ALL THAT JAZZ
“Being massively successful is a little traumatizing,” says Norah Jones. “I was probably the most stressed out I’ve ever been in my life. But I’m not complaining.”
The serene singer is thinking back to when her 2002 debut album, Come Away With Me, won eight Grammys (including album of the year), sold more than 25 million copies and found her in such demand, she “freaked out” at the prospect of doing more interviews.
Now, she’s in a Toronto hotel suite, submitting rather gracefully to questions about her new album, Day Breaks. By the end of the day, at a music industry event in Toronto, she’ll be so vague and curt one will want to give the onstage host a hug, but at the moment, she’s smiling. “I feel really lucky that the path success took me in was one of creativity and not crawling in a hole and being scared to do anything.”
This creativity has been unpredictable and under the radar. Jones is an unusual mix of indie artiste and crossover superstar. In the years since her hit Don’t Know Why was everywhere from Starbucks to Sesame Street, she has delved into side projects such as alt-country trio Puss N Boots (which toured as Neil Young’s opening act), garagerock outfit El Madmo (which found her wearing a blond wig and howling about “sweet adrenalin”) and all-female comedy-rap posse White on Rice (which released a ribald video about bad dates — with another in the works). Under her own name, she has expanded her range from country to pop to cinematic noir, and on Day Breaks, to actual jazz.
Not that Jones’s oeuvre wasn’t previously found on record-store jazz racks, but Day Breaks was recorded largely live off the floor, with solos. On three songs, she even inserts herself into the piano chair of 83-year-old sax maestro Wayne Shorter’s working quartet. Her label is selling Day Breaks as “a kindred spirit to Come Away With Me,” although the material sounds both more adventurous and appreciably deeper.
“If these songs don’t have more heft than when I was 22 years old,” says Jones, “then that would be sad.” For one thing, she has spent time performing with the likes of Bob Dylan, Keith Richards and Young, whose song Don’t Be Denied she adapts here, changing a lyric about “Winnipeg ” to “Anchorage.” (“I moved to Anchorage when I was in seventh grade,” she says. “No offence to Canada, but I wanted to make it more personal.”) The experiences seem to have rubbed off. According to Don Was, president of her label, Blue Note (and The Rolling Stones’ longtime producer), “She got a lot of inspiration, just seeing people who have built these long careers on integrity, as opposed to fashion.”
What’s more, Jones recorded the album while newly pregnant with her second child, a daughter, who’s now five months old. She also has a two-and-a-half-year-old son, who during the mixing stage would offer his own brand of input at home: “Sometimes, he’s like, ‘Mommy song!’ And then sometimes he’s like, ‘No! No Mommy song!’ Half the time he’s so stoked, and then half the time, he wants to hear something else.”
Such in-home critique leaves her little time to listen to the aging hipsters who still call her “Snorah.” Jones says she feels settled, with no desire to repeat her past mega-success, mostly because of her new family: “I think that would be hard for me, especially in this day and age of exposure.” She maintains an unusual degree of privacy for a public figure in 2016, never having divulged the names of her children, or their faces on social media, or even the name of her musician husband.
“I think Norah is the purest artist that I know,” Was says, “and I know a lot of artists. What does it take to endure? It takes a purity, and it requires that you be motivated by the right things. And she’s really sane in that fame and (money) mean very little to her.”
Day Breaks shows Jones engaging more directly with the world around her through her music. On the tense Flipside, she sings, “If we’re all free, then why does it seem / We can’t just be” and “Put the guns away or we’re all gonna lose.”
Jones says her more political songs are driven not by a need to preach, but to express her fears. “The world is falling apart right now. Sometimes, you feel, ‘What can I do? How do I clean up global warming? Or, how am I, one person, going to change a gun law?’ It gets overwhelming, and you feel like what you do is insignificant.”
What she does do is make connections — whether by playing at the White House, where she bonded with soldiers’ parents on Mother’s Day, or even at a low-profile gathering such as her music industry event in Toronto.
After her onstage chat mercifully ends, she plays a few songs, solo, at the piano, including, by request, Don’t Know Why. Singing it for probably the 11 quintillionth time, she invests it with all the grown-up wistfulness we find on Day Breaks, and it’s about enough to break her listeners’ hearts.
“The biggest compliment you can ever get,” she says, “is, ‘Your music really helped me through a hard time.’ You do what you can. I guess any little thing is not insignificant.”