RECORD REVIEWS
It has been almost two decades since Norah Jones emerged shyly from obscurity into astonishing pop/jazz stardom, first with 2001’s First Sessions EP, her Blue Note launchpad, then with 2002’s Come Away With Me, which wowed the world. It has been surmised that Jones’s self-described “mellow piano music” salved the pain of 9/11—whatever the reason, the album won five Grammy Awards and is reported to have sold some 27 million copies: more than Eric Clapton’s Unplugged and slightly fewer than The Eminem Show. She followed that up with three more million-selling albums during the two-thousand-and-aughts. Along the way, she made lots of friends and collaborators: country icons Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson; rock/pop acts Danger Mouse and Foo Fighters; jazz icons Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.
After that remarkable first decade in the spotlight, the singer-songwriter with the beautiful voice didn’t settle into recycled predictability. 2012’s Little Broken Hearts was completely different from anything she’d done before, and 2016’s Day Breaks marked a return to the piano-driven, jazzinfused repertoire of her early career.
For a while, instead of releasing new albums, Jones collaborated on a series of singles: with soul queen Mavis Staples and hip-hop vocalist Tarriona Tank Ball (issued on opposite sides of a 7" single and in other formats); with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and Brazilian singer-songwriter Rodrigo Amarante; with drummer Brian Blade (her drummer since Come Away With Me) and Nonesuch pianist/producer Thomas Bartlett. In 2019, she released Begin Again, a seven-song, 28-minute EP featuring collaborations with Tweedy and Bartlett.
Jones’s new collection, Pick Me Up Off the Floor, an 11-tune masterpiece of personal and societal politics, continues to mine those collaborations.
It also marks the first time she built many of her songs on her own poetry: Jones wrote the poems without music in mind, then edited the words into song shapes delivered by duos, trios, quartets, and quintets with, among other instruments, trumpet, tenor saxophone, Hammond B-3 organ, and pedal steel. The introspective lead-off number on PMUOTF, “How I Weep,” is a poetic dive on the theme of loss “that’s so deep/That it hardens and turns into stone.” Jones plays a spare, staccato rhythm on piano, accompanied by a slowly swaying string section: cello (Paul Wiancko) and viola (Ayane Kozasa). Beauty in angst.
Brian Blade’s drums anchor six of the tunes. Tweedy gives two of his cowrites a rhythmic edge on acoustic and electric guitars. The last number, “Heaven Above,” is a slow and sober story about reaching “the fork in the road” and reminiscing about when “the pieces were in the right
