In the album’s title track, she poignantly admits as fiercely and intensely as she ever did in other compositions her nostalgia for her bygone times of excess and wandering, speaking of now as a time when “The world is turning faster than it did when I was young – When I was young I was a wild, wild one” (Flying Cowboys title track / 1989).
As a climax, the album ends with Atlas' Marker, a great and enigmatic composition which can easily claim to be a worthy successor to Traces of the Western Slopes, just as much because of its dense, sophisticated and surprising musical coloration as because of its multi-layered and open structure. A composition globally tinted with a sort of a mysterious exoticism, that its mix of "world" and jazzy brass orchestrations -added to incredible vocals-, instill there.

Rickie Lee Jones today lives in New Orleans, after having travelled around and stayed before in Paris, San Francisco and Washington state, and delivered eleven studio albums. The list here does not include obviously live albums, or cover albums like Pop Pop and It’s Like This. But it does include a few other gems just as indispensable, such as the lush and highly sensitive EP Girl At Her Volcano (a 1983 Live and Studio assembly), and above all the dazzling, lustrous, mystical and disconcerting The Magazine (1984), third of the undeniable masterpieces to the musician's credit .

Unpredictable, brilliant, shady, Rickie Lee Jones knew how to overcome the facilities, traps and pitfalls that her career’s dazzling start held out to her. She adopted an artistic attitude backed by integrity and an absolute refusal of compromise.

For example, when she branched off into Hip-Hop with the album Ghostyhead (1997), exactly as Mitchell had branched off into Jazz with Mingus in 1979. A move that cost the two musicians, for exactly the same reasons and in the same way (if not within the same musical disciplines, Jazz being as foreign to Hip-Hop as chalk to cheese) a large part of their audiences. A comparison with Mitchell, for once, stopping here -for good.