NORAH JONES
Come Away With Me: Super Deluxe Edition
BLUE NOTE
9/10
Twenty years on, the road to her debut LP chronicled. By Nigel Williamson
ON its release in February 2002, expectations for Norah Jones’ debut album were “modest” in the extreme, as the liner notes accompanying this expanded 20thanniversary edition tell us. In Uncut’s brief original review, we suggested that Jones’ sultry voice sat somewhere between Sade and Shelby Lynne, but did at least hint that she might go on to outstrip both of them. Nine Grammy awards, 30 million sales and two decades later, that judgement seems a tad cautious but not too far wide of the mark.
Since her debut Jones has recorded half a dozen more huge-selling albums and lent her beguiling voice to collaborations with Foo Fighters, Outkast, Ray Charles, Ryan Adams, Dolly Parton, Danger Mouse, Jeff Tweedy, Mavis Staples and Herbie Hancock among others.
Yet it is Come Away With Me, recorded when she was 22 and which Jones herself self-deprecatingly calls “my moody little record”, which has remained her biggest seller and her calling card.
After graduating from the University of North Texas, Jones moved to New York in 1999 and began playing jazz gigs in restaurants around Manhattan. Her 21st birthday found her singing at a brunch with the JC
