Norah Jones - Feels Like Home

[chris olivarez]

Blue Note is running tv ad's on "Feels Like Home" and my first impression is zzzzzz!!!!!!

[Alexander]

I can't wait for Mojo's long-awaited second album: MO MOJO.

And the follow-up "Way Mo' Mojo."

[Guest Chaney]

Norah Jones News Update

CD & Video Premiere

You can be one of the first to listen to Norah's new album Feels Like Home, on Monday, February 2nd at VH1.com. Starting Monday, February 2nd, you can stream Feels Like Home in its entirety exclusively on VH1.com, one week in advance of the February 10 release date. This special premiere is part of VH1.com's Hear Music First: Norah Jones. In addition to streaming Feels Like Home, you can Pre-Order the CD at a special price plus access new photos, interviews and more. You can visit Norah's page @ VH1.com for more information and sign up for Free Updates.

VH1 and VH1.com will also be the place to see the World Premiere of Norah's new music video for the first single from Feels Like Home, "Sunrise." The video will air exclusively on VH1 at 10:00 am and 8:00 pm (EST) on Sunday, February 1 (Super Bowl Sunday). This sunny video features Norah and The Handsome Band in a most fun setting... don't miss the premiere.

Feels Like Home: Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Norah Jones releases Feels Like Home, the follow up to Come Away With Me on Tuesday, February 10, 2004. Feels Like Home features new tunes penned by Norah along with songwriting partner & bassist, Lee Alexander, as well as all members of The Handsome Band (Daru Oda, Adam Levy, Lee Alexander, Kevin Breit & Andrew Borger). Feels Like Home also includes three cover songs: Townes Van Zandt’s “Be Here To Love Me,” Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan’s “The Long Way Home” and Duke Ellington’s “Melancholia,” to which Norah wrote lyrics to and re-titled “Don’t Miss You At All.”

Feels Like Home also features the talents of Dolly Parton singing vocals with Norah on "Creepin' In," drummer Levon Helm and organist/accordionist Garth Hudson of The Band, join in on "What Am I To You?" and the set also showcases long-time friends guitarists Jesse Harris and Tony Scherr, drummer Brian Blade and keyboardist Rob Burger. Reflecting on both Come Away With Me and Feels Like Home, Norah says "I’m glad that people liked the last album. It was where I was at the time, musically. This is where I am now. That’s what a recording is for me, like a snapshot. We had so much fun making this record.”

Internet Powered Music Experience

Feels Like Home includes BandLink connection for an Internet Powered Music Experience. Insert Feels Like Home into your CD-Rom Drive and gain access to exclusive bonus material. With BandLink you can play the CD, read lyrics, check out photos, chat with other fans and see news and tour dates. BandLink also allows you to gain access to exclusive bonus material upon registration. The bonus material will be updated frequently, so make sure to check it out often.

TV Appearances & Tour Dates

Before heading out on a major European Tour beginning in early April, Norah Jones will be make several television appearances.

Sunday, February 8: The 46th Annual Grammy Awards (CBS, presenting only)

Tuesday, February 10: The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (NBC)

Thursday, February 12: The Today Show (NBC)

Monday, February 23: The Late Show with David Letterman (CBS)

Wednesday, February 25: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Comedy Central)

Tuesday, March 9: Late Night with Conan O'Brien (NBC)

For more news and information on Norah Jones please visit her official website @ NorahJones.com.

You can also check out Norah's page@ Blue Note for news, audio, video, tour dates and more.

If you can not read the information contained in this email, please visit http://www.BlueNote.com. All of the information here... is there.

[Tjazz]

I gave VH1.com a listen of the Norah Jones album.

Country feel. I like it.

[Jim Alfredson]

I saw a TV commercial for this record... you know the ones... they show the artist performing and throw all these hyperboles out about the music and then the blue screen comes on with the phone number and website and snail-mail address so you can order the CD for only $18.99 plus $6.00 S/H (rush delivery available!! CALL NOW!)

It was weird.

[Tjazz]

Ya know,

Doesn't Norah Jones sound like Carole King??????

raw, earthy, natural singer B)

[jazzhound]

Blue Note is running tv ad's on "Feels Like Home" and my first impression is zzzzzz!!!!!!

Don't underestimate the healing power of a good nap!

[Gary]

The reviewer in today's Guardian seems to have enjoyed it

Alexis Petridis

Friday February 6, 2004

The Guardian

Never let it be said that pop has lost its capacity to shock. You might think that every element of surprise has been surgically removed from the music industry, but there are things happening in 2004 that would have caused an epidemic of gobsmacked incredulity just a few years ago. Let us imagine it is 1996 and you have been asked to bet on who will be Britain's most influential DJ in eight years' time: this being the era of the superstar DJ, you would confidently wager all on Paul Oakenfold or Sasha. Let us imagine your reaction when informed that 2004's most influential DJ is in fact Michael Parkinson. Is that a new clubland megastar, you gasp, educating the dancefloor with his turntable tricknology? Nope. It is Michael "Parky" Parkinson, Barnsley's avuncular king of chat and former presenter of All-Star Secrets.

In 2004 Britain's record buyers are, it seems, suffering under the delusion that a 69-year-old chat show host is some sort of avatar of musical cool. The repercussions of this are scarcely believable. Publicists routinely send out press releases for new acts bearing Parky's glowing testimony. In the album charts, the music he favours on his Radio Two show - inoffensive, jazz-tinged balladry - exerts a ruthless dominance. Katie Melua is toughing it out with Jamie Cullum, Michael Buble and the late Eva Cassidy: the battle of the blands. And the victor ludorum is 24-year-old New Yorker Norah Jones.

This is a peculiarly British phenomenon, and its rise is always presented as a kind of musical equivalent of the fuel protest or the Countryside Alliance: it is the sound of ordinary, decent middle-aged middle-Englanders making a stand against repellent modern concepts such as synthesizers, musical progress etc. Norah Jones, however, is a global phenomenon. Her 2002 debut Come Away With Me sold 18m copies, 8m in the US, where she receives little airplay. One theory is that her music acted as an aural balm in the wake of 9/11. It is unobtrusive, and inflected with traditional American genres of country, blues, folk and jazz. Much has been made of her links to the latter genre: she studied jazz piano and is signed to the venerable label Blue Note. In fact, Jones seems less like an heir to the throne of Ella Fitzgerald than a millennial version of Sade: a beautiful female vocalist whose exoticism and jazz chops are somewhat undermined by the knowledge that she makes the sort of music that middle managers from Basingstoke put on in the background when they think they're going to get their leg over.

They are liable to be delighted with Jones's second album, as long as they don't think an increased dose of country will hamper their chances. Presumably in an attempt to vary the relentless crawling of Come Away With Me, Jones has upped the Nashville content in her music. In addition, her success has attracted some all-star special guests. Levon Helm and Garth Hudson of the Band crop up on What Am I to You?, Dolly Parton sings a duet and Tom Waits gifts her a song, The Long Way Home. The latter's dark lyrics sound a little incongruous with such a pedestrian musical backing: "I've got a handful of lightning and a head full of rain," simpers Jones, sounding like a woman with a handful of tissues and a head full of shopping lists. Her voice has a husky intimacy, but it is oddly inexpressive, something she might have considered before calling upon Dolly Parton's services. Parton is just messing around on Creepin' In, chuckling at the song's close, but it still sounds as if she has Jones pinned to the wall of the studio with the sheer power of her voice.

The rest wafts discreetly around the room like something manufactured by Airwick. Don't Know Why, the best-known track from Come Away With Me, had an undeniable melody: you might not have liked it, but it was impossible to dislodge from your head. There's nothing similar here. In fact, Feels Like Home is so inoffensive you have trouble remembering whether you put it on.

You suspect that this is the appeal for the millions of people who buy this kind of thing. They are past the point of wanting to be moved or inspired by rock and pop. Instead they treat music as something ornamental, something with which you can tastefully decorate your home. Beautifully produced and beautifully played to no cumulative effect whatsoever, this album fits the bill perfectly.

[scottb]

Just got a special offer from BMG for the new Nora Jones disc. Now that's weird!!

I have never seen them offer a new release like this.

[Muskrat Ramble]

This thread is too long to search, so apologies if this has been mentioned already. I saw a Norah video last night on VH1, presumably off the new album, and the video itself was dreadfully bad. (The one with the neon-colored kid's show landscape and Norah supposedly fishing but actually looking bored or confused.)

[ghost of miles]

I've listened to it all the way through twice now, and offer the following impressions:

(1) It won't disappoint those who liked the first record.

(2) For the first five songs it sounds as if it will be as good as the first record, then tapers off...

(3) But the last song, "I Didn't Miss You at All," is the best... Ellington's "Melancholia" set to words by NJ, a rather haunting and compelling, spare, piano/vocal only piece.

[Brad]

There's a review in tomorrow's NYT by Ben Ratliff that isn't terribly complimentary. I read it this morning and perhaps someone can post it tomorrow.

[7/4]

Pop's Best Behaved . . .

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: February 8, 2004

The atmosphere of "Feels Like Home," Norah Jones's second album, is full of a tasteful quiet. Not a literal lack of sound, of course: there's a lot of girlish exhalation, and a bit of wry womanhood, and some ghosts of soothing 70's radio hits and American roots music. But there is a kind of void at the heart of "Feels Like Home": Song after song about inaction.

Nothing much happens in a Norah Jones song, whether she writes it or not. (She had a hand in 6 of the album's 13 songs, and most are written with various members of her group, the Handsome Band.) She reflects, she wonders, she grows wistful; she considers falling in or out of love, and when she pledges it, as in the song "What Am I to You?," she does so in certifiable clichés about skies falling and butterflies. One entire song, "Toes," contemplates the possibility that its narrator will go swimming — but in the end, as the chorus goes, her toes just touch the water. If every pop star transmits a persona, hers remains sweet and blank and diffident. To the extent that she has an idée fixe, it's time and its passing. The first song, "Sunrise," is about staying in bed with the clock stuck at 9:15, and by the sixth track the word "afternoon" has cropped up eight times.

Despite Ms. Jones's obvious gifts as a singer, she's still hiding out in work that's so low-key it verges on the studied. Instead of being a cipher that nobody can identify with, she has calibrated her crème-fraîche voice to the point of becoming a singer that anyone can identify with, if only in general terms. "Feels Like Home" (Blue Note) is more one-size-fits-all than her first album, the 18-million-selling "Come Away With Me."

The persona in her songs — let's not call it Ms. Jones herself, because her life couldn't be this dull — might have lived practically anywhere in the developed world, at any time during the last century. Somehow Ms. Jones's work has managed to make a virtue of vagueness. (The virtue wasn't quite so apparent when she played at the Beacon Theater in New York during last year's tour for "Come Away With Me"; she was too fidgety and lacking in stagecraft to make her close-quartered music get over in a large space.) This is multipurpose music: whatever your circumstances, you can plug in your own life's coordinates and project yourself into her songs.

Where she spends her money, aesthetically speaking, is on creating a vibe. As co-producer of the album with Arif Mardin, she mixes low volume with warm, slightly antique-sounding instruments — electric piano, steel guitar, accordion, acoustic bass. And her piano style comes pretty much whole from the one invented in the 1950's by the Nashville pianist Floyd Cramer, who helped create the "countrypolitan" sound of Patsy Cline's records, among hundreds of others. It's a cool, subtly kitschy choice, and it trails through almost every tune on "Feels Like Home."

If all that sounds like a description of "Come Away With Me," the new album is more buoyant than its predecessor, which was weighed down by morose medium-slow tempos. (They were like torch songs that were designed by Pottery Barn, with natural fibers and sand-washed color standing in for emotion.) The new album is slightly leaner, with more of the snapping, boom-chicka-boom rhythm of early Johnny Cash; it even upshifts to bluegrass for "Creepin' In," a song she sings with Dolly Parton. But on balance it's the Norah Jones you've already heard.

Ms. Jones's peek-a-boo act, coming through a lush voice, isn't artless: that's a game she's playing with her audience, and her voice is original enough to pull it off. The musical influences behind the tunes are almost all two to three decades old: Bill Withers, the Band, Neil Young, Maria Muldaur, Bonnie Raitt, Rickie Lee Jones. Still, there's an even stronger precursor for the general sound of her records, over and above those memory trip-wires. Simply put, it's hard to imagine this music without Cassandra Wilson.

On a run of albums starting in the early 90's, and with her original producer Craig Street — incidentally, the original producer for Norah Jones's first album, before Arif Mardin was called in to remake it — Ms. Wilson crafted an upside-down version of what's considered elegant in jazz, with the roots on top and the leaves on the bottom. Saxophones were out; acoustic guitars and mandolins were in. The usual cosmopolitan images were out; evocations of rural America under dark skies were in. The Wilson records smushed entire traditions together without a second thought, with simplicity as a common denominator. But underneath it all were elements that came unmistakably from jazz: a sense of controlled soloistic ideas, an organic feeling of a group playing together in real time, even within the songs' pop brevity, and in her singing, a lot of patience.

Ms. Jones, 24, inherited this blueprint, as well as a similar feel for material. On "Feels Like Home" Ms. Jones puts bluegrass, singer-songwriter pop, blues and Duke Ellington's song "Melancholia" together on one aligned field. Ms. Wilson once covered Robert Johnson; Ms. Jones once covered Hank Williams. Two years ago, Ms. Wilson recorded the Band's song "The Weight"; Ms. Jones hired the Band's Garth Hudson and Levon Helm to play on "Feels Like Home." The big difference is in vocal hues and styles: where Ms. Wilson's voice is wisdom-weighted and draped irregularly over bar lines, Ms. Jones's is young, fresh and rhythmically regular.

Essentially, Ms. Jones's albums feel like the commercial refinement of a brilliant idea. But even at their second-generation remove, Ms. Jones's albums still retain their little nubs of American identity, details that connect with national myths and cultural memory, and for some reason, soothe us. Those details are all over "Feels Like Home," though shyly played and coyly low in the mix — be it the modified banjo Kevin Breit plays on "Sunrise," Mr. Hudson's accordion on Townes Van Zandt's "Be Here to Love Me," the pump organ Ms. Jones plays in "Humble Me" or the box Andrew Borger taps on as the only percussion in "The Long Way Home," written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. But when Dolly Parton starts in on the second verse of "Creepin' In," blazing forth with a flash of melismatic mountain singing, suddenly here's a rock-ribbed, authentic national music, instead of a glib pop deconstruction. The eyelids, pleasantly lowered, suddenly pop open.

Perhaps what listeners respond to in Norah Jones isn't the honesty of the acoustic sounds, but the limited emotional range of the music. Perhaps we want someone who sounds self-assured, sexy, basically happy, talented, and untroubled. ("No More Drama," as Mary J. Blige put it a few years ago.) Is Ms. Jones making the world safe for soft-rock again? I'm afraid she is. But that's not all she's doing: she's a musician making clear connections to several different traditions, from country to folk-rock to jazz. One can imagine her lending star power to lots of worthy musicians along the way, but she herself has enough breadth within her for several careers, if she can just get her clock fixed, rise up and wander away from her cozy home.

[Tjazz]

Feels Like Home is being advertised at BEst Buy & Circuit City for $10.

BMG club has a 2 for 1 offer with Norah Jones.

Guess she'll be #1 this week.

[chris olivarez]

I read an article today where she expressed displeasure with the idea that her music was being sold in a tv ad.

[Alfred]

Is the CD copy protected in the U.S.?

[mgraham333]

Is the CD copy protected in the U.S.?

NO.

[Alexander]

I read an article today where she expressed displeasure with the idea that her music was being sold in a tv ad.

I saw that too.

[Out2Lunch]

I would like to see a Duets album next for Norah. They could dub in the other vocalists voice they way that was done with Sinatra when he recorded those last albums of his career. I think Norah could be paired with Yma Sumac or Mrs. Elva Miller or perhaps Moms Mabley to create some real musical magic.

Edited February 11, 2004 by Out2Lunch

[catesta]

Excellent idea Tod. B)

[Out2Lunch]

Let's run it up the flagpole and see if Norah salutes!

[Chrome]

From Slate ...

The Faux Life With Norah Jones

Debunking the pop star's "word-of-mouth success."

By Seth Mnookin

Posted Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2004, at 3:46 PM PT

The carefully crafted down-home Jones

Unless you're housebound, you've heard Come Away With Me, Norah Jones' first album—for the last two years, it's served as an unofficial boho soundtrack for coffee houses and bookstores around the country. But unlike other semiesoteric java joint mainstays, Come Away With Me is a record-selling tsunami: It's moved 18 million copies and won eight Grammys last year. (By comparison, Britney Spears' most recent album has sold about 2 million copies.) The release on Feb. 10 of Jones' sophomore effort, Feels Like Home—a slightly more upbeat album than her first one—presents a complicated challenge for Jones' savvy handlers.

The conventional take on Jones is that she's a homegrown success who prevailed in an era of pre-manufactured and overmarketed pop stars. The truth is a little more complicated. Beginning about six months before Come Away With Me was released in February 2002, Blue Note Records sent out advance copies bearing breathless testimonials. The label also set up a series of press-only showcases at places like New York's now-defunct Bottom Line, a club notable for having showcased "legit" artists like Bruce Springsteen and Miles Davis. These efforts resulted in so much attention that Jones was featured in Rolling Stone as an "Artist To Watch" weeks before her album even hit the streets. (I reviewed the album for the New York Observer almost two months before it came out; my editor and I agreed that Jones was being pushed so hard it was silly to wait until the actual release date.) But as soon as Blue Note's PR campaign started to pay off, an interesting thing occurred: There was a paradoxical effort to promote Jones as an artist whose success wasn't the result of promotion. She was, we were told, a word-of-mouth phenomenon, someone you could feel good about listening to while you wrote in your journal.

This type of promotion worked well among a crucial part of her fan base: college students, aging baby boomers, and sensitive writer types—people who think of themselves as independent and open-minded. Jones' continuing success will depend at least in part on getting these fans to be as evangelical about Feels Like Home as they were about Come Away With Me. So how do you market one of the best-selling artists of the past decade without making her willful fans feel as if they're being spoon-fed a star? By continuing to pretend you're not marketing her at all.

This time around Jones and her handlers don't need to ask for coverage; instead, she's being carefully parceled out. Advance copies for Feels Like Home weren't sent to reviewers until a couple of weeks before the album's release date, and only one reporter, Rob Hoerburger, was allowed access to Jones and her new album as it was being made. The result was a perfectly positioned—and highly uncritical—feature called "The Anti-Diva," which ran in the Jan. 25 issue of the New York Times Magazine.

In addition to amply praising the product, Hoerburger bought into the now overdetermined story line about Jones' career trajectory:

The success [of Come Away With Me] happened without the usual promotional tools, a Top 10 pop radio hit or a high-concept video, on a boutique jazz label, Blue Note, whose executives usually listen for talent first and chart positions later, if at all. Julian Fleisher, a New York nightclub singer who released his own album of smart, genre-busting pop in 2002, said: "It was like Howard Dean. It was a grass-roots success that people heard about in their living rooms. That's where I heard it first—in someone's living room."

It's a nice story, but it's not exactly true. Jones didn't have a high-concept video because watching Jones strut around on a strobe-lit set would have turned off her fans. But she did have a pair of low-concept videos, one of which featured Jones wandering barefoot on a beach, flip-flops in hand. Jones didn't have a pop radio hit, but that was just because her fans don't listen to pop radio—they read the New York Times, and they buy CDs instead of downloading songs off the Internet. And while it used to be true that Blue Note was a boutique jazz label, it's now owned by Capitol Records (home to Radiohead and Snoop Dogg). These days, Blue Note focuses on both jazz and boomer artists like Van Morrison and Al Green.

Jones conveyed to Hoerburger that she wants to be seen as part of a tradition that views art as antithetical to commercial success, and on Feels Like Home, she has tried to cement her status as a legitimate artiste. One persistent criticism of Come Away With Me is that Jones didn't write enough of the songs herself—which is seemingly fine for Madonna (or Billie Holiday, for that matter) but apparently a no-no for an "authentic" singer-songwriter. She's more active on that count here, but the results are less than stellar. "What Am I to You?," the only song Jones wrote by herself, is a train wreck of clichés and platitudes, with line after line of deep blue seas, falling skies, and butterflies. "Toes," which Jones co-wrote, features an odd kind of attenuated solipsism—the entire song is an internal debate as to whether the singer should go swimming. (She doesn't.) There are also requisite homages to her brethren in all those coffee shop CD players: Feels Like Home includes covers of both Tom Waits and Townes Van Zandt compositions, as well as a nod to the night watchman of Bob Dylan's "Visions of Johanna." It's also a more countrified album than Come Away With Me, with two pinches more twang and slightly less torch. Everything from the album's title to its trajectory (it starts with Jones in bed on "Sunrise" and ends with her watching the snow out her window on "Don't Miss You at All," a Jones composition set to Duke Ellington's "Melancholia") is designed to make the listener feel comfortable.

If one of the strengths of Come Away With Me was the unexpected and unobtrusive beauty of Jones' voice, Feels Like Home is actually too unobtrusive—about right for background music while you're trying to decide whether to order that second cup of cappuccino, but not the type of thing you'd force a bunch of friends to listen to all the way through. The surprising sexuality of her first album, where the 22-year-old Jones didn't know why she didn't come and was waiting for her lover to turn her on, has been replaced by rusty nails and long ways home and handfuls of rain. At its best, Come Away With Me was like a revelation—there are young, sexy singers that sound this intelligent and artful? It was distinctive and fresh. Feels Like Home is too tepid and bland to serve as a fully deserving follow-up.

But when you've sold 18 million records with your first release, you can afford to not do quite as well the second time around. Plus, it sets up a nice story line for next time: scrappy Norah Jones, fighting to prove she still has the right stuff.

[Tjazz]

Is the CD copy protected in the U.S.?

Is the Norah Jones FEEL LIKE HOME copy protected in Europe?

[couw]

Is the CD copy protected in the U.S.?

Is the Norah Jones FEEL LIKE HOME copy protected in Europe?

according to amazon.de: yes.

[JSngry]

Maybe that's why she didn't come.