Are you playing with Tigers, right now!

By Paul Langan, for CoolMediaLLC.com

Rickie Lee Jones’ Traffic in Paradise is not so much an album as an invitation to drift. It asks the listener to surrender to an emotional and sonic tide, where angels fall into bars and words arrive sideways. Among its many beguiling tracks, one stands apart in its seductive melancholy: Tigers.

This song flows like a fever dream. It opens with the gentle terror of something creeping in—“The tigers come at four / Shaped like the curtains and the floor”—and from that moment, the listener suspends between reality and reverie. These “tigers” aren’t predators in the jungle; they’re emotional presences, shapeshifting memories, and the ghostly forms pain can take as it weaves into domestic life.

But the moment that crystallizes the song’s power comes later:

“Climbing up the bridge to your window / Using the sharp end of what you said.”

This lyric is the emotional apex of Tigers and perhaps the entire album. It’s an image of return—not with roses or apologies, but with wounds sharpened into tools. It’s about returning to someone, using their words and their damage, to find a way back in. Jones delivers it with the extraordinary, cryptic intimacy that has long been her hallmark. Like a whispered confession heard through a cracked window, the line is as piercing as it is poetic.

An Album of Angels and Everyday Things

Released in 2003, Traffic in Paradise marked Rickie Lee Jones’s return to a more atmospheric, songwriter-forward aesthetic after the more eclectic experimentation of the late 1990s. The album feels both intimate and unmoored as if recorded in the space between waking and sleep. From the moment it begins, it concerns visitors from another realm—angels, dreams, memories—who show up unannounced in laundromats and under lamplight.

Throughout Traffic in Paradise, Jones wrestles with the divine and the mundane. Her angels aren’t sacred and sealed off—they mingle with servers and musicians, hang around alleyways, drink gin, and sleep through sermons. In Tigers, that dichotomy is alive and swaying:

“You check your clothes / You come and lay with me a while / In the theater of dreams / We are sleeping in the aisle.”

These images blend lovers with phantoms and stages with streetlights, glowing faintly with bittersweet irony. The city becomes a temple, and the bedroom becomes a haunted stage.

The chorus—“Playing with tigers / Chasing the lampshade with my toes”—is deceptively playful. There’s a childlike whimsy to it, but it’s a whimsy dressed in gauze, trailing emotional bruises. The lampshade isn’t just a quirky object—it’s something spinning, dizzying, like the light from a love that once warmed but now disorients.

By the song’s end, the imagery becomes almost mythic:

“Tigers falling like paper on our parade / And the mail blowing out of the mailbox / Down the street.”

It is as if grief and joy have become weather systems, dropping tigers like rain, scattering correspondence like forgotten intentions. The spiritual descends into the every day, again and again.

The Evolution from Pirates to Paradise

It’s impossible to talk about Traffic in Paradise without recalling Pirates (1981), Jones’ seminal, shapeshifting second album. That record was a bold, orchestrated leap into narrative depth and jazz-inflected theatricality. If her self-titled debut positioned her as a streetwise romantic, Pirates placed her among the great chroniclers of emotional disarray—alongside Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, and Laura Nyro.

Jones crafts songs that are less like pop compositions and more like short stories told through riddles in both albums. Tigers echoes the narrative compression and emotional volatility of Pirates tracks like We Belong Together or Skeletons. In both records, you find characters in motion, grasping for connection, often amidst surreal or symbolic landscapes. There is always a bridge to cross, a window left ajar, a voice calling from the world’s end.

But where Pirates brims with youthful bravado and theatrical turns, Traffic in Paradise softens into dream-state surrender. Jones is older, perhaps less inclined to shout her truths, but more fearless in revealing the quiet, haunting spaces in between. She sings not from the stage but from the wings—from the periphery of Paradise, where traffic hums and memories flicker like streetlights.

Tigers and the Truth in Whimsy

So, what does it mean to be playing with tigers?

It means dancing with danger, letting your guard down, and loving someone in the full knowledge of their power to harm. It means being brave enough to climb the bridge—not despite what they said, but because of it. It means chasing light sources with your toes, even if you might tip the lamp over in the process.

Rickie Lee Jones has always resisted easy categorization. She is neither folk nor jazz, neither pop nor poetry—but somehow, all at once. With Tigers, she reminds us that the most dangerous creatures often wear familiar shapes: curtains, lampshades, old letters, and half-remembered phrases. And yet we return to them, play with them, even paint them into art.

Because in the world of Traffic in Paradise, even tigers deserve a lullaby