By Donald Liebenson
Earlier this year, Norah Jones achieved yet another milestone in her estimable more-than-20-year career: She replaced herself at the top of Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz chart.
Her most recent album, Visions, debuted at No. 1. At No. 2 was her astonishing 2002 debut, Come Away With Me, which, as of this writing, has charted for 378 weeks, 335 of them in the top spot. The following week, the two albums switched positions, with Come Away With Me returning to No. 1.
Visions was Jones’s fourth No. 1 on the Billboard chart, following Come Away With Me, 2020’s Pick Me Up Off the Floor and the live album ...’Til We Meet Again a year later. Seven of her albums have charted in the top 10.
The last time Norah Jones played Ravinia—where the Visions tour brings her on July 14—was in 2003 on the heels of her Grammy-palooza that was Come Away With Me, which earned eight awards, including Album of the Year. Jones, the rising star, beat out Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising, as well as albums by the Dixie Chicks, Eminem, and Nelly. She earned five of those statuettes, including Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, as well as Record of the Year with “Don’t Know Why.” A photo of Jones struggling to hold all of her Grammys in her arms went 2003’s version of viral.
Said Jones that night of glittering prizes, “Career-wise, this is probably the biggest thing I’ll ever do.” She later told Katie Couric on 60 Minutes, “I feel like I went to somebody else’s birthday party, and I ate all their cake.”
The album has sold nearly 30 million (and counting) copies. Rolling Stone ranked it among its top 100 albums of the decade: “She sings in an earthy growl that can send chills, or a conspiratorial whisper that suggests she’s sharing sworn secrets, or a weary sigh that exudes the kind of quiet, easygoing intimacy that doesn’t come around in songs too much anymore.”
Norah Jones and her band in her July 8, 2003, Ravinia debut
So, what’s she been up to since her last visit to Ravinia? Musically, she has released eight additional solo albums, including a Grammy-nominated Christmas album (she’s received 19 Grammy nominations in all), a live album, and seven collaborative projects, including Rome with Danger Mouse and the live tribute album Here We Go Again: Celebrating the Genius of Ray Charles, which was spearheaded by Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis and earned her another Grammy. The song “Sunrise” from her second album, Feels Like Home, brought her more Grammy love as the Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
She hasn’t been resting on her considerable laurels is our point, but it’s hard to keep up with all the Joneses. In 2008, in perhaps a kick against what Joni Mitchell called “the star-maker machinery behind the popular song,” she stepped away from the piano, picked up her guitar, put on a blonde wig, donned some Blade Runner-style makeup, and formed a side project, El Madmo under the stage alias Maddie.
In March 2020, during the pandemic, Jones debuted a series of at-home concerts on YouTube. The first was viewed more than four million times. The New Yorker marked Jones’s long, strange trip: “Twenty years after she broke in at the Living Room, on the Lower East Side, and eighteen years after her first record, Come Away With Me, made her famous at the age of 23, Jones’s onscreen living room has become a refuge from her celebrity, an ill-lit space where she is drawing deeply from the home piano, as if returning to the source.”
Two years later, Jones launched a podcast, Norah Jones Is Playing Along, featuring conversations and jams with a wide range of artists, including Jeff Tweedy from Wilco, the legendary Mavis Staples, Chris Thile, and Questlove joined by Christian McBride. As herself, she had memorable cameos on 30 Rock and in Seth McFarlane’s raunchy comedy Ted, for which she wrote the Oscar-nominated song “Everybody Needs a Best Friend.”
Throughout her career, Jones has resisted being pigeonholed. Her albums are on the venerable jazz label Blue Note, but the genre-defying Jones is also a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. Visions, her first non-holiday album in four year, is a lively departure from her 2020 album Pick Me Up Off the Floor, which Glide Magazine called “brooding and melancholy” (but in a good way). “The reason I called the album Visions,” Jones says, “is because a lot of the ideas came in the middle of the night or in that moment right before sleep.” Leastways, her voice is as dreamy as ever. It’s an album of soaring harmonies and the catchiest of hooks, produced by and featuring Grammy-nominated multi-instrumentalist Leon Michels.
Take the song “I Just Wanna Dance.” We don’t know what’s troubling the singer, but she proclaims, “I don’t want to talk about it, I just wanna dance.” Jones says she and drummer Homer Steinweiss “were just playing around with this song, and I was on Wurlitzer. The song pretty much just repeats the same thing over and over. Afterward, Leon was like, ‘We’ll change some of the lyrics around,’ and I was like ‘No, I just want to dance! That’s it!’ That’s the whole sentiment of the song. There is no verse, there is nothing else, so hopefully the groove and the vocals carry it, because that was the plan!”
While Come Away With Me was recorded in its entirety three times, Visions “sprang from an improvisatory immediate space,” according to Grammy.com. Jones shared with the website, “I didn’t really have a lot of preconceived ideas. We just wrote and played. I love playing music with people and collaborating and trying new things, and I feel very at ease with myself and as myself in all those situations. Which is why it works, I think. I’m not trying to be somebody else when I do this. I’m comfortable, but I love to just try new clothes on musically.”
Jones has come a long way since the days when she was a freshman music major studying jazz piano at the University of Texas. New York singer-songwriters Richard Julian and Jesse Harris heard her sing and encouraged her to drop out of college. Armed with demos she recorded in her high school band room (you can hear them on Come Away With Me’s expanded box set), she went to New York, waitressed, played gigs, caught the ears of a Blue Note executive, and, well, you know the rest. Two years ago marked the 20th anniversary of Come Away With Me, or as NPR’s Jazz Night in America host Nate Chinen joked, the album you’ve heard a thousand times “standing in line at Starbucks.”
Jones, not one for looking back, reflected on the album in several characteristically charming and self-effacing interviews. The album, she told Salon, was born out of growing up listening to Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Bill Evans, and Miles Davis.
“I used to think that Come Away With Me was such a mellow record,” she said, “but it is actually a sweet little record. Is it melancholy? Yes, but it also has so many hopeful notes to it. I don’t even know how to do that sometimes now (laughs), because I am usually drawn to the sad lyric – maybe it is my age now, maybe it is from just living life. But Come Away With Me definitely has a looking-forward, hopeful, romantic quality to it, which was age-appropriate at the time.”
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Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based entertainment writer. His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Los Angeles Times, and on RogerEbert.com. The first Ravinia concert he attended without his parents was Procol Harum in 1970.