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Lion Reviews Norah Jones

Norah Jones -- Come Away With Me
2002

I don't know much about Norah Jones, but I do know that she is 23 years old and has compiled some of the best music of 2002. Come Away With Me is mature, sensitive, and surprisingly lively. Her singing style reminds me of Holly Cole, and like Holly Cole, much of the work here is covers and songs written her Bassist Lee Alexander and guitarist Jesse Harris, while two songs were written by Jones. I enjoy the writing style and maturity expressed in this CD.

The CD is chock full of serious songs that Jones delivers with sincerity, but at times her voice toes the line between serious and playful and that is part of her magic. When an artist can leave the listener with a sense of ambiguity--that is when a chord is struck WITHIN the listener and a relationship is created that never existed before.

"Don't Know Why" (Jesse Harris) is about not showing up for someone the author loves--but it is actually about not knowing why she didn't come. "Seven Years" (Lee Alexander) appears to be about the innocence of a 7-year-old, alone and looking at the sky with hope. She sings about depression in "Feelin' The Same Way" (Lee Alexander):

     Another day that I can't find my head
     My feet don't look like they're my own
     I'll try and find the floor below to stand
     And I hope I reach it once again

"Come Away with Me" (Norah Jones) simply a request, and Jones appropriately uses "and" when she writes "Come away with me / And I'll never stop loving you", signifying that her love is unconditional. "Shoot the Moon" (Jesse Harris) evokes images of Summer, Fall, and Winter, in that order. This is a perfect anti-love-song-cliche. Love-song-cliche would be about spring, and here she writes about love being over, and the only season not mentioned is spring. I wonder will there be hope? When she sings about hope in a relationship, it is married to complication. In "I've Got To See You Again" (Jesse Harris), she says she knows the person she loves is not home (his location never disclosed) and she says "I could almost go there". Is he having an affair? or is he just out bowling? Again, she delivers ambiguity where other "pop" artists would deliver cliche. She dreams if she were a painter in "Painter Song" (Lee Alexander/J.C. Hopkins), in "Nightingale" (Norah Jones) she offers a prayer to the bird so that she can have some guidance on her journey and in "The Long Day Is Over" (Jesse Harris/Norah Jones), she echoes the theme of "Shoot the Moon", this time offering the image that the long day is over and "The sun will rise".

Hope for Norah Jones is not that spring is here or the morning has come. No. For Norah Jones, hope is in her awareness that her pain or loneliness will soon end, because winter is here and the day is at an end.