When Rickie Lee Jones entered the makeshift recording studio on Los Angeles's Exposition Boulevard, she thought she was just going to help out her friend Lee Cantelon. The Vancouver Island–based poet, photographer, and world traveller had recently compiled The Words—a book of the sayings of Jesus arranged for modern readers—and was anxious to issue these texts in spoken-word form. With Mike Watt, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and Low already behind the project, he was pleased to have Jones on board as well.

But she just couldn't do it. Faced with a microphone and prerecorded tracks courtesy of guitarist Peter Atanasoff and recording engineer Bernie Larsen, she decided that the words of Christ were too baggage-laden to fit in her mouth. She also realized that something else was at work: while Jones couldn't speak for Jesus, his parables were drawing her into the world of the Holy Land, circa the year zero.

“The first image that I had was that we were drawing pictures of Jerusalem a few thousand years ago, setting the stage for me to look out of people's eyes—or for them to look out of mine,” she explains, reached at a St. Paul, Minnesota, hotel. “To have one foot here, but mostly, you know, to inhabit that time and look out through them and tell you what I saw and what I heard.”

Words welled up out of her, and Cantelon's project quickly morphed into Jones's next CD. The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard is the most coherent and accessible statement Jones has made since 1997's underrated Ghostyhead, yet more than half of its 13 tracks feature lyrics the singer made up on the spot.

“I'd done this before, in that I've sometimes taken a chance in making a text in front of an audience,” Jones allows. “But this was obviously extraordinary. I didn't plan or expect what came out, and for it to take shape so clearly was very wonderful and miraculous in that setting.”

Christian mystics might call Jones's experience gnosis, the direct and instantaneous experience of the divine. This isn't entirely new to Jones: like musicians as diverse as John Coltrane and Iggy Pop, the singer has often felt a connection to something bigger while performing. But to have the spirit manifest in something as concrete as a song has changed her relationship to the Christian message, if not to organized religion.

“Through knowing Lee, I've developed sympathy and understanding and empathy for the character that is Christ,” she says. “But my point of view would be kind of radical to a traditional Christian.

“The idea of practising utter nonviolence in thought and action is still a very profound idea,” she continues. “That's the beginning and end of that rabbi's message. And he was against religion—he was really against rote prayer, against being pious in the sense of making a big deal out of your prayers. Yet it seems that's the only kind of representation he has: the things he absolutely didn't seem to like at all.”

With subversive gospels like Cantelon's The Words and Jones's Sermon, this may be starting to change—and, frankly, it's about time.

Rickie Lee Jones plays the Commodore Ballroom next Thursday (March 8).