Norah Jones

Norah Jones – The Fall (2009/2012)
DSF Stereo DSD64, 1 bit/2,82 MHz | Time – 45:59 minutes | 1,82 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: AcousticSounds | Booklet, Front Cover | © Blue Note Records/Analogue Productions

Part of Analogue Productions’ reissue of the Norah Jones’ solo catalog, featuring the individual albums Come Away With Me, Feels Like Home, Not Too Late, The Fall and Little Broken Hearts. Each album is also featured in exclusive LP and SACD box sets that include Norah’s Covers album!

Norah has taken a new direction on The Fall, experimenting with different sounds and a new set of collaborators, including Jacquire King, a noted producer and engineer who has worked with Kings of Leon, Tom Waits and Modest Mouse. Richly detailed and vocally lush on this DSD format reissue by Analogue Productions, The Fall, Jones’ fourth album, may surprise some of Jones’ die-hard fans, Billboard magazine notes. During the 13-song set, Jones ditches the gentle piano playing of her previous work and tears into fresh, beat-savvy arrangements, playing plenty of electric guitar and exploring the piercing quality of Wurlitzer electric piano. Jones’ smoky voice and soulful veneer highlight the opening track and first single, “Chasing Pirates.”

Jones displays a slinky kind of ambience on “Light As a Feather (co-written with Ryan Adams). The social commentary “It’s Gonna Be” offers a garage-rock attitude, and “You’ve Ruined Me” has a rich Americana flavor. But Jones is still a little bit country (“Tell Yer Mama”) and a little bit rock’n’roll (“Stuck”). Overall, writes reviewer Gary Graff, Jones straddles those lines in an entirely different manner than she ever has before.
For The Fall, Jones enlisted several songwriting collaborators, including Ryan Adams and Okkervil River’s Will Sheff, as well as her frequent partners Jesse Harris and Richard Julian. Musicians include drummers Joey Waronker (Beck, R.E.M.) and James Gadson (Bill Withers), keyboardist James Poyser (Erykah Badu, Al Green) and guitarists Marc Ribot (Tom Waits, Elvis Costello) and Smokey Hormel (Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer).

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Norah Jones – Not Too Late (2006/2012)
DSF Stereo DSD64, 1 bit/2,82 MHz | Time – 45:42 minutes | 1,8 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: AcousticSounds | Booklet, Front Cover | © Blue Note Records/Analogue Productions

Norah Jones’ third studio album, Not Too Late, is an understated masterpiece from one of music’s greatest singer/songwriters. The album follows the success of her first two albums, Come Away with Me and Feels Like Home, which combined have sold over 27 million copies worldwide. The album, which features only self-penned material, finds Jones branching out and developing her signature crooner sound. The album highlighted by her extraordinary artistic growth is eloquently sung and immaculately performed. The outing topped Billboard’s Top 200 and featured the hit single, “Thinking About You.” This transitional effort is easily one of her most compelling and personal albums to date.

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Norah Jones – Little Broken Hearts (2012)
DSD64 (.dsf) 1 bit/2,82 MHz | Time – 45:03 minutes | 1,78 GB | Genre: Jazz
Official Digital Download – Source: AcousticSounds | Booklet, Front Cover | © Blue Note Records/Analogue Productions

Part of Analogue Productions’ reissue of the Norah Jones’ solo catalog, featuring the individual albums Come Away With Me, Feels Like Home, Not Too Late, The Fall, and …Little Broken Hearts. Each album will also be featured in an exclusive LP box set and an exclusive SACD box set that will include Norah’s Covers album!

Norah Jones’ Little Broken Hearts was created in collaboration with producer Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, best known as the producing ace for Gnarls Barkley with singer Cee Lo Green. Jones and Danger Mouse wrote all of the material for the album together at the producer’s studio in Los Angeles, and the duo performed all of the instruments themselves. This is their second time working together — Jones previously appeared as a vocalist on Rome, Danger Mouse’s collaboration with Italian composer Daniele Luppi. Though Little Broken Hearts is the result of a partnership between Jones and Danger Mouse, the record will be credited only to her.

The album’s sound ranges from experimental chamber serenades to stark, electronic-embellished confessions. “It’s obviously very different than anything Norah’s ever done,” Burton says. “I don’t know what people will think — I hope they like it, and she doesn’t lose a bunch of fans.”

“I’d never gone in with nothing and wrote songs from scratch, and I’d never played bass before on a record,” Jones told Rolling Stone. “I was out of my comfort zone — but I was comfortable because we’re friends.”

Adds Burton, “The best thing was having just the two of us on those first sessions, not a whole band. Norah had as many, if not more, great ideas than I did.”

One of the boldest departures is “Take It Back,” which features fuzzed-out guitars and spooky, distorted vocals. “I never knew how to get weird sounds,” Jones says. “It was all about finding a balance between those effects and making sure my voice was clear and sounded like me.”

In its own quiet way, Little Broken Hearts hews closer to heartbreak classics like Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear than to anything in Jones’ back catalog, Rolling Stone reports, “This time, I’ve been way less concerned with self-editing,” Jones says. “I’m not sad, but there’s a lot of hurt in there. And it felt great to say what I felt and put it down on tape. Doing that made me so happy! This album is all about saying things that needed to be said.”

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Norah Jones – Feels Like Home (2004/2012)
DSD64 (.dsf) 1 bit/2,82 MHz | Time – 46:15 minutes | 1,83 GB | Genre: Jazz
Official Digital Download – Source: AcousticSounds | Booklet, Front Cover | © Blue Note Records/Analogue Productions

Part of Analogue Productions’ reissue of the Norah Jones’ solo catalog, featuring the individual albums Come Away With Me, Feels Like Home, Not Too Late, The Fall and Little Broken Hearts. Each album is also featured in exclusive LP and SACD box sets that include Norah’s Covers album!

Norah Jones took the world (and the Grammys) by storm with her debut album Come Away With Me. Now, she’s back for one of the most-anticipated follow-ups in recent memory. On Feels Like Home, Jones again teams with producer Arif Mardin, engineer Jay Newland and her close-knit touring band. And her pop, jazz, and country-tinged sound has never been richer.

On Feels Like Home, Jones has written several new songs, gathered a few more from her bandmates and also covered Townes Van Zandt, Tom Waits, Kathleen Brennan and Duke Ellington. Jones plays piano, Wurlitzer electric piano and pump organ and features her stripped-down core group of guitar, background vocals, bass and drums. We needn’t describe Jones’ singing. Everyone recognizes it by now. The arrangements aren’t quite as mellow as Come Away With Me, but the music still centers on country, pop and jazz colors.

“I’m glad that people liked the last album,” Jones said. “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.”

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Norah Jones – Covers (2012)
DSD64 (.dsf) 1 bit/2,82 MHz | Time – 36:29 minutes | 1,44 GB | Genre: Jazz
Official Digital Download – Source: AcousticSounds | Booklet, Front Cover | © Blue Note Records/Analogue Productions

Released exclusively to Target stores in America in January 2013 (it had previously shown up in other territories, either as a bonus disc as part of a career-encompassing box set or as a separate release in Japan), Covers rounds up stray covers Norah Jones has released over the years, adding a couple of unreleased cuts in the process. This runs the gamut from classic country covers to Wilco, taking detours for Tom Waits and Horace Silver along the way (the latter is an especially appealing left turn). Nothing here is especially surprising, either in execution or selection, partially because many of these versions date from earlier in her career, appearing as B-sides and bonus tracks for various editions of Come Away with Me, Feels Like Home, and The Fall. Jones has gotten looser and more adventurous as the years passed, a shift that’s evident when these perfectly pleasant covers are compared to the swinging, earthy Little Willies, but she’s always had immaculate taste and that’s evident throughout this enjoyable, lightweight addendum to her first decade of recording.

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