Norah Jones – Visions (2024) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Norah Jones – Visions (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 45:38 minutes | 859 MB | Genre: Vocal Jazz, Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Blue Note Records

Nine-time GRAMMY winning singer, songwriter, and pianist Norah Jones releases her ninth solo studio album ‘Visions’, a collaboration with producer and multi-instrumentalist Leon Michels. ‘Visions’ is a vibrant and joyous 12-song set that finds Jones singing about feeling free, wanting to dance, making it right, and acceptance of what life brings. It’s the yang to the yin that was ‘Pick Me Up Off the Floor’, Jones’ last album of new original songs which was released early in the pandemic lockdown of 2020 and foreshadowed many of the dark emotions of that period.

Few are the career artists who can create music over the long haul that continually sounds fresh and contemporary without seeming faddish or desperate. Across eight solo studio albums, Norah Jones has effortlessly embraced the here-and-now, followed her muse and allowed her assured sense of self to carry her forward without any embarrassing missteps. Jones wanted to explore darkness on 2020’s Pick Me Off the Floor, her most recent studio album, so she flipped the switch. Two years later she swerved to record Playing Along, an oft-buoyant album of duets with artists including Mavis Staples, Valerie June and Jeff Tweedy. It succeeded on its own terms.

For Visions, Jones wanted to write with a single collaborator, Leon Michels, to make a mid-tempo record with session players and solo artists who’ve recorded with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Brazilian Girls, Joni Mitchell and others. So she invited him into the studio, shut the door and made Visions.

Billed by Jones’ label as a more carefree, upbeat record, Visions sets a mood across twelve soulful, wood-paneled originals. Despite mentions of dance or dancing in a few songs, it’s often bliss driven by solitude that’s suggested. The happy-go-lucky “On My Way” floats across its measures, a joyful ode to moving forward not with a partner or lover, but alone, where the notion that “no one cares what you have to say” lives in the same space as “in the dark you can dance and sway.” That many of the ideas for Visions, as Jones has said, “came in the middle of the night or in that moment right before sleep,” it makes sense that she’s focused on solitude, and that she’s embracing it.

“Everyday we do God’s little dance,” she sings on “Staring at the Wall,” an uptempo groover with a twangy, Sun Records-suggestive guitar line and a piano-propelled counter melody that, combined with sturdy snare-drum snaps, could power a Saturday night dance floor at a dive bar. “Running” gets energy from a piano melody, a reverbed drum pattern and a layered chorus of Jones’ voice adding responses. “Swept Up in the Night” is a ballad of longing set after midnight. Lost in a dream, Jones can’t shake her memories of a certain someone: “I find you a thousand times/ Underneath the stones in my mind.” These are sturdy songs, the kind that not only linger in the psyche, but are so well crafted as to be indestructible. – Randall Roberts

Tracklist:
1-1. Norah Jones – All This Time (03:15)
1-2. Norah Jones – Staring at the Wall (04:31)
1-3. Norah Jones – Paradise (03:25)
1-4. Norah Jones – Queen of the Sea (04:46)
1-5. Norah Jones – Visions (02:42)
1-6. Norah Jones – Running (03:28)
1-7. Norah Jones – I Just Wanna Dance (03:07)
1-8. Norah Jones – I’m Awake (04:18)
1-9. Norah Jones – Swept Up in the Night (03:34)
1-10. Norah Jones – On My Way (03:52)
1-11. Norah Jones – Alone With My Thoughts (04:14)
1-12. Norah Jones – That’s Life (04:22)

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