Evaluating Rickie Lee Jones [ tickets ]' new album, "Balm in Gilead," feels like an attempt to answer questions from a Taoist text. Is a journey complete when one returns home? If an adult connects with their youth, is a lesson finished or has it just begun? Jones has ventured on a linear journey over the last 30 years, not so much detouring as taking occasional off ramps, yet this latest stop is the first great reminder of where she started.

Not that Jones has returned to the specific sound of her first two albums. She has returned to their spirit, an open-air sound that evoked nightclubs, chapels and empty fields with songs that bared all, group vocals and languid delivery. Lyrically, she's bursting with empathy, concerned about decisions and their consequences, whether it be the rearing of a child, belief systems, or the ability to love. It's a pensive effort with just enough spirit to get the hips to gently sway.

The feel of "Balm in Gilead" is not unlike a religious service, a ceremony of passage that acknowledges celebration and reflection. It's quite possible some of that owes to the alignment of several milestones in 2009: Jones turned 55; her debut album celebrated its 30th anniversary with a glorious sounding vinyl release; and her daughter turned 21.

The instrumentation is organic and elemental--an accordion to spruce up the drone in the foundation of the dirge "His Jeweled Floor," the sweetly swinging guitar on "The Moon is Made of Gold," the slow, electric blues work on "The Gospel of Carlos, Norman and Smith," which echoes that of her former companion Tom Waits from the era when Jones broke through with "Chuck E's in Love."

"I am the last of my kind in this town," she sings on parlor-room ballad "Eucalyptus Trail." It's not so much a boast of her ability to survive her tumultuous life, simply a declaration of individuality. Thinking back about three decades ago, it was hard to know what to make of Jones who, at the time, was in line to be the next generation's Joni Mitchell. With the rearview mirror set, she's more of an oracle, the artist who had to come along so that Tori Amos, Fiona Apple and Norah Jones could follow, a notion "Balm in Gilead" reinforces.