Norah Jones

THE NEXT STAGE

Not Too Late contains few musical departures, with arrangements generally hewing to the low-key, jazz- and country-tinged sounds listeners have come to expect. But, clearly, those who buy Norah Jones records as tasteful dinner-party soundtracks ought not listen too closely. Don’t get her wrong—Jones isn’t trying to disown her earliest artistic choices. She steadfastly refuses to play “what if” games. “Though,” she says, “I still feel like—‘my God, my first record is my high-school picture that everyone in the frickin’ world saw that I wish they hadn’t.’”

With the maturity that’s become her trademark, Jones sees her first public musical steps as an essential rite of passage. Many songwriters, she notes, begin with simple romantic sentiments—“‘I love you, you love me, let’s rhyme a song, come away with me.’ And there’s something to be said for songs like that.” Certainly, the record-buying public agrees.

At the same time, Jones considers it important to move away from being an interpreter of other people’s songs and sentiments. “This record is different. I worked really hard on these songs and I feel like they came from a place—a different place. … I did try to get into different ways of looking at things, I tried to write about things that weren’t necessarily just my experiences. I let a lot of outside things influence my writing this time.”

Though Jones is referring to subject matter, she easily could have been talking about her copious, aforementioned side projects. While The Little Willies are her highest-profile diversion (with an EMI-distributed album), she’s involved in a seemingly endless parade of one-off projects and recurring collaborations; the country-tinged Sloppy Joannes (fronted by pal Sasha Dobson) even held down a weekly pool-hall gig at one point.

“She does as many gigs in small clubs as anyone else I know in New York,” says frequent collaborator Jesse Harris. “She just wants to play music and be creative.”

“It can’t even be stressed enough how much [El Madmo] opened her up as a songwriter,” notes Little Willies bandmate Richard Julian. “Because she started writing those tunes, which are really hilarious and really silly. And because there was no [expectation] for them to be the next tunes for her record. She could just let herself go and I think it opened up creative juices for her own thing.”

Jones agrees. “Daru and I started writing for that band—the idea had been there for maybe four years as a joke,” she says. “But we didn’t really start writing songs for it until the last tour, because she started playing bass and I started playing guitar, and I brought my electric guitar along on the road because it’s fun … So we started writing these songs and it definitely opened me up to just writing—it kind of opened the floodgates. … Without El Madmo, maybe this [new] record would be different.”

El Madmo’s songs weren’t the only ones written on the road, either. “I had written about 10 songs by the end of the tour,” says Jones, “and I thought, ‘Wow! Yay, I have 10 songs! Go figure; who’d-a thunk it?’ So we went in and said, ‘Let’s document these while they’re fresh.’” The resulting sessions formed the backbone of Not Too Late.

The Sloppy Joannes had an effect, too. “I credit that band with helping me play more guitar,” Jones says. “I did guitar solos, which is terrifying. It’s so painful to watch because I’m a one-string solo kind of girl, like ‘Oooohhh, where’s she going to go? Where’s she going to land?’”

The time in front of audiences large and small turned Jones into the more at-ease performer she is today. “When I was young I wanted to be a musician,” she says. “In college I wanted to be a musician. I moved to New York to be a musician. When my first record came out, I was totally unprepared for what happened, but the main thing that was so crazy was that I had to perform all of a sudden for people, not just play. ‘Performing’ is a whole different thing. With performing you have to look and smile at the audience every once in a while and say, ‘Thank you for coming and blah-biddy-bloo and here’s a joke for you.’”

‘HOPING FOR SOME KIND OF SIGN’

Jones was born in New York (as Geethali Norah Jones Shankar, a name she’s since officially shortened), but she’s a Texan through and through. The laidback Lone Star attitude comes out after just a few minutes in her presence, when you start shooting the breeze and forgetting about how many records she’s sold and how many people around the world recognize her. (Alexander wrote “Lonestar” for her in tribute to this inescapable fact.)

The thread that runs through Jones’ recent history, from Texas to New York, is her extraordinary luck. In fact, Julian jokes that—perhaps even more than hitting it big with her first major-label outing—her biggest coup was landing an affordable, well-located Manhattan apartment upon arrival.

In fact, the seeds for her arrival in Gotham were sewn before she’d even left Texas. Julian and Jesse Harris (who’d later pen Jones’ biggest hit to date, “Don’t Know Why”) were road-tripping across the country in 1998 when they hooked up with some jazz-musician friends conducting a clinic at the University of North Texas in Denton, where Jones, then 18, was a student. She was tapped to provide transportation and play tour guide because of her car—an ancient, hulking Cadillac.

She ended the day jamming on a golf course with many of the musicians who’d eventually form her New York circle of friends and collaborators. “Somebody said, ‘Hey, why don’t you sing something?’” Julian recounts. “There were a lot of guitar players there that know all the standards. They’re all jazz musicians, so she sang ‘Come Rain and Come Shine’ or something like that, and it just sounded really good.” Julian and Harris were so intrigued by the young pianist that they called their friends, still in Texas, to find out how Jones’ subsequent restaurant gig went. The verdict? “Thumbs up.”

The chance meeting had two effects, one retrospectively humorous: “My mom was horrified when I told her about it,” Jones says, giggling. “I was so excited, [saying] ‘Mom, I met all these New York musicians and they were so cool. We went to this golf course and jammed under the stars.’ And she said, ‘OK, Norah, how many guys? Hmm… Five guys in their late 20s, early 30s on the golf course at night… .’”

But just a few weeks later, one of those guys, Harris, sent Jones the lead sheet for a song he’d written, “One Flight Down,” and a partnership was born. “A year later, Kenny [Wolleson], Tony [Scherr] and I went back to Denton and did a gig,” says Harris. “Kenny bought the car from her, and we drove it back to New York City. And then she moved up to New York a few months later.”