RIDGEFIELD — In her official bio, penned by Hilton Als, the two-time Grammy winner, one of VH1’s 100 Greatest Women in Rock & Roll, and so-called “Queen of Coolsville,” Rickie Lee Jones describes her family growing up as “lower-middle-class-hillbilly-hipster.”

But across the wide and genre-consuming path she cut through her 40-year musical career — battling the demons of addiction and bad relationships — Jones presents as way more hip than hillbilly, and seems to carry herself too regally to ever be typed as middle class.

She called in from New Orleans to The Newtown Bee for an apparently rare phone interview (she prefers to conduct Q&As via email) ahead of her August 12 stop at The Ridgefield Playhouse.

The conversation primarily focused on the present, digging into the process and production of creating Jones’ latest project The Other Side of Desire. But a question about her career-catapulting 1975 guest spot on Saturday Night Live piqued her memory and a conversation about how even as a fledgling artist, Jones fought hard to not be showcased on the hit late night show as a bubblegum pop star.

“I insisted on doing ‘Coolsville’ on Saturday Night Live — that was a deal breaker because they didn’t want to have that song on,” Jones recalled. “I said if you only let me do ‘Chuck E.’s In Love’ people will see me incorrectly. They’ll see me as happy or whatever the word is for it — there are two sides of this picture and I won’t do the show without ‘Coolsville.’

“So we were having meetings with Lorne Michaels right up until airtime, and I started to pack up my stuff when Lorne showed up in my dressing room to tell me they would put it in the show. I found out later that Warner Bros. was really fighting for me — so if you watch the video, you’ll see they squeezed me in right at the end [before the credits].”

This was an early skirmish in a series of battles Jones has waged throughout her career. As she morphed through creative phases Jones would venture off in non-sequential directions, at the same time creating opportunities for countless female artists who came after her to break from the status quo and industry image makers who thought they knew better than the artists themselves.

“The more specific you are the more they can market you,” Jones said. “I was so famous and felt so very big that I thought I could do things that weren’t done and pave the way for other people. I really did some of that on purpose.”

Jones said she loved mixing jazzy or pop cover versions of other people’s music with her own original material.

“That really pissed off some critics, they felt it was inauthentic. But I knew if I could stay in business and defy them. You know artists should be able to do covers without their integrity being impugned.”

So Jones kept rolling on, and in the months following her simmering jazz covers on Rob Wasserman’s Duets, a flood of female artists started emerging doing the same — likewise following her unplugged solo project Naked Songs, after her adventure into electronica with 1997’s Ghostyhead, and her dabbling in Celtic folk and gospel on The Evening of My Best Day.

“I think that was what I was supposed to be doing from the beginning,” she said. “That ‘Chuck E.’s In Love’ thing with the finger snapping and the bridge — when it came out it was a very different type of pop song. And I think I was able to be accepted because that was how I began.”

Jones may have wandered farthest out onto black ice when she collaborated with then-boyfriend and collaborator Lee Cantelon on a planned musical version of his The Words, a book of the words of Christ. But even that extreme departure — entitled The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard — failed to alienate her fervent and diverse fan base.

But in typical fashion, Sermon ultimately exposed Jones to new listeners who might not have otherwise given her more than passing notice. 

“I met some alternative and unusual kind of people, Christians who might be considered way beyond the realm of Christianity,” she said. “You know, you could do an intellectual interpretation of Buddhism and nobody would question it, but you do something like this — a visceral, intellectual interpretation of Jesus’ words — you could see people wince.

“But I’m not a Christian. So I wanted to explore what this guy said in my own culture. A few amazing people heard this work who wouldn’t have [listened to me] otherwise.”

Turning to the creative process behind her new release The Other Side of Desire, Jones said she was in some ways very involved in the day-to-day creative process, and in other cases, she opted to hand over the wheel to her expert studio team and the musicians who backed the 11 compelling tracks.

“My feeling is that it was produced by the producers. That said, on something like ‘Valz de Mon Pere (Lover’s Oath)’ I heard the violin part distinctly. ‘Blinded by the Hunt’ is all my song. The producer said ‘play everything — you can do it.’ But the bottom line is, all the songs seem to fit.

“I really just wanted to try and express it all through a New Orleans palette. Records are like movies — they’re cinematic and thematic. But they’re also feelings, right? Happy and sad feelings you shape into words and sing,” she said. “It was clear how I felt in the City of New Orleans was how I wanted to express this music.

“When I lived in LA, people drive to everywhere and they don’t look at each other. In New Orleans everybody you pass looks you in the eye in a friendly way. There are also people who are really broken — but they won’t give up, which I found was an expression of my own life. How they find the strength to go on with friendliness and determination and not give up.”

Jones describes it as a theme she constantly saw reflected around her.

“The entire city is parading down its own street. It loves itself. New Orleans loves to look itself in the mirror and doesn’t care how worn out it is. This kind of self love I’ve never seen in any city before.”

One of the most strikingly beautiful songs on The Other Side of Desire is “I Wasn’t There,” a whimsical adventure that could easily fit in a film soundtrack or Broadway show featuring a spectacular string ensemble.

“I’ll tell you a little story,” Jones related. “I wanted that in from the very beginning. As I wrote it I could feel myself as a little child with a balloon floating over the streets of Paris. So when I played it for my girlfriend, one of the first people to hear it, she turned to me and said ‘It makes me feel like I’m sailing away on a balloon over the clouds.’ It was so cool.

“So from the beginning I heard these strings. But I couldn’t arrange it myself. So my producer got this guy on the phone and I sang my ideas for that string section over the phone — and he really got it. He came up with this beautiful string section. It’s extraordinary.”

For tickets to Rickie Lee Jones on Wednesday August 12 at The Ridgefield Playhouse, visit ridgefieldplayhouse.org. Bailey's Backyard is offering a 10% discount on dinners that evening for anyone with a ticket to the show.

Check out the latest video from Rickie Lee Jones, “Jimmy Choos”, from her new album, The Other Side of Desire.

Rickie Lee Jones covers a soulful version of “The Weight” in this 2013 set from Madrid, and this 1979 set form The Wiltern in Los Angeles features a classic take on Jones’s early career favorite “Coolsville.”