Come Away With Me

Norah Jones, cradling an armful of gold, spoke sheepishly at the 2003 Grammys. The 23-year-old singer-songwriter had just swept the lauded Big Four categories for her debut album, Come Away With Me; over the previous year, her gentle rasp of a voice floated out of seemingly every Starbucks, wine tasting room, and parents’ CD changer. Yet the nascent star, with her fresh-faced appearance and bounty of dark curls, was visibly stunned by her own success. She could scarcely believe that one of her idols, Aretha Franklin, was sitting front row that night as she performed the album’s doe-eyed lead single, “Don’t Know Why.” Standing so close to a legend she’d grown up listening to sent Jones into a tailspin. “I didn’t expect this,” she said of her winnings that night, “nor did I need it.”

Jones was partly right. Come Away With Me had already sold 4 million copies, riding high off the breezy, inescapable “Don’t Know Why,” not to mention an unprecedented marketing push from vaunted jazz label Blue Note. Since the record’s release the previous February, she had sold more records than any other artist in the label’s storied history, including titans like Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. But Jones’ subdued response to her swift acclaim was genuine. At one point, a rumor arose that she had asked Blue Note boss Bruce Lundvall if they could pull the record from shops to prevent listener burnout. No such luck: The laid-back, preternaturally beautiful Come Away With Me, still Jones’ best album despite its sleepy reputation, struck a singular chord with both the music industry and general public, going on to sell an eye-watering 27 million copies to date.

Jones was born in New York City to Sue Jones, an Oklahoma-born nurse and former concert producer, and the celebrated Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar. The pair’s relationship blossomed in the late 1970s, but they split after nine years, and Sue moved with 4-year-old Norah to Grapevine, Texas, a small town northwest of Dallas; Shankar and the family wouldn’t reconcile until Norah was 18. (“All families have their complicated corners,” she said when looking back at the strained relationship in 2020, eight years after Shankar’s death. “It took us all some time to feel comfortable with each other.”) Jones credited her own early interest in music to her mother’s vast record collection, a library that spanned Ray Charles to Pavarotti. Billie Holiday became an early north star; Jones would play her favorite songs from her mother’s eight-disc Holiday compilation on repeat, especially the ambrosial “You Go to My Head.”

In early interviews, Jones painted a Norman Rockwell-style portrait of her otherwise “pretty normal” childhood growing up in Texas: “I lived on a little street, had neighbors and they were nice, and we rode our bikes down the street every night till it got dark and your mom called you home for dinner.” She began singing in church choirs by age 7 and later took piano lessons; her mother noticed her melodic aptitude and encouraged her to audition for Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, a school in downtown Dallas that counts Erykah Badu as an alumna. There, Jones studied jazz piano in a vibrant environment full of other artsy kids that she often compared to the film Fame. Her teachers noticed her acumen for vocal stylings; one observed that other students would often try to imitate her loose, graceful improvisations.

Jones’ musical education continued at the University of North Texas, where she majored in piano at the school’s prestigious jazz program. At UNT, her art really began to thrive—Jones would study piano by day and go to shows in Denton’s diverse music scene by night, eventually joining a band named Laszlo, after the resistance leader in Casablanca. The songs on Laszlo’s lone recorded album, Butterflies, hint at the bluesy music Jones would assemble for her own debut: On the highlight “Wait,” backed by wending guitar solos, she gives a pleading, ardent performance that presages some of the more feverish songs on Come Away With Me.

In 1998, Jones was cruising around in a hulking blue 1971 Cadillac DeVille eight-seater, picking up guitarist and singer-songwriter Jesse Harris from his hotel. Harris was in town from New York to gig and give lessons at the university, and the faculty had asked Jones to scoop up him and his band, including drummer Kenny Wolleson. “That night, we played together on a fairway on the golf course at the hotel. Norah sang some standards—we all thought she was good,” Harris remembered. Jones kept in touch after the band returned to New York, sparking a friendship that would play a pivotal role in her career—Wolleson played on Come Away With Me and Harris penned several of its songs, including “Don’t Know Why.”

The summer after her sophomore year Jones moved to New York City in what was meant to be a vacation, subletting a friend’s apartment in Greenwich Village. Instead, she dropped out and stayed put in what she called her “first adult decision.” She liked the thrum of the city, and even enjoyed the way it smelled: “Dirt. Garbage. It’s nostalgic from when I was a kid,” she said. Jones scraped by waiting tables and performing wherever she could, which usually meant $50 gigs at piano bars. It was an early start reminiscent of Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell: rooting around for a star turn on the club circuit while playing to their hearts’ content in the meantime. Jones’ lucky break came in 2000 in the form of a brunch gig where she caught the ear of Shell White, an accounts executive for Blue Note. Taking advantage of label president Lundvall’s so-called “open-door policy” to pitch new music, White brought in Jones’ three-song demo.

Blue Note, named for notes played at a slightly lower pitch that add characteristic, wistful grittiness to jazz, was founded in 1939 by German record executive Alfred Lion and writer and musician Max Margulis. The label notched its first notable success with a popular recording of Gershwin’s “Summertime” by saxophonist Sidney Bechet. From there, it began to introduce varied styles of jazz to the record market, from hard bop in its early days to modernist work by artists like Herbie Hancock, Cecil Taylor, and Eric Dolphy. Add in the label’s exceptional art design—era-defining cropped black-and-white photos set alongside geometric typography by designer Reid Miles—and Blue Note quickly grew into a standard-bearer for the genre.

Following an upswing through the ’60s and ’70s, Blue Note hit a rough patch going into the next decade. EMI purchased the label, which lay dormant for some time until Lundvall arrived. Having signed Bobby McFerrin to the parent label, the new exec hoped to finesse Blue Note out of its creaky era with more acts capable of “crossing over” to reach soul, rock, and pop listeners—an increasingly important strategy for jazz labels looking to get out of the red. Jones, it turned out, was just the ticket; when he heard her demo, Lundvall instantly decided to sign her. “I just stopped in my tracks,” he remembered. “When you hear a voice that has that kind of engaging power, it just draws you right in.” When Shell White told Jones she wanted to introduce her to Lundvall, Jones simply laughed. “It seemed like an impossible dream,” she said.

Nearly a year later, Jones became the youngest artist on the Blue Note roster, despite an offer to sign to the pop-leaning sister label Manhattan. “I didn’t want to be on a pop label, because I know what comes with that,” she would later explain to Rolling Stone. “I didn’t want to make videos. I didn’t want to be expected to sell millions of records. I didn’t ever want to be a celebrity.” Jones’ first attempt at recording her debut didn’t even pan out. Recording take after take dispirited her; she found it exceedingly difficult to summon any kind of spontaneity, even while working alongside her familiar trio that included Harris and her then-boyfriend, bassist Lee Alexander. Lundvall gave her another chance, this time enlisting veteran producer Arif Mardin. Known for his work with superstars like Franklin, Dusty Springfield, and Chaka Khan, Mardin brought a deft hand to Come Away With Me, even if Jones was intimidated by his résumé. “Apparently, before we met she said, ‘How can I tell him when I disagree with him?’” Ardin remembered later. “But we just added little touches. Organ chords here, strings on one track. We recorded the old way: People played, people sang, lots of eye contact.”

The “old way” worked. Come Away With Me is tender and low-lit, a cocktail of tuneful mid-tempo blues balladry and country-soul that soars with the easy, weightless determination of a gull. For every assured cover song, like Jones’ hip-swinging version of Hank Williams’ “Cold Cold Heart” or her late-night, besotted take on Hoagy Charmichael’s “The Nearness of You,” she issues a slight nudge in another, unexpected direction. “Feelin’ the Same Way” ambles along with a buoyant bluegrass gait, while an accordion sneaks in behind her on the dreamy “Painter Song.” “Lonestar,” the most overtly Texan song on the record, adds a soupçon of slide guitar, which moves around her luminous, multi-tracked voice like a dance companion. Later, on the gorgeous “The Long Day Is Over,” a downy-soft brushed snare, piano, and low-slung guitar played by the great Bill Frisell guide Jones’ zigzagging vocals. Her voice swirls into maze-like melodies, rambling from a low whisper to a throaty call. And “Don’t Know Why,” Jones’ most popular song, captures the impulsivity she sought; the version included on the album uses her first vocal take. It arcs and moves with calming clarity, like an especially beautiful sunrise filtering through the trees.

Come Away With Me isn’t all unfussy easy listening. “I’ve Got to See You Again,” written by Harris, has lyrics that suggest an unhealthy attachment to an erotic dancer: “Lines on your face don’t bother me/Down in my chair when you dance over me,” Jones murmurs over a Fiona Apple-esque mixture of leisurely piano and a keening, unsettling violin. “I could almost go there/Just to watch you be seen.” She leaned further into sensuality on the title track, dashed off in “10 or 15 minutes” on an acoustic guitar she’d sent for from back home in Texas. Its opening verses sound as though she’s whispering to you from beneath the sheets: “Come away with me in the night/Come away with me and I will write you a song,” she offers. With its gently rising chorus, the tune remains one of the best showcases for the earthy luxury of Jones’ voice.

Upon the album’s release in February 2002, Blue Note marketed Come Away With Me with a blitz of press. They shipped thousands of copies to be sold at coffee shops, spas, and vineyards, aiming directly at the over-21 crowd. “Time, Newsweek, getting it played in Starbucks—people need to hear about a record,” Blue Note marketing director Zach Hochkeppel noted at the time. “They may not buy a lot of albums, but when they do, they become a hugely dedicated fanbase…. It was turbo word of mouth.” Reviews were positive, with several critics drawing comparisons to Diana Krall and Rickie Lee Jones, artists who similarly balanced jazzy inspirations with soul, Americana, and pop. The album debuted at No. 139 but only climbed from there: Jones’ music performed well on small-town radio, appearing on jazz and college stations and NPR. It helped somewhat that she arrived in the wake of another piano prodigy, Alicia Keys, whose debut had shifted many millions of units just a year earlier (and who would present Jones with her Best New Artist trophy at the Grammys). But Jones’ smoky, soft rock approach took gradual, almost uncontrollable hold over listeners. By August, the album had gone platinum.

Part of the record’s success can be attributed to a cultural pushback against the industry’s rabid appeals to youth-oriented music: teen pop, rap-rock, and hip-hop were still the main event. Jones’ album, meanwhile, with its soft-focus, adult-contemporary bent, inspired nostalgia in older listeners and suggested a refreshing integrity to curious younger ones. But Jones and her affiliation with Blue Note were met with opprobrium from genre purists, too: “It Ain’t Jazz, Despite the Label,” sneered a Wall Street Journal headline about Come Away With Me’s runaway success, though Jones herself was at pains to assure the public that she thought the same. “I’m very open about this record [not being] really a jazz record,” she explained to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram a month after its release. “I think it’s probably because I come from being a jazz musician, hanging out with jazz musicians and hearing them and myself say, ‘Oh, that’s good, but it’s not jazz.’ That sort of mentality sort of carried over, and I’m sort of quick to say it’s not jazz because I don’t want them to say, ‘That’s not jazz!’”

As she gained popularity, Jones began to feel the pressure from all sides. In June, she refused to let EMI release a chintzy “Don’t Know Why” remix amped up with a computer-generated drumbeat and reverb. She sometimes bristled with the press, especially once her connection to Shankar became more widely known. Lundvall insisted he wasn’t aware Shankar was Jones’ father before he signed her, and the fact wasn’t acknowledged in press kits. Annoyed with the scrutiny, Jones tried to deflect reporters’ questions about her family life, a topic on which she remains exceedingly private. In an interview with The Guardian that September, after insisting that any questions about her family be submitted in writing, she explained her reasoning: “Although I love my dad very much, I did only spend a fraction of my adolescence around him. This is probably why I try to downplay our relationship in the press. When misquotes start flying around, inevitably someone’s feelings get hurt, and I didn’t get into music to have family business printed in the press. I love my dad, and I think he’s a brilliant musician.” She finished off with a clarifying sentence: “I just want to make my music, and I want it to stand on its own.”

Come Away With Me’s blockbuster success had indeed launched Jones’ musical career and helped to restore Blue Note’s fortunes. But by October, even she was overwhelmed by her own album. “I mean, I’m proud of it,” she explained. “But I’m totally sick of it. I wanna see an end to this record… I’m not complaining. But I really did not sign up for this.” She had to move house after the New York Post published a photo of her apartment building and fans camped outside. Once the Grammy nominations rolled around and Jones was up for eight awards, her visibility hit its peak. She balanced feeling blessed with feeling overrun.

Jones’ unexpected Grammy night, netting five trophies in total, introduced Come Away With Me to a still wider audience, even as some critics called her “terribly over-rewarded” and predicted that the hyper-exposure would jinx subsequent projects. The album spent four weeks at No. 1 nearly a year after release, a stat that seems almost unbelievable today. Jones, for her part, remained poised in the face of newfound stardom. When asked at the Grammys what she planned next, she announced, “I just keep doing what I’m doing, nothing more. This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment. I’m clear on that. My objective is to enjoy this moment and then put it on the side and get on with what I’ve been doing all along, which is to make music.”

Jones’ career since has drifted in new directions while retaining her roots in country, rock, and soul. Her follow-up, 2004’s Feels Like Home, scooped up another Grammy for its tasteful, light-handed lead single, “Sunrise.” She nabbed a guest feature from Dolly Parton on the straight-ahead bluegrass standout “Creepin’ In,” a song inspired by Parton’s 1999 LP The Grass Is Blue. Even Jones seemed bemused by the collaboration, as though the whirlwind of her past few years hadn’t happened: “We just thought it would be fun if Dolly came in and sang, and she did!” On subsequent releases, Jones moved between moving polemics against injustice, smoldering Danger Mouse productions, and a collaboration with Outkast. Her latest record, this year’s Visions, is a gentle summation of her long, evolving career: Jones finds room for retro-soul workouts and piano pop in equal measure, with her voice in fine form.

Come Away With Me’s singular staying power was a union of circumstance: a shrewd marketing strategy by Blue Note; a demographic moment at which the over-45 audience was becoming the fastest-growing group of music consumers; and the magnetic pull of Jones’ sophisticated yet easygoing music. Her success became a model to future stars who would dabble between pop, soul, jazz, and country—singers like Joss Stone and even Adele found a home on the avenue Jones paved. But her sudden success went unmatched for some time; her Big Four sweep at the Grammys wouldn’t be replicated until another ambitious, soft-spoken upstart, Billie Eilish, arrived in 2020 and achieved the same benchmark. Come Away With Me holds a deep reserve of pathos, even as it quickly assumed a life of its own as so-called coffee house music. Jones’ pacifying drawl and waves of sparse yet resonant instrumentation imbue the album with a warm, captivating radiance that still glows bright.

Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.

Norah Jones: Come Away With Me

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