Norah Jones, the quiet hitmaker who keeps walking away from the hit

Norah Jones

Photo: PhilipRomanoPhoto / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 30, 1979 New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Singer-songwriter, pianist
Known for	Ted, Two Weeks Notice, My Blueberry Nights
Awards	8 Grammy

Most musicians spend their careers chasing the record that made them. Norah Jones has spent hers declining, politely and repeatedly, to make it again. Her first album sold more than 27 million copies and turned a low, unhurried voice and a few soft piano chords into the sound of every café on earth. Almost everything since has gone through a side door: a country covers band, a trio with two friends, an album of heartbreak made with Danger Mouse, a set of Everly Brothers songs sung with the frontman of Green Day. The sales shrank. The respect went the other way. Her most recent studio album stalled at No. 168 on the Billboard 200 and still won her a tenth Grammy, and the Grammy Museum has now handed her an award named after Ray Charles, the man she calls her musical hero.

The name on her birth certificate, Geethali Norah Jones Shankar, points to a father she hardly knew as a child: the sitar master Ravi Shankar, whose relationship with the concert producer Sue Jones was over by 1986. She arrived in New York City on 30 March 1979, but it was Grapevine, a suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth, that raised her, with her mother. At 16 she made Norah Jones her legal name. She studied at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas and then majored in jazz piano at the University of North Texas, before leaving for New York in 1999. The sitarist Anoushka Shankar is her half-sister.

In New York she played the clubs with a band that included the guitarist Jesse Harris. A demo reached Bruce Lundvall, the president of Blue Note, through Shell White at EMI Publishing, and the most storied jazz label in America signed a singer whose instincts ran as much to Hank Williams as to jazz standards. Come Away with Me, produced with Arif Mardin, Jay Newland and Craig Street, came out in February 2002. It entered the Billboard 200 at No. 139 and kept climbing until it reached the top. At the Grammys the following February she was nominated eight times and won five, including Album of the Year, Record of the Year for Don’t Know Why and Best New Artist; Harris took Song of the Year for writing it.

Ubiquity has a price, and Jones paid it early. By 2004, drive-time radio hosts were calling her “Snorah”, and the record that nobody could dislike became, for a certain kind of listener, the reason to dislike her. She took it lightly (“My mom calls me Snorah all the time now,” she told Time), but the caricature stuck harder than the music deserved. It flattened a debut that covered Hank Williams and Hoagy Carmichael into background furniture for a coffee chain. The quieter truth is that the shock rattled her more than she let on. She has called the experience “disorienting, fabulous and also totally cuckoo”, and admitted that she simply let go of trying to reach that level of success again. Not every escape route worked. Some later albums are easier to admire than to love, and the restlessness has at times looked like a refusal to commit.

Feels Like Home followed in 2004 and sold 1,022,000 copies in its first week in the United States, spending six weeks at No. 1. It carried Creepin’ In, a duet with Dolly Parton, and Sunrise, which won her another Grammy. At the 2005 ceremony her duet with Ray Charles, Here We Go Again, also took Record of the Year. Then she started to wander. She formed The Little Willies, a country covers band. Not Too Late, in 2007, was the first album on which she wrote or co-wrote every song, and it still opened at No. 1. The same year Wong Kar-wai cast her as the lead in My Blueberry Nights, which competed at Cannes.

The turn became explicit with The Fall in 2009. The producer Jacquire King and the guitarist Marc Ribot pushed her away from the keyboard, and Billboard noted that she “ditches the gentle piano-playing of her previous work”. Little Broken Hearts, made with Danger Mouse in 2012, was a breakup record with a cinematic edge. With Sasha Dobson and Catherine Popper she formed Puss n Boots, and with Billie Joe Armstrong she recorded Foreverly, a song-by-song return to an Everly Brothers album.

Day Breaks, in 2016, brought her back to the piano and to jazz, with Wayne Shorter, Brian Blade, John Patitucci and Dr. Lonnie Smith in the room and covers of Horace Silver, Duke Ellington and Neil Young. It debuted at No. 2. After that she abandoned the album cycle for a while, releasing one-off singles with collaborators such as Jeff Tweedy and Thomas Bartlett, later gathered as Begin Again. Pick Me Up Off the Floor arrived in June 2020 and entered at No. 87, the first of her albums not to debut in the top three. Her first holiday album, I Dream of Christmas, came the following year, and in 2022 she launched the podcast Norah Jones Is Playing Along, in which she sits down with guests and makes up music on the spot.

Visions, released on Blue Note in March 2024 and produced and engineered by Leon Michels, is the clearest statement of where she has landed. She said most of its ideas “came in the middle of the night or in that moment right before sleep”, and the record keeps that loose, half-awake feel. It peaked at No. 168 on the Billboard 200 while topping the jazz charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and in February 2025 it won Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. Michels also co-wrote and produced This Christmas I’m Coming Home, her duet with Leon Bridges, released in November 2025.

This year has been busy without a new album. The podcast keeps drawing collaborators, among them Josh Homme for a cover of Somethin’ Stupid. In March she joined Mavis Staples onstage at the Beacon Theatre in New York, and in April Blue Note released a new live recording of Come Away with Me from Apple Music’s Los Angeles studios. On 8 May, at the Beverly Hilton, the Grammy Museum gave her the Ray Charles Architect of Sound Award, only the second time it has been presented, after Jon Batiste. “Ray Charles was my musical hero, and he changed the way so many of us hear and feel music,” she said. A short run of West Coast dates followed the same week.

Jones has been married to the keyboardist Pete Remm since 2014, and they have two children. She has described herself as someone who was “always very anonymous”, never really famous, which is an odd thing to hear from the owner of a diamond record, and also the best explanation of how she has worked ever since. No successor to Visions has been announced. When one comes, the safe bet is that it will sound nothing like the album everyone still asks her to play, and that she will play that one anyway.

Selected Recordings

Come Away With Me (2002)
New York City (2003)
Feels Like Home (2004)
Not Too Late (2006)
The Fall (2009)
…Little Broken Hearts (2012)
Foreverly (2013)
Day Breaks (2016)
Begin Again (2019)
Pick Me Up Off the Floor (2020)
I Dream of Christmas (2021)
Visions (2024)

Tags: singers, jazz, Norah Jones, Leon Michels, Come Away with Me, Feels Like Home

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