Out of the lounge-room comfort zone

Seven years after the runaway success of her debut album, Norah Jones has moved from her trademark smooth jazz into rougher, contemporary rock. And far from courting celebrity trappings, she’d far rather play in a tiny club with passers-by forming an audience

THERE WAS A time when Norah Jones was reluctant to talk to anyone about her work, her life, her art; we know this because seven years ago, just as her debut album, Come Away With Me, was in the midst of selling millions of copies, Jones and I met in London, and the last thing she wanted was to engage in yet another interview with yet another music writer. Back then, Jones was running flat out on the promotional treadmill. No spare time, schedules rearranged at the click of a button, her normally chirpy personality chipped away by PRs with clipboards.

Things have changed, however, and very much for the better. Clearly, the past seven years and the success of subsequent album releases (2004's Feels Like Home, 2007's Not Too Late) have given Jones a buffer zone, within which she can live her life without feeling the need to spread her time so thinly that it'll snap at the slightest tug.

With a new album, The Fall, just around the corner, she's out there again, but when asked whether she's fed up talking about herself, she replies with a gentle laugh. "I am! They're working me to the bone, but I can do it, I'm made of stern stuff."

If what we've heard of the album is anything to go by, it's her fans who might need to be made of stern stuff. The Fallis a change of style from what has made Jones the queen of post-prandial relaxing; critics have sneered at her sedate, if perfectly poised jazz/soul, claiming it sleepwalks from song to song, or that it has the backbone of a jellyfish. Whether to placate them (unlikely) or whether she felt a change of musical direction was what she needed in order to re-energise her creativity is open to conjecture.

From the organic warmth of a jazz/pop/folk hybrid to a more contemporary rock feel might seem a bit of a jump for some people. For Jones, it was that she simply wanted “to try some new things, to step out of that comfort zone.” Did she feel she was stuck in something of a rut? “No, not too much,” she says, implicitly allowing that a small part of her actually was. “I just thought it was time to try something new. I really wanted to experiment with different instrumental textures, but wanting them rougher, nowhere near as smooth as they had been in the past. I wanted to try certain songs, and because they were quite different to what I had done, I wanted to go more in that direction. And while there were certain songs that could have sat very comfortably on my last album, ultimately I wanted to bring all the songs into this other musical place, so that they all fitted together.

“The thing about being an artist is that you never want to get too comfortable, you never want to feel that what you do is too easy. That way, you get bored very quickly, or stagnate – or repeat yourself. The aim is to grow, learn new things, inspiring things.”

The daughter of an Oklahoma nurse, Sue Jones, and Indian sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, Norah Jones was born 30 years ago in Brooklyn, New York, but grew up in Grapevine, Fort Worth, Texas. An alumnus of Dallas’s Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing Visual Arts (alma mater of Erykah Badu), Jones majored in jazz piano at the University of North Texas. In 1999, she dropped out of university and made her way to New York’s Greenwich Village, where she waited on tables during the day and performed jazz standards at night. It was during this period that the chief executive of Blue Note, Bruce Lundvall received and listened to a demo sent in by Jones. His reaction was immediate: “Norah has a signature voice,” he informed Time magazine, “right from the heart to you. When you’re lucky enough to hear that, you don’t hesitate. You sign it.”

CUE THE DEBUT album, the millions of copies sold, the fuss, the personality crisis, the burnout. How does anyone cope with so much success without becoming a mess? “I found it really difficult at first,” Jones reveals. “It was overwhelming, actually. Luckily I had a lot of good people around me – my band, my friends, everyone in between, people I worked with, my family. They were all ready to help me to stay grounded through all the early days of being successful and selling so many records. It depends on the people you have around, of course. But, you know, you can also create the people you have around you – who you choose to have around you is up to you, too.

“So, like I say, it was overwhelming, but I got used to it. Things settled down after a while, and now I can just focus on the music. I really don’t think about the success too much, and that’s the only way for me to stay sane. And then there’s also the critical backlash. When someone is very successful after a very quick start, there’s always going to be that. 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.” She seems to have settled into herself, also, between the massive early success and the interim period of being well known but not being an Oh-My-God! celebrity.

“I’m much more comfortable being me, yes; partly because I’m older, and partly because I have more experience of the world. You see, what people may have forgotten is that I came to New York to just play jazz, to play standards, and I didn’t really know what else I would do. I never thought I would do anything else, but when I arrived in New York my mind was blown by all the different things I experienced, and pretty soon I knew I wanted to write songs and explore different musical avenues. My first record was just trying these different things – I had no idea it would be such a huge success. It was an experiment! Ever since then I’ve been experimenting, but I now feel more comfortable with what I want.

“Also, instead of embracing fame and using it to get into clubs or restaurants, or hoping I get photographed by paparazzi, I actually avoid those situations. I try to live my life as normally as possible. You see those people in the magazines and I don’t personally want that in my life. I’m so thankful that I’ve been successful, but I don’t want to be a famous person who is caught in the limelight. It doesn’t appeal to me, never did. So when I’m home in New York, I try to forget about that side of things. I hang around all my friends, be normal, take the subway, do average things. In NYC you can do that, because they’re too cool, they don’t care.”

It’s about how you present yourself, is what Jones seems to be saying. The direct implication is that the public react to what they see. “There are certain people who can’t control the scrutiny – it’s too much, they don’t want it. For the most part you can put out what you want to get back. Like, when I’m home I play in small bars and clubs in little side projects of mine. Not too many people know about them – and that’s another thing that grounds me, playing in a small room instead of on a big platform. Some musicians might think that the fans will get too close, but again it’s what you put out. Some of the clubs and bars I play in have no backstage at all – some are smaller than my apartment. I sit at the bar before and after the shows, and people come over sometimes and say hello, but it’s never weird. It’s just so much fun, and I feel if I couldn’t do that it’d be sad.”

WE TALK ABOUT how some pop and rock stars are scared to go back to performing in small clubs, where the proximity of people (and how the whites of their eyes might alert them to something) is no longer part of the learning process, and where, perhaps, flaws are rather more visible. “Well, I imagine there are certain people who can’t do it without creating a mob scene. For me, it’s mellow; I’m successful but I’m not a huge pop star. It’s also important, musically, to try songs out without a bunch of people reviewing the show or making a big freakin’ deal out of it. I think that’s hugely rewarding, because it’s fun – playing together with some friends, going through a bunch of cover songs on a Saturday night.

“Whoever passes by gets to see the show, and they enjoy it – or they don’t – and they get to request a song from the floor, and we choose to play it, or not. Sometimes, we do other gigs that nobody knows about, so nobody comes to them! To me, that’s big fun. Totally great. It’s like the new album – I feel as if I had a sound in my head and I saw it through to the end.

“Nailed it, in fact.”

The Fall, on EMI, will be out on November 13th