Two-time Grammy Award-winning musician Ricki Lee Jones, who will perform at Medford’s Chevalier Theatre on a double bill with Patty Griffin on Oct. 18, said she has a soft spot in her heart for Massachusetts and her fans in the Bay State. “Massachusetts kept me working in years that were really slim. There would be a lot of little towns I could get booked in and keep playing,” she said in a recent phone call from her home in New Orleans. “When I had not played for about five years and came back in the late ’80s-early ’90s, Boston was the first place I played. I have this real or imaginary relationship with Boston, a romantic idea about it.” Jones, 70, said she is looking forward to touring with Griffin, with whom she said she shares a “mutual respect” both as people and for each other’s music. “[We] really want to try to boost the idea of two older women kicking ass,” said the singer-songwriter — known for her genre-diverse songs often infused with jazz, R&B, soul, rock, and pop — whose first hit song was “Chuck E’s in Love” from her 1979 self-titled album. And while Jones said she will be performing new material from her next collection (her 16th studio album, due to be released in early 2026 — more information may be found on Fish Sticks, her creative platform on Substack) on the current tour, audiences can rest assured that she will also play older material, too. “I think people are going to smile and have a lot of fun,” she said. We caught up with the Chicago native, who moved to Phoenix when she was 4 and now calls New Orleans (where she lives with her French bulldog, Jazzy) home, to talk about all things travel.
If you could travel anywhere right now, where would you go? I have always wanted to go to Africa, so if I could go right now … I’d helicopter over to Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa. I’d see fossils and lions. I’d look at forests and old trees and old bones, families of villagers and families of elephants, I’d bird watch and walk along the water’s edge of Lake Victoria or the Indian Ocean, or even [go] west to the Ivory Coast for the music and princes, and so forth.
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Do you prefer booking trips through a travel agent or on your own? I definitely do not like to book trips.
Thoughts on an “unplugged” vacation? Hmm. Unplugged. The absence of plugs. Still, it sounds like people are involved. I would not want to be out in the middle of nowhere, neither hot or cold or tundra or villages. Unplugged … unplanned? A real of-the-plan, off-the-map thing seems possible if you are on your own. But traveling with a companion, both are always concerned about the other’s state of mind and well-being — well, my sweetheart and I are that way. So, it’s harder to be unplugged, I think. Worrying about him worrying about my happiness. When we are responsible for others — or think we are — I find having an itinerary is helpful.
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What has been your worst vacation experience? I don’t get to vacation often, but I went to Mazatlán, Mexico, by myself a year or two ago, just to compare from the last time I was there 44 years ago. I did not have a good time. Cheap jewelry for a lot of money, people actually drinking cocktails while floating in the pool, and they kept changing my room. I hated it. But the worst involves lost bags or changed tickets or no one giving a damn to help you solve a problem. When you are far away from home, the problems seem so much worse, like maybe we’ll die. It’s all an adventure. I have had travel problems for sure — stolen passports, dead train passengers — but not on vacation.
What is your favorite childhood travel memory? When I was about 4, my parents packed up my brother and me, and we drove across the USA in our Pontiac. It seemed as if Danny and I had always lived there in the backseat, kicking each other in games of “kick,” and finger-jumping the telephone poles for miles on end. When we came to Yellowstone National Park, we showed up after dark at a bathroom area [with] garbage cans where the bears liked to come. They approached our window, which we hurried to roll up as they came. It was all so thrilling and terrifying … loving a thing that frightened me so. The bears would enter my subconscious and remain there, actors in countless dreams for decades to come. I suppose this was the biggest memory of travel — though our Sunday drives to Tombstone, Ariz., were pretty cool, too. They still had the old saloon, a dark place with men who drank. No different than it had been 60 years earlier when the stuff of legends sat in those very chairs.
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Do you vacation to relax, to learn, or for the adventure of it all? I am always working, but if I can go somewhere, I go for the immersion of it all. The sounds and sights, the animals, [and] the possibilities. Water and land and treetop. Birds and whales. I usually try to be near water. I am not interested in the cold, and I do not camp.
What book do you plan on bringing with you to read on your next vacation? Yeah, any book is excellent when you have nothing else to do.
If you could travel with one famous person/celebrity, who would it be? Tom Waits, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Mary-Louise Parker, and/or Hilton Als.
What is the best gift to give a traveler? Love and an AAA card. Or, if they are going to Europe, love and traveler’s checks.
What is your go-to snack for a flight or a road trip? Gosh … I don‘t have a go-to snack. Maybe a Snickers bar.
What is the coolest souvenir you’ve picked up on a vacation? A very large stuffed toy that my dog really, really, really liked.
What is your favorite app/website for travel? I don’t have one. We have a travel agent we are using in Italy to book our Africa trip — yes, I am going! Conde Nast has some spa information, but they are places I never go. We stay in Marriott hotels on the road and they’re always consistently clean and such, but what I really like is when you sit down and turn on the TV, they show these artsy five-minute pieces on people who do interesting things, like one was on a person who does interpretive dance and another talks to whales … very interesting.
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What has travel taught you? I learned that what I thought was a given, right and wrong, reality, was actually just sociology. When you go somewhere where even the light switches, the tiniest insignificant things are different, [and] it makes you reconsider everything. One guy’s corn on the cob is another guy’s stinky cheese. It’s all relative, as my friend Lowell George used to say.
What is your best travel tip? Wear comfortable shoes. Packing for an imaginary dinner somewhere will only make your suitcase heavy and you’ll always be disappointed about those shoes one way or the other. But maybe you’ve got to pack them to find out they don’t matter.
Juliet Pennington can be reached at writeonjuliet@comcast.net.