What Genre of Music Is Norah Jones Song Ive Got to See You Again
Norah Jones, Now in Her Own Words
A LOCAL musician couldn't ask for a more appreciative audition than the petite, black-haired woman in bluish jeans who was i of about ii dozen people at Marion'south Marquee Lounge on the Bowery a few Mondays ago. As the guitarist Tony Scherr led a trio through his bluesy, slightly skewed songs, she tapped her foot, giggled at his phase patter and vigorously applauded his solos. Every few tunes, she whispered, "I dearest this song!"
Betwixt sets she walked over to hug band members and chat about gigs. She'due south role of a circle of New York singers and songwriters who play one another's songs and swap backup musicians. Sometimes she visits Lower East Side karaoke bars and belts out songs by Shakira or Guns N' Roses. She'southward also a member of various bands — the Sloppy Joannes, the Mazelles, the Picayune Willies — who show up as opening acts at no-embrace-charge places like the Rodeo Bar. But she'due south far amend known past her ain name: Norah Jones.
In a few days Ms. Jones, 27, would resume her main career: the i that has sold millions of albums and fabricated her almost too pop for the 3,000-seat theaters she prefers to arenas. Her third solo anthology, "Non Too Late," is due for release January. thirty, and similar her first 2 it offers the intimate sound of a scattering of musicians in a small room, the audio of places like this one.
"Not Too Late" is besides the start total anthology of her ain songs, and information technology is darker, thornier and sometimes funnier than the albums that made her a star.
"On the first anthology I was saying, that'due south merely 1 role of me," she said. "And so I was thinking, well, am I going to hide the rest of me at present just because I'm afraid of something? No. I'm just going to be myself."
At Marion's Marquee Lounge she wore no makeup and had no entourage: just her boyfriend and songwriting collaborator, Lee Alexander, with whom she traded grins through the evening. They had rushed over after a long day of rehearsals to hear the night's opening deed: Jason Crigler, a guitarist and singer-songwriter recovering from a 2004 brain aneurysm. Ms. Jones had headlined a do good concert for his medical expenses, and she watched his set with sisterly concern and increasing relief. Betwixt sets she pointed out the other musicians in the room, offering praise and updates on their albums in progress. While she's by far the best-known musician from this excursion, she's however immersed in it. Hither she was but another working musician among peers, the exact opposite of a diva. She has piddling interest in loftier-profile celebrity, and the tabloids by and large ignore her. "I think I but never interested people that way in the beginning," she said. "I don't think I'm that boring, but I call back, to an outsider 'O.1000., she's in a stable human relationship, she's non a drug addict. She wears dress, she wears underwear.' "
She shrugged. "There's no facade," she said. "I wish there was sometimes."
Back onstage Mr. Scherr eased into an unhurried vamp, and Ms. Jones almost purred with pleasance. "I love slow music," she declared.
Of class she does. She has thrived as a ballad vocalizer, alternately historic for her finesse and dismissed every bit banal. Many listeners, she admits, consider her albums "background music." On "Non Besides Tardily" the instruments are yet mostly unplugged, and the tempos stay moderate; its first single, "Thinking Most Yous," is a soul-flavored love song Ms. Jones had hesitated to record because it was "too pop."
Nonetheless her newer songs don't always provide the comforts of her showtime two albums. The modify is articulate in the album'south first song, "Wish I Could." It's a gentle guitar waltz, and every bit it begins, the singer frets about how she can't behave to get into an one-time favorite place "without you" — the kind of situation listeners might wait in a Norah Jones song. But then a girlfriend pulls her in, grieving that her human, a soldier, has been killed in the war. The song deepens from plaintiveness to irrevocable sorrow.
Epitome
Ms. Jones wrote it, she said, while thinking virtually a soldier she dated soon after she arrived in New York Metropolis in 1999. She recently tried to discover data on him, with no results. "I'm worried almost him," she said.
"Wish I Could" is followed by "Sinkin' Soon," a banjo-plinking, New Orleans-tinged shuffle with touches of Tom Waits and Kurt Weill. Every bit Ms. Jones tinkles piano tremolos and allows herself a sultry rasp, it warns, "We drifted from the shore/With a captain who'southward too proud to say/That he dropped the oar." Later in the album comes "My Dear Land," a song she wrote after the 2004 ballot: "Who knows, peradventure the plans volition change/Who knows, maybe he's not deranged," she sings.
"I'grand not a very nighttime person," Ms. Jones said. "The darkness on this album comes more from just being aware of what'southward going on around the states."
Much of "Not Too Belatedly" was recorded in the home studio at the loft Ms. Jones shares with Mr. Alexander. They met when she was looking for a bass player for a brunch gig singing jazz at the Washington Foursquare Hotel, where she was too a waitress. Adam Levy, who'due south all the same the guitarist in her ring, gave her a list, "and I lucked out because I think the listing was alphabetical," Mr. Alexander said. He had just gotten a cellphone; Ms. Jones'southward phone call was the offset to come through.
The studio'southward big windows survey the Lower East Side; there are guitars in neat racks overhead and ii elegant antique pianos — a baby yard and an upright — among the keyboards. The doorway into the studio is flanked by vintage concert posters for members of Ms. Jones'due south musical pantheon: Duke Ellington, Hank Williams, Ray Charles and Patsy Cline.
Jazz, country and soul were all folded into Ms. Jones's 2002 debut album, "Come Away With Me." In a pop universe full of whiz-bang electronic bombast and frantic vocal acrobatics, she arrived like an emissary from some subtler dimension. She sang modestly, with unimposing jazz syncopations, accompanied by a few manus-played instruments.
"It's non that things are left out very carefully," she said. "It's just that we never thought about putting them in."
The songs, nigh of them written by her band members, were filled with contemplative longing and, tucked behind it, the serene assurance that she'd never have to shout for attention. Or so it seemed. Really, in 3 years singing on the New York lodge excursion, Ms. Jones had tried showier styles and decided she couldn't pull them off. "I sang in some bad blues band for a while, and I heard a recording of myself," she recalled. "I thought, 'God, I'm oversinging, and I don't sound similar Aretha Franklin, so I shouldn't attempt.' And I call up I scaled back a little bit more than peradventure I meant to."
MS. JONES has a musical pedigree; her male parent is the sitar master Ravi Shankar. Norah'south mother, Sue Jones, and Mr. Shankar broke upwardly soon subsequently Norah was built-in, and Norah was raised in Texas, in touch with Mr. Shankar only non close to him.
Epitome
"I didn't actually grow upwards with much of a relationship with him," she said. "Now that we're in a good place, I think: 'Wow, he's 86. I should ask him all these questions well-nigh music.' I was simply interested in having a dad for a long time, and I was nearly annoyed that he was a famous musician. And at present I'chiliad like: 'Oh, my God, John Coltrane came to him for a lesson. Forget George Harrison. I want to know well-nigh his afternoon with John Coltrane.' "
Drawn to jazz, she majored in piano at the pioneering jazz studies department of the University of North Texas before dropping out and heading to New York City. "I used to be a jazz snob, believe it or not," she said. "I sort of turned my olfactory organ upward at anything more commercial."
She soaked upwardly music theory and developed a limpid touch on pianoforte, though non the sheer velocity of musicians she admires. "I'm not lazy, but I've never been a lock-myself-in-the-practice-room kind of girl," she said. "I don't take chops. I can't play fast."
In New York she institute herself at the intersection of two social and musical scenes: jazz musicians, who were addicted of musical complexities and structural experiments, and singer-songwriters, aiming for concision and elegance. She regained respect for the basic three-chord songs of country, soul and folk.
"I'1000 admitting it: I don't brand jazz really anymore, but I'grand very heavily influenced by it," she said. "I had to reprogram myself. That's why I started writing more than on guitar in the beginning, because I merely knew three chords, and it was easier, it just made my life simpler. And on the piano it took me a long fourth dimension to realize I could play a triad" — an unembellished major or pocket-sized chord — "and information technology doesn't take to sound really simple. I finally learned how to do it."
Her reticence became her gift. Although "Come Away With Me" wasn't what Meridian 20 radio stations defined every bit popular, it caught on most by word of mouth and kept selling, eventually reaching x meg copies in the Us alone, ratified by an armload of Grammy awards. Her slightly more than upbeat 2004 sequel, "Feels Like Abode," has sold four million copies in the Us, and last year Ms. Jones released an anthology with her coincidental, countryish side projection, the Little Willies (named after another hero, Willie Nelson).
Popularity brought a backlash: from jazz aficionados grumbling that Ms. Jones's popular didn't belong on the hallowed Blue Note label, from rock and pop listeners who constitute her music too tame, and from people who grew tired of hearing her albums everywhere as, yes, groundwork music.
"I have a real big fright of existence overexposed," she said. "On the first record I was everywhere and it was like the worst fourth dimension in my life."
She was grateful for success, she quickly noted. "I'g appreciative of everything. But information technology was the most unhappy fourth dimension for me."
Video
"I'thou very much not like my records in person," she added. "They expect me to exist very girly, very romantic, very melancholy, and I'm non any of those things. So it's funny. I don't know where this side of me came from, this ballad-loving, serenity, simplistic, all that stuff. That's very much from me, and I'1000 non certain where I got that or why I held onto it and so tightly."
She knows her albums tin can be lullabies. "People always tell me how: 'Oh, my god, my son listens to your album every night to get to sleep. He went to summer camp last summer, and he couldn't slumber, so I had to give him his Norah Jones anthology.' I'grand similar: 'Oh, that'south so sugariness. Cheers.' I put people to sleep. Putting people to slumber, one child at a time." She laughed.
"It's funny, with every album, I'thou similar: 'Oh, this is way different from my terminal album. This is and then much not equally mellow.' And then I'll listen to information technology and I'1000 like, 'Wow, this song'south slow.' "
Ms. Jones wrote only a few songs on each of her first ii albums. (Her Grammy-winning hit, "Don't Know Why," was past Jesse Harris, who's part of her studio ring.) Every bit she was gearing up for her 3rd anthology, she said, "I was kind of depressed that I hadn't been creative in that style." And so despite the complications of life on the road, she decided: "I've got to figure out how to simply exercise this. This is my life now."
Subsequently the tour, Mr. Alexander left her alone for a calendar month while he produced an anthology for Amos Lee. "I was staying up late by myself in the studio playing, which is something I never practise when he's home," she said. "We had been together for five years, and it was the first fourth dimension we'd spent that kind of time apart, where I was the one alone and not busy."
What came out, forth with political reflections, were songs nigh loneliness and breakups. "It's my journal, non my diary," she said. "We realized we're in a good human relationship. Nosotros don't want to crusade turmoil just for a good song, so we'll simply have to get it from other people. I did have some skilful friends who were going through a pretty crude breakup at the fourth dimension. And I definitely looked towards that for a lot of these songs. I finally started looking exterior myself for ideas."
A sense of mortality flickers through the album'southward apolitical songs. In "The Sun Doesn't Similar You lot," she sketches a love song in a stark prison landscape, complete with dogs and razor wire; "Someday we all have to die," she reflects. Amidst eerie, Minimalistic plinking and an aura of guitar feedback, "Non My Friend" starts as a plaint and turns far more sinister: "When I back abroad," she sings, "I'm gonna keep the handle of your gun in sight." Even "Petty Room," a droll, countryish bounce virtually a tiny flat from her early days in New York Urban center, notes that with the bars on the windows, "If there were a burn down nosotros'd burn upwardly for sure."
The music on "Not As well Late" stays poised; its border is turned inward. "I know that to some people information technology might sound the same: 'Oh, it's repose, therefore it's the same,' " Ms. Jones said. "But I don't mind existence misunderstood anymore, that's the affair. I realize that it doesn't matter if people don't understand me or what something ways to me. If information technology doesn't translate and so that's O.K., I don't care anymore.
"If people savour the music, great. And if they don't similar it, and they recall it's boring, fine. They don't get it. But it doesn't matter anymore if I'm completely understood. Because you're not going to be. And you're never going to delight everybody, so you shouldn't try."
A few nights later Ms. Jones had a formal performance: a Webster Hall show for television cameras and an audience of friends, the news media and music-business contacts. At the sound check she was a working musician again, making last-infinitesimal adjustments to details: deciding, for instance, that one song needed the quiet rustle of a shaker instead of brushes on a snare drum. She started the concert non with a ballad, but with the sardonic barrelhouse strut of "Sinkin' Shortly." After the adulation she smiled knowingly. "I hope we'll play some tranquility tiresome songs," she said. "Eventually."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/arts/music/21pare.html
0 Response to "What Genre of Music Is Norah Jones Song Ive Got to See You Again"
Post a Comment