There’s a particular kind of bravery in covering a song that already owns the room. The Rolling Stones‘ “Sympathy for the Devil” is one of the most mythologized tracks in rock history, a piece of music so identified with Mick Jagger’s strutting menace that any other interpretation risks looking either foolhardy or derivative. Rickie Lee Jones does neither. On her 2012 covers album, she strips the song of its carnival swagger and treats it as something more unsettling: a first-person confession from history’s most patient predator, delivered not with a sneer but with the steady, almost sorrowful authority of someone who has seen everything and forgiven nothing.
- Released: September 18, 2012
- Album: The Devil You Know
- Duration: 6 minutes, 28 seconds
- Album type: covers album
- Artist: Rickie Lee Jones
A Different Kind of Devil
The original Jagger-Richards composition was written in the voice of Lucifer as a wit, a dandy, a provocateur who delights in human catastrophe. That version works because Jagger sells the charm. The devil there is seductive, and the seduction is the point. Jones does something harder. She doesn’t perform the devil as a character you’d want to have a drink with. Her reading is slower, more deliberate, and the vocal sits lower in the mix of implication than Jagger’s ever did. The effect is that the narrator feels less like a showman and more like a witness who has outlasted every civilization he describes.
That shift matters because the song’s lyrics, which catalog atrocities from the Russian Revolution to the Kennedy assassination, read differently depending on whether the voice delivering them is thrilled or resigned. Jones leans toward the latter. The devil she inhabits isn’t bragging. He’s making a case. And somehow that’s worse.
What a Covers Album Does to a Song’s Meaning
Context is everything. “Sympathy for the Devil” appearing on an album called The Devil You Know isn’t a neutral placement. The title phrase is a proverb about the comfort of familiar danger, the logic that keeps people in bad situations because at least they understand the terms. Framing an entire record of other people’s songs under that idea positions every cover as a known quantity, a devil already identified. Jones isn’t discovering these songs; she’s reckoning with them.
For a singer-songwriter who built her reputation on intensely personal originals, working from a covers album is itself a kind of philosophical statement. The songs she interprets are already loaded with other people’s fingerprints, other people’s meanings. By choosing “Sympathy for the Devil” as part of that project, she’s not trying to out-Stones the Stones. She’s asking what the song means when its performer isn’t the one who invented the mask. What does it sound like when a woman sings it, unhurried, at six and a half minutes, without the bongo-driven momentum that made the original feel like a party?
Duration as Interpretation
At 6:28, this version runs significantly longer than most takes on the song, and that length is doing real work. The Stones original was built around momentum, a groove that kept accelerating, making the devil feel kinetic and unstoppable. Jones’s version breathes differently. The extra time allows phrases to settle, allows silence to accumulate meaning, and gives the listener room to sit with the implications of each historical atrocity named in the lyrics rather than being swept past them by the rhythm.
This is actually a classic technique in jazz-influenced vocal interpretation, the kind of approach you hear in singers like Cassandra Wilson or early k.d. lang, where the tempo becomes a tool for emotional excavation rather than propulsion. Jones has always moved in that territory, somewhere between rock and the more ruminative end of American song. On this track, the expanded runtime turns what was originally a performance into something closer to a meditation. By the time the song ends, you haven’t been entertained so much as implicated.
Complicity and the Listener’s Role
The Rolling Stones version famously ends with the devil demanding that listeners identify themselves, a theatrical call-and-response that flatters the audience for being in on the joke. It’s fun. Jones’s approach reframes that demand. When the request for self-identification arrives in her reading, it doesn’t feel like an invitation to the party. It feels like a question you’re genuinely supposed to answer.
That’s the interpretive move at the heart of this version. The original Stones track asks you to appreciate the devil’s wit. Jones’s asks you to examine your own. The long runtime, the measured delivery, the absence of the original’s almost celebratory energy — all of it builds toward a version of the song where the listener’s complicity isn’t a wink but a charge. You’ve been listening. You’ve found it interesting. The devil wants to know why.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is “Sympathy for the Devil” by Rickie Lee Jones about?
Jones’s version covers the same lyrical ground as the original Rolling Stones composition: a first-person monologue from a devil-narrator who claims responsibility for major historical atrocities and asks listeners to recognize him. Her interpretation shifts the emotional register from seductive swagger to something more solemn and implicating, turning the song into a slower reckoning with human complicity in evil rather than a celebration of the devil’s charm.
What album is “Sympathy for the Devil” on?
The song appears on The Devil You Know, Rickie Lee Jones’s 2012 covers album, released on September 18, 2012.
Did Rickie Lee Jones ever explain the meaning of “Sympathy for the Devil”?
No verified public statement from Jones specifically explaining her interpretation of this track is part of the song’s documented record. What speaks clearly is the interpretive choice itself: placing the song on an album whose title invokes the proverb about familiar dangers signals that she understood the song as being about recognition and complicity, not spectacle.
How does Rickie Lee Jones’s version of “Sympathy for the Devil” differ from the Rolling Stones original?
Jones’s cover runs over six minutes and adopts a slower, more deliberate pace than the Stones’ bongo-driven original. Where Jagger performed the devil as a charismatic showman, Jones’s reading is more measured and resigned, shifting the emphasis from the devil’s seductive menace to the weight of the historical record he’s reciting and the listener’s uncomfortable position in hearing it.
Some songs endure because they’re great performances. Others endure because their central question keeps finding new answers. “Sympathy for the Devil” has always been the latter kind of song, which is why it survives translation into so many different voices and contexts. Jones’s version on The Devil You Know earns its place in that ongoing conversation not by competing with the original but by asking something the original never quite did: what does it mean to listen carefully to evil and find it coherent? The six-and-a-half minutes she takes to pose that question is time well spent.
Cara Whitfield has spent more years than she can count in record store back rooms and tiny venues, absorbing everything from post-punk to shoegaze to modern indie rock. She writes with the enthusiasm of a lifelong fan and the focus of someone who actually wants you to understand the song – not just enjoy it. Rock and alternative music is her home turf.