INTERVIEW:Her music has been described as sedate in the past, but Norah Jones, who has sold almost 40 million records, has a few surprises in store in her new release, writes TONY CLAYTON LEA
NORAH JONES LOVES Paris. Today is a little cloudy, but it’s warm, and hey, it’s Paris in the springtime, so what’s not to love? “It’s one of my favourite cities,” enthuses Jones, a woman who has sold almost 40 million records, yet is dressed in a floppy/hippy slip of a thing that looks more thrift shop than catwalk. Clearly this is a woman who wears her wealth with a casual sense of style. “Paris is certainly one of the more familiar, because I’ve been here more than most places. I’ve only been in Dublin a couple of times. Wherever I go, I usually try to get out for a good meal. I find that when I go out on tour and you don’t have a lot of time to sightsee, the best thing to do is to go for a great meal. You get a lot of the local flavour and a real feel for a city if you go to good restaurant, and boy, am I in the right place for a good restaurant.”
The daughter of Oklahoma concert producer Sue Jones and Indian sitar musician Ravi Shankar, Jones was born 33 years ago in Brooklyn, New York, but grew up in a one-parent home in the Fort Worth suburb of Grapevine, Texas. With Shankar very much out of the picture (and it’s a topic that is amiably halted with a firm: “I didn’t grow up around him and that’s it”) she and her mother embarked on a stop-start life, travelling across America in a beat-up car, passing the time camping, fishing, skiing and hiking.
“We moved to Alaska for a while – being there broadened the mind, that’s for sure. My mom was big on road trips, so we saw every state in the US, which I thought was so cool. She enjoyed the travelling; she’s that kind of person. I was dragged along – I used to complain, but now I love travelling.”
Eventually, the pair returned to their original base, from where Jones majored in jazz piano at the University of North Texas. From there, it was no more than a few steps to New York’s Greenwich Village, waiting on tables during the day and singing jazz standards at night. It was during this time – late 1990s – that Blue Note president Bruce Lundvall listened to a demo sent in by Jones. His reaction was instant: “Norah has a signature voice,” he informed Time magazine. “When you’re lucky enough to hear that, you don’t hesitate. You sign it.”
Such praise is echoed by Jack White, who Jones has collaborated with over the past 18 months. The former White Stripes singer, and one of rock music’s drop-dead cool figures, regards Jones’s voice as “a thing of rare beauty and instantly appealing. It’s a bonus that she’s also fun to be around.”
“I would imitate every singer I could,” recalls Jones. “I loved singing along to other people’s music, and by the time I was 15 I had a Sarah Vaughan song I imitated to death. It was a live version she did of My Funny Valentine – you can’t even tell it’s that song it’s so amazing and different. I tried to get it down because her vibrato is so unusual. Same with Billie Holiday’s vibrato – it was so strange, too.”
It has been 10 years since Jones released her debut album, Come Away with Me, a record that set up her and her music as the ideal companion piece for soundtracking dinner party chit-chat. Although the record is infused with the spirits of Aretha Franklin, Patsy Cline, Bill Evans, Hank Williams and Nina Simone, its unifying blend of jazz, pop and country brought her considerable mainstream success.
Subsequent album releases have tended to shoehorn her into an area that had some critics sniping at the sedate nature of the music, which seemed tailor-made for hotel elevators. She used to regard her reaction to such criticism as a character flaw: “I’m too sensitive,” she told Mojo magazine in 2009. “All I have to do is glance upon a bad review and it will crush me for a week. I make slow music and they call me Snorah, but Jesus, that slow music touches people. You’ve got to forget about what people think of you.”
In the past couple of years she has toughened up and worked hard at upending such opinions. Part of the toughening up process included the amicable break-up of a seven-year love affair with bass player and former band member Lee Alexander (Jones is single at present). Then came her collaboration last year with hip musicians Jack White and Brian Burton on the evocative album, Rome. Hanging around with the former frontman of the White Stripes and Burton (one of the music industry go-to musicians/producers) elevated Jones somewhat in the eyes of her detractors.
This is something that looks set to continue with her forthcoming album, Little Broken Hearts, which Jones co-wrote with Burton, and which displays a far more experimental side to the singer. It is, she says “a concept album of sorts that examines a difficult break-up”. There is little doubt that Jones’s more settled audience might just wonder what on earth is going on – was that part of the point of doing it?
“No, not really,” she avers prior to going into a bit of cliché-speak. “For me, every album I make is a natural evolution, so I’m not sure why it’s perceived that it will surprise people so much. That said, I suppose I’m on the inside of it all so I’m not really placed to be objective about it.”
Having worked with Burton on Rome, she says, something clicked between them. Burton is better known for aligning himself to an edgier style of music, and Jones was open to trying something quite removed from her usual output. “We were friends, we had already worked well together, and so it didn’t seem that crazy.”
To record the new album, Jones relocated to Los Angeles, where she kept very much to herself. There’s a strong sense that despite her wealth and fame, Jones would much rather be off the grid than in the centre. “I didn’t play any gigs there, and I didn’t go out that much. I rented a little house for two months and I cooked meals almost every night. I had loads of barbecues, had lots of friends over. Went to supermarkets. I think I went to a restaurant about three times.”
Applying such a low-key approach to her life fits. Early in her career, Jones admits to having felt intense pressure at having become so well known so quickly. “On the one hand, people are telling you you’re fantastic, yet on the other you hear people being angry and mean about you. You shouldn’t listen to any of it, to be honest.”
It has helped tremendously, she says, that she lives in (an unspecified corner of) New York. “I hang around all my friends, be normal, take the subway, do average things. In New York you can do that, because they’re too cool, they don’t care. In LA, because I was barely noticed, the recognition factor actually wasn’t a problem. I would hate the opposite. A little bit here and there is one thing, but to be completely recognised all the time would be very tough for me.”
Would she by nature be a settled person? “I wouldn’t want to be a crazy pop star, that’s for sure. I’d be so stressed out by that.” Has she reached a point where she is comfortable with her profile, which seems moderate rather than huge? “Yes, I feel lucky because of that. I remember when I put out my first album – I was on the jazz label Blue Note, and even though I didn’t make a real jazz record, I definitely wasn’t making a pop record that I – or anyone, for that matter – expected to head to the top of the charts. We had pretty modest expectations, but it just went crazy, cuckoo, totally unexpected. It was wonderful, but stressful, no doubt, for a while. I was glad when it settled down.”
Jones is now in a position where, music-wise, she can effectively do what she wants. “I feel like I’ve always been in that position in that I’ve always done what I wanted. I’ve never been the kind of person who does what I’m told – in fact, it makes me want to do it less. And it has to be said that my record label never even hinted at me replicating the success of my first album on subsequent records. If they have opinions, they’re rarely bad ones. And if they are then they’re dismissed pretty quickly. Besides, after my first record was so successful I had even more control over what I did subsequently.”
This is true – despite the perception of Jones aligning herself to the middle of the road, there have been telling examples of her doing exactly the opposite by working with the likes of Ryan Adams, Keith Richards, Belle Sebastian, Willie Nelson, and Outkast – none of which could justifiably be termed conservative.
“I understand what you mean about this album – one or two of the songs some people might find shocking – the new single is called Happy Pills - but the album as a whole is a different step for me. On it are songs that are intimate, beautiful and quiet. So as far as this particular collaboration goes, it went really well.”
A glint of sun shines through the clouds. “What’s next?,” prompts Jones before she heads out to one of those local-flavour restaurants she loves. “Oh, no, I’ve learned not to look too far ahead into the future.”
Little Broken Hearts is out on April 27th
