’ve been happy to never work again and just stay home and be a mom.

“To be honest, the only reason I went back to work was because the people around me wanted me to. They said, ‘You’ve waited a long time and this is the time.’ I’d built up a block against working by then and I guess they could see I’d have to be pushed. I was very resistant to the idea and felt quite cynical about producers and the possibility of finding one I was compatible with.”

The solution to Jones’ produc ing problems came, surprisingly enough, in the form of the reclusive Becker, a musician who won a reputation as a savagely witty and temperamental artiste during his tenure with Steely Dan. Becker’s not exactly the first guy who comes to mind when considering who might be able to nurture Jones’ musical gifts to fruition.

“The people at Geffen mentioned Walter as a possible producer and I have to say that from his picture he looked like one of the meanest men I’d ever seen,” Jones recalled with a laugh. “Steely Dan’s music isn’t too friendly either, so I was kind of scared. But I knew we’d gone through similar things so I agreed to meet with him and he was really nice. Walter could destroy you with his scathing wit if he wanted to, but he was really patient and gentle with me.”

Though the mood of “Flying Cowboys “ is fairly easy to read, much of its imagery is extremely cryptic. Asked to explain what flying cowboys--the album’s unifying motif--means to her, Jones says that “flying cowboys aren’t a metaphor for anything. They’re kind of magical creatures and when I first thought of them they were sitting in a wooden shack up in the sky then a wind came and blew them down to earth. They were all connected but they didn’t know it, and some of them died, some of them got corrupted, and some of them found their way back to this circus.

“I’ve always had an active imagination,” she added. “I spent my childhood in an imaginary world--probably because I needed an escape. I think that’s one of the reasons people have imaginations--because they can’t maintain existence here.”

Though Jones is presently gearing up for what she hopes will be a world tour scheduled to kick off in February, today she’s free to return to life in the country with her family.

“My home is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen and I feel so lucky to live there,” she said. “We have a view of a valley and mountains, and people in the country are still friendly like on ‘The Andy Griffith Show.’ I have a studio at home but I never get to it because I spend most of my time cleaning and taking care of the baby. I don’t have a nanny or a manager, so our days are completely filled with the telephone. Sometimes I’ll have a phone in each hand!”

The spate of press generated by “Flying Cowboys” should make it clear that Jones’ image as a hard-drinking loner on a long, slow slide into oblivion is obsolete. Audiences are notoriously reluctant to allow the stars they love to transform themselves too radically, but Jones is confident that her fans will be generous in this regard.

“I think what people liked about me--if I can say something like that--is that even with all that extraneous self-destructiveness, there was a great light and a smile and great reaching out,” she concluded. “I think that’s still there. The only thing I’ve lost is all the drama and ambivalence about whether or not I should be here.”