When Rickie Lee Jones performs, even the stage is quirky. There's sort of a garage sale feel to it, with a floor lamp over on the side and some big plastic flowers. Up front there's a little table with a red-checked cloth, and there's a lopsided window hanging from the ceiling. And there's an accordion.
Even if you had never heard Rickie Lee Jones before you'd suspect the unexpected.You always get surprises with Jones: A woman who looks like a little girl; a little girl who sounds both world-weary and innocent; a singer whose songs sometimes seem like long conversations, performed by a person who can hardly manage to string together a sentence of chatter between songs.
And since you expect the unexpected with Jones, you're only mildly surprised when she does a 90-minute show that does not include the only song she ever recorded that reached the Top 10 - her 1979 hit "Chuck E.'s in Love."
That was the only disappointment in an otherwise perfect evening of music like only Jones can deliver - a distinctive mix of jazz and pop in a voice that sometimes sounds like English is her second language, a voice that whispers one second and then pierces like a smoke detector in a kitchen fire.
Rickie Lee Jones can always catch you off guard, and the Wednesday night show at Kingsbury Hall was Jones at her goofy, shy, cool best.
The singer-songwriter, who rarely tours, is promoting her newest album, "Pop Pop," which includes some old standards as only Jones can sing them. In fact it's when you hear her sing familiar tunes like "Bye Bye Blackbird" or "The Second Time Around" that you really realize how unusual her voice is.
Her style isn't for everyone; but the near-capacity crowd at Kingsbury was wild about her, giving her a two-minute standing ovation. They seemed panicked, in fact, when the lights came on and they feared she might not come back for an encore.
Jones finally did reappear, with her coat and hat on, to sing just one more song - "Easy Money." She apparently does what she feels like and nothing more.
Although she's a mom now, the song that summed her up the most last night was Peter Pan's "I Won't Grow Up." With her little girl bangs, those big third-grader teeth and a wide-eyed defiance, she seemed just right singing "I won't grow up, I don't want to wear a tie, And a serious expression in the middle of July."
Jones shared the stage with a sax player, acoustic bass guitarist, percussionist and guitarist, whose accompaniment was a perfect match and whose laid-back sounds gave Kingsbury Hall a bistro feel.
Jones also accompanied herself on the guitar - played with aggressive gusto - and also performed a couple of songs on the piano, including "We Belong Together."
She muttered only a few sentences in between songs. Her longest bit of chatter was a suggestion that maybe the audience might like to look at the Greenpeace information in the lobby.
"Maybe you could . . . uh . . . I don't want to tell you what to do . . ." is the way she phrased it.
Jones ended with a song her father, Richard Loris Jones, wrote - "The Moon Is Made of Gold." Sitting around listening to her dad and uncle play the guitar when she was a little girl is what taught Rickie Lee about music in the first place. But she must have made up her singing style all by herself.