Norah Jones

• 1. Introduction

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  Norah Jones was born Geethali Norah Jones Shankar in Manhattan on the 30th of March 1979. At sixteen, with the consent of both parents, she made the shorter name official. By 2023, records sold under that name had passed 53 million worldwide. Yet the career began in small rooms, with a voice and a piano and very little else. How does a teenager from Texas end up with one of the best-selling catalogues of her era? What can a three-track demo do when it lands on the right desk? And what does a musician choose to do after a debut that sells in the millions?

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• 2. Texas Roots

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  After her parents separated in 1986, Norah moved with her mother, the concert producer Sue Jones, to Grapevine, Texas. Her music took shape early in the local Methodist Church, where she regularly sang solos. She also took piano and voice lessons. At eleven, mother and daughter lived for a time in Anchorage, Alaska.

  Colleyville Middle School came first, then Grapevine High School, and finally Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas. In high school she sang in the choir, joined the band and played alto saxophone. Summers took her to the Interlochen Center for the Arts.

  Bill Evans and Billie Holiday were among the oldies she loved most. She once described how it started: "My mom had this eight-album Billie Holiday set; I picked out one disc that I liked and played that over and over again."

  In 1996 and again in 1997 she won the Down Beat Student Music Awards for Best Jazz Vocalist. In 1996 she also took the award for Best Original Composition.

  At the University of North Texas she majored in jazz piano and sang with the UNT Jazz Singers. A small favor changed her direction there. She gave a ride to a visiting band whose members happened to be friends of Jesse Harris. Harris was on a cross-country road trip with Richard Julian, and he stopped to see the band play. After meeting Jones, Harris began mailing her lead sheets of his songs.

  In 1999 she left Texas for New York City.

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• 3. The Living Room

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  On a Tuesday night, Peter Malick walked into the Living Room just as the singer announced her final song of the set. In his liner notes he recalled that the song was the Dinah Washington classic "Since I Fell for You" and that he was "struck breathless." He heard "a stunningly beautiful, blues infused voice" in the tradition of Billie Holiday. He had been hunting for a singer to record his latest songs, and he had just found her.

  Jones was working as a lounge singer then. Before she made a studio album of her own, she performed with Wax Poetic, with Malick, and with the jazz guitarist Charlie Hunter.

  Malick brought her to Room 9 from Outer Space in South Boston for sessions in August and September 2000. They recorded four Malick originals, "New York City", "Strange Transmissions", "Deceptively Yours" and "Things You Don't Have to Do". They also cut Sam Maghett's "All Your Love" and Bob Dylan's "Heart of Mine". Koch released the results in 2003 as New York City, credited to the Peter Malick Group Featuring Norah Jones.

  The route to a major label ran through a big band. Jones sang lead for the JC Hopkins Biggish Band, and Shell White, the wife of J. C. Hopkins, worked for EMI Publishing. White passed Jones's three-track demo to Bruce Lundvall, president of Blue Note, and to Brian Bacchus, the label's artists and repertoire agent. The tape held two jazz standards and one song by Jesse Harris.

  Both executives saw potential, though they had misgivings about where her music was heading. They signed her anyway. Bacchus later told HitQuarters: "We let her find her own direction... We knew that if she could develop her songwriting and we could find great songs, it would work."

  Bacchus believed the producer and engineer Jay Newland, with experience across jazz, blues, rock, country and folk, would give her a feeling for her sound. Jones and Newland recorded nine demo tracks on the 8th and the 9th of October 2000. Four of them appeared on a sampler called First Sessions, released on the 30th of May 2001. The rest were set aside for her debut album.

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• 4. Breakthrough Year

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  Come Away with Me entered the Billboard 200 at No. 139. It then climbed all the way to No. 1. Released in 2002, it drew praise for blending acoustic pop with soul and jazz. Critics and listeners also heard country, blues and folk in the mix. Its single "Don't Know Why" reached No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the Top 40 Adult Recurrents chart in 2003.

  At the 45th Grammy Awards in 2003, Jones received eight nominations and won five. Her wins were Best New Artist, Album of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Album, Record of the Year, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for "Don't Know Why". That tied Lauryn Hill and Alicia Keys for the most Grammys won by a female artist in one night. She also became the first person of South Asian descent to win five Grammy Awards at a single ceremony.

  The night belonged to her collaborators too. Jesse Harris won Song of the Year for "Don't Know Why", the song that had begun as a lead sheet in the mail. Arif Mardin was named Producer of the Year, and the album won Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.

  The Recording Industry Association of America certified the record platinum for one million copies. In February 2005 it was certified diamond for ten million. Sales eventually passed 27 million copies, which made it the third best-selling album of the 21st century.

  The follow-up arrived in 2004 under the title Feels Like Home.

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• 5. Albums On Her Terms

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  Feels Like Home debuted at the top of the charts in at least 16 countries, among them Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. At the 47th Grammy Awards in 2005 it earned three nominations and one win, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for "Sunrise". Separately, her duet with Ray Charles on "Here We Go Again" won Record of the Year and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. Time magazine named her one of the most influential people of 2004. In January 2005 she played a benefit concert for victims of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.

  Not Too Late came out on the 30th of January 2007, and it was the first album where she wrote or co-wrote every song. She said some of the material was much darker than before. Most of it was recorded in her home studio, with no deadline. She called the sessions "fun, relaxed and easy", and Blue Note executives reportedly did not know she was making a record. It was also the first album made without Arif Mardin, who died in the summer of 2006. The song "My Dear Country" is political commentary that she wrote before election day in 2004.

  The Fall debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in November 2009, with 180,000 copies sold in its first week. It was the first of her albums not to reach No. 1 in the United States, though critics praised it. A St. Bernard named Ben appeared on the cover. Its lead single, "Chasing Pirates", peaked at No. 13 on Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks and No. 7 on Jazz Songs. The album went platinum in the United States and sold 1.5 million copies worldwide. By 2010 it had reached gold or platinum in 14 countries. Billboard's decade awards for 2000-2009 named Jones the top jazz recording artist and placed her at No. 60 among all artists. Come Away with Me ranked No. 4 among albums of the decade and No. 1 among jazz albums.

  On the 1st of May 2012 she released Little Broken Hearts, made with Danger Mouse after they worked together on tracks for the album Rome with Daniele Luppi. She played the whole record at SXSW 2012. American Songwriter called it the "most dramatic and rewarding departure she's made in her career." Her fifth world tour opened in Paris on the 25th of May 2012.

  Day Breaks followed on the 7th of October 2016, with nine new songs and three covers. Its lead single, "Carry On", appeared the same day. The album brought her back to the piano. She told Billboard that the aim was to record everything live: "When you have great musicians, there's no reason to overdub. That strips the soul out of the music." In 2019 came Begin Again, a compilation of singles from 2018 and 2019 that included work with Jeff Tweedy and Thomas Bartlett. Blue Note released it on the 12th of April 2019, and the pandemic forced her to cancel planned Australian and American dates.

  Pick Me Up Off the Floor arrived on the 12th of June 2020 and debuted at No. 87 on the Billboard 200. That made it her first album to open outside the top three. I Dream of Christmas followed in 2021, with an expanded edition in 2022. Visions came in March 2024, produced by Leon Michels. The Los Angeles Times described it as "a funky, gently psychedelic garage-soul record." Much of it grew out of spontaneous studio sessions, with Jones playing guitar while Michels handled percussion and bass. At the 67th Grammy Awards in 2025 it won Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album, her tenth Grammy. The Visions Tour ran from 2024 into 2025.

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• 6. Guest Voice

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  Few listeners noticed Jones on OutKast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, where she sang on "Take Off Your Cool". The album won Album of the Year, but she was not credited. Her appearances kept multiplying after that.

  In 2005 she played piano and sang on "Virginia Moon" for the Foo Fighters album In Your Honor, a track nominated for a Grammy in 2006. That same year she co-wrote "Dear John" with Ryan Adams for Jacksonville City Nights. In 2006 she sang "Sucker" on the Peeping Tom project with Mike Patton, the first time she used profanity on a recording.

  Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters opens with her singing "Court and Spark". The album won Album of the Year at the 50th Grammy Awards in 2008, and Jones, credited as a featured artist, collected her ninth Grammy. In 2008 she also sang "Life Is Better" with Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest.

  On the 31st of March 2008 she returned to the Living Room for its 20th anniversary and played a midnight set. She debuted "How Many Times Have You Broken My Heart", set to newly found Hank Williams lyrics. It belonged to the so-called Hank Williams Project overseen by Bob Dylan. She later performed the song on Elvis Costello's television series.

  Blue Note released ...Featuring, an 18-track disc of her collaborations, on the 16th of November 2010. It gathered work with the Foo Fighters, Willie Nelson, Outkast, Ray Charles, Dolly Parton, Herbie Hancock and many others. She explained the appeal: "It's so exciting and flattering and fun when I get asked to sing with somebody that I admire." She added that it felt "like being a little kid and having a playdate."

  In October 2011 she played three songs at the Apple Campus as a tribute to Steve Jobs. One was Bob Dylan's "Forever Young", chosen because "he liked Bob Dylan". The same year Seth MacFarlane invited her onto his debut album Music Is Better Than Words for "Two Sleepy People". She then appeared in his 2012 film Ted. With MacFarlane and Family Guy composer Walter Murphy she recorded "Everybody Needs a Best Friend", which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song.

  On the 25th of November 2013 came Foreverly, a duets album with Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong built from the Everly Brothers record Songs Our Daddy Taught Us. Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones had already joined her once on "Love Hurts" at the Gram Parsons tribute Return to Sin City. In 2015 she sang "Illusions" with Richards on his album Crosseyed Heart.

  On the 6th of May 2015 she sang "Don't Know Why" on The Late Show with David Letterman, thirteen years after her first appearance on his show. The broadcast aired within two weeks of his retirement as host.

  Several of her guest spots carried a cause. In 2010 her song "World of Trouble" joined a compilation by the Enough Project and Downtown Records that supports the protection and empowerment of women in Congo. In September 2012 she took part in "30 Songs/30 Days" for Half the Sky. On Record Store Day, the 16th of April 2016, she sang on "One Voice", from the film A Dog Named Gucci, with Aimee Mann, Susanna Hoffs, Brian May and others. Profits from the single went to animal charities.

  In 2023 she teamed with the Icelandic musician Laufey, covering "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" and releasing the original "Better Than Snow".

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• 7. Side Bands and Screens

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  In 2003 Jones formed The Little Willies with Richard Julian on vocals, Jim Campilongo on guitar, Lee Alexander on bass and Dan Rieser on drums. The alt country group released a self-titled album in 2006 and For the Good Times in 2012.

  A blond wig made another side project possible. Calling herself "Maddie", she sang and played guitar in the rock band El Madmo with Daru Oda and Richard Julian, almost anonymous on stage. Their self-titled album came out on the 20th of May 2007. Years later she formed the all-female country trio Puss n Boots with Sasha Dobson and Catherine Popper. Their album No Fools, No Fun was released through Blue Note on the 15th of July 2014.

  Her screen career began with a cameo in the 2002 film Two Weeks Notice, starring Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock, in which she sings briefly at a piano during a charity benefit. In 2007 Wong Kar-wai cast her as the lead in My Blueberry Nights. It opened the Cannes Film Festival that year as one of 22 films in competition, and she wrote and performed the song "The Story" for it. She also played herself on Saturday Night Live as musical guest in 2002 and 2004, and in the 2004 special Sesame Street Presents: The Street We Live On. In 2009 she made a guest appearance on the season three finale of 30 Rock.

  Television stages suited her as well. She recorded a live session at Abbey Road Studios in January 2007 for Live from Abbey Road, alongside John Mayer and Richard Ashcroft, and it aired on UK Channel 4 and the Sundance Channel. She appeared twice on Austin City Limits, on the 2nd of November 2002 and on the 6th of October 2007, when she opened the season.

  From September 2022 she began a podcast called "Norah Jones Is Playing Along", where she and guests played impromptu, improvised songs. Dave Grohl and Marc Rebillet appeared, and so did her half-sister Anoushka Shankar.

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• 8. Family Ties

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  Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitarist and composer, was Norah's father, and the musicians Anoushka Shankar and Shubhendra Shankar are her half-siblings. Jones grew up mostly with her mother, and for a stretch she and her father were estranged. She later travelled to New Delhi to spend time with him. She wrote songs there that were later recorded for the album The Fall.

  From 2000 to 2007 she was in a relationship with the bassist Lee Alexander. Since 2014 she has been married to the keyboardist Pete Remm, and the couple have two children.

  Music eventually joined the two sides of her family. On the 22nd of October 2013 her half-sister Anoushka released Traces of You, and Norah sang on three of its songs.

  Her father also asked something of her on stage. She toured three cities in India for the first time because he wanted her to. The run began at the Summer's Day festival in Mumbai on the 3rd of March, produced by Only Much Louder, then continued to New Delhi on the 5th and Bangalore on the 8th.

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