To celebrate our return to publishing the print version of MAGNET three years ago, we will be posting classic cover stories from that time all week. Enjoy. And order a copy of the issue here.
Meet the new Norah Jones. The Norah Jones for people who think they don’t like Norah Jones. She just might have made the album of the year. Who says nice girls always finish last? By Jonathan Valania
Lazy Sunday morning coming down. You are awakened by the sunshine streaming through the open windows and the sound of the Brooklyn streets outside coming alive. Oddly, Danger Mouse is lying next to you, on his back, looking up at the ceiling, languidly strumming an elegiac guitar. He acts like you aren’t there. If you listen closely, you can hear a tinkling, Eno-esque piano arpeggio out of the corner of your ear. It sounds—and, more importantly, feels—like raindrops falling on your head.
You roll over and there’s Norah Jones—beautiful, kind, classy incarnate Norah Jones—her little hands plinking the keys of a toy piano. Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands, you think to yourself, absently quoting e.e. cummings. Oddly, she seems to have cut her hair since you went to sleep last night, but she somehow looks even more beautiful shorn of her trademark long inky locks, which is strange because you always prefer long hair. Always. She gives you that pensive, other-shoe-about-to-drop look that spells trouble, or that unexpected change has already become operational. You hate change. She starts singing, “Good morning/My thoughts on leaving/Are back on the table/I thought you should know,” like you’re in one of those musicals where all the dialogue is sung instead of spoken. It is at this moment that you are reminded why you hate musicals.
Welcome to beginning of …Little Broken Hearts (Blue Note), which, despite the fact that it’s a down-the-middle collaboration with Danger Mouse, is credited as the fifth and latest album by Norah Jones, the Lady Madonna of modern MOR. It is easily her best album to date; it is also a fairly radical departure from everything that precedes it, a heart-shaped-box sampler of poison pills and bloody valentines, pop noir shot through with magic and loss, spooky-sexy analog keyboard textures, echoic vocal washes and tremolo power chords, knotty krautrock bass lines and the shimmering jangle of guitars. It is, in fact, such a complete break from her past that it may well cost her as many old fans as it gains new ones. Not that’s she’s sweating it. She’s used to having millions of people who she’s never met making snap judgments about her, some in the name of love, others not so much. Such is life in the business that is show.
If you are not among the 27 million global villagers who bought Jones’ Grammy-sweeping 2002 debut, Come Away With Me, and made it the biggest-selling album of the last decade, or, for that matter, Feels Like Home and Not Too Late, the two LPs that came after and pretty much pick up where the first left off, or the last one, 2009’s The Fall, which doesn’t so much and instead hints at the adept pop stylist she has become, well, you probably have your reasons. Presumably among them are:
1. You Wouldn’t Want To Be A Member Of Any Norah Jones Fan Club That Would Have You
It’s not so much the music you can’t stand, it’s the crowd it draws. Lots of balding graybeards with ponytails who still think pressed jeans and a blazer is sticking it to the man. Smug jazzbos who put on Pat Metheny when they are in the mood to fuck shit up. Tweedy Lebowskian dinner-party bores with pierced ears and patched elbows who drink too much and stay too long. Turtlenecked wine-bar Romeos and Birkenstocked fern herders. Plus, your parents like her, and the day you and your parents agree on music is the day you officially become O-L-D.
2. You Are Still Reeling From Some Tragedy In Which Norah Jones’ Music Played A Pivotal Role
Some smug yuppie assclown ran over your puppy/kitten/wheelchair-bound little brother while screaming unto distraction into his Bluetooth at his stockbroker behind the wheel of his Hummer, windows down and blasting Come Away With Me, and he didn’t even bother to stop.
3. It’s Not Your Fault, It’s Hers
It’s nothing personal, but you just simply can’t abide her amalgam of Starbuckian jazziness, tastefully muted country lilt and the smoky after-hours torch-singer balladeering. “Should be called Snorah Jones,” you have been known to say in your saltier moments.
Well, you won’t have Norah Jones to kick around anymore. At least not that Norah Jones. The old Norah Jones is dead, long live the new Norah Jones. Truth be told, the new Norah Jones looks a lot like the old Norah Jones, but with shorter hair and higher hemlines. The new Norah Jones makes kitschy panoramic odes to the inglorious bastards of Sergio Leone spaghetti-Westerns with Jack White and Danger Mouse. She takes album-cover-art design cues from Russ Meyer movies, wherein beautiful-but-deadly double-D glamazons body slam sniveling creeps into submission with feral hell-hath-no-fury fierceness. The new Norah Jones writes murder ballads, vowing homicidal retribution against the fairer-sex co-conspirator in her lover’s deal-breaking infidelity. Message: I will cut you, bitch.
OK, so maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But unless your name is Lou Reed, Iggy Pop or Arthur “The Fonz” Fonzarelli, I am willing to bet Mitt Romney $10,000 that Norah Jones is, despite your protestations to the contrary, cooler than you. Here’s why:
The Top 10 Reasons Norah Jones Is Cooler Than You
1. She recorded a Nick Drake cover before you ever even heard of her. You did not, and besides, nobody’s ever heard of you.
2. Her side band, Puss N Boots—not even her main band, but her side band—jams with Neil Young. None of your bands jam with Neil Young. Also, Jeff Tweedy was the one who came up with the name Puss N Boots, introducing them as such for the first time when they jammed with Wilco on “Jesus, Etc.” at Madison Square Garden back in 2008. Let’s not even try to pretend that’s not cooler than anything you did in 2008.
3. She didn’t even know she was the biggest-selling artist of the first decade of the 21st century, beating out Eminem and Usher, until I told her.
4. She told me she has a “very manly, scrappy” poodle named Ralph. It takes guts to say that out loud.
5. She has appeared on an episode of 30 Rock, performing a pro-organ-donation celebrity sing-along anthem called “Kidney Now” with Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow, Mary J. Blige, Adam Levine, Steve Earle, Michael McDonald, Talib Kweli, Rhett Miller, Moby, Cyndi Lauper and two-thirds of the Beastie Boys. You have not.
6. She sang Billie Holiday’s darkly Southern gothic “Strange Fruit” in high school, but admits her impression of Holiday takes a back seat to David Sedaris’, especially when he does Billie singing the “My Bologna Has A First Name” Oscar Mayer theme song.
7. She first realized her father was different than most other fathers when she saw him on television receiving an award from George Harrison. “I remember turning to my mom and being, like, ‘Did that just happen?’ and she was, like, ‘It’s time we had a talk.’”
8. Despite the fact that her net worth is well north of $30 million, she still uses words like “numbnuts” and “switcheroonie.” Also, she is, like Warren Buffett and precious few other members of the One Percent, more than happy to pay more taxes to provide for the common good.
9. She has duetted with Ray Charles (“I cried when I met him”), Belle And Sebastian (“nicest people on the planet”), Andre 3000, Herbie Hancock, Dave Grohl (“Of course I said yes; I mean, dude, I used air-drum to Nevermind when I was a kid”), Dolly Parton (“She asked me to sing with her at the Country Music Awards, which was the sweetest thing ever”), Q-Tip, Ryan Adams and Willie Nelson. You have not.
10. It took three days to shoot the kissing scene in My Blueberry Nights. Which means she kissed Jude Law for three days straight. You have never kissed Jude Law and almost certainly never will.
In late February, I met Norah Jones at a Mexican restaurant near her home in Brooklyn that shall remain nameless so that she may be able to continue to patronize it in relative peace from the stalkerazzi. Peace has been in short supply as of late in Jonestown. She spent the last year feuding with neighbors of her recently purchased $4.99 million brownstone in the borough’s tony Cobble Hill section of over what has been alternately called “The War Against Norah Jones’ Windows” and “Windowgate” by New York media that micromanaged their snarky coverage of the kerfuffle with breathless updates on a near-daily basis.
The trouble started when she had the unmitigated gall to propose the installation of 10 double-hung windows on the side of her house that faces a neighbor’s yard and driveway. She applied for and received the necessary approval from New York’s Landmark Preservation Commission, but Roy Sloane, president of the Cobble Hill Association, and a handful of neighbors were adamantly opposed and accused Jones of using her celebrity to get special treatment. “Greek-revival buildings of your type do not have side windows, and breaking this precedent is wrong,” Sloane lectured Jones via email. The Cobble Hill Association was opposed to the windows plan, he went on to say, because it “set a dangerous precedent” and there are some 80 other rowhomes in the neighborhood that don’t have windows on the sides.
One is to the other like a match is to gasoline. Jones’ plan could set off a chain reaction of people installing windows where there were no windows before and … what? Supplies of Windex in area stores would be decimated for a 10-block radius? Fresh air would have to be rationed? Nobody would be able to get any sleep, what with all the swarthy men in wife-beaters hollering “Stella!” out the window at all hours?
“I have to say, your neighbors sound like complete dicks,” I tell her, eliciting an involuntary guffaw that is quickly stifled, presumably, so as not to aggravate the situation. An uneasy peace was brokered when Jones volunteered to scale the renovation back to seven windows instead of 10.
“Actually, most of my neighbors have been wonderful; there’s only two that have not been cool,” she says. “But [Sloane] was a kind of a dick. He gave my email address to the New York Post—that’s not cool. Plus, he put me on the radar and now more people know where I live than ever before, and there have been some creepy incidents, strangers knocking on my door to say hi or give me their CD. I’m like, ‘OK, I’m in my bathrobe; I only answered the door because I thought it was FedEx.’”
Things got so heated that one unnamed neighbor bragged to a reporter that she would hide the countertop display copies of Norah Jones CDs at the nearby Starbucks out of spite. Another spread the rumor that Jones brought bed bugs with her to Cobble Hill, which, in this day and age, is only a few magnitudes of exaggeration shy of saying she was putting HIV in the local water supply. “Yeah, all that was really lame; they played really nasty,” Jones says of the opponents of her window installation plans. “And let the record show that I’ve never had bed bugs.”
This is, in part, why she never reads her press. “It really messes me up,” she says, absently poking at the remains of her breakfast burrito. “So, pretty much I have a rule: Like, don’t pay attention to it. Every once in a while, my mom will send me something she’ll think I’ll like, but really it just messes with my head. Even if it’s nice, it messes with you. So, I tried really hard not to pay attention to that after my first record. I mean, if it makes you feel vulnerable and if it makes you self-obsessed, don’t do it. It’s important not to, especially in this day and age. I mean, with the internet, everything is there and it’s a never-ending pit, and it’s mostly people who don’t know what they’re talking about or they are just trying to be mean.”
***
Norah Jones was born Geethali Norah Jones Shankar on March 30, 1979, the product of the union of Ravi Shankar, world-renowned sitar master, and Sue Jones, then an employee of legendary concert promoter Bill Graham. They lived for a few years in New York before Ravi and Sue split up, and four-year-old Norah and her mother moved to the suburbs of Dallas to be near her ailing grandparents. Shankar went on to marry his current wife, Sukanya, which resulted in a daughter named Anoushka, who would go on to become a world-renowned sitar master in her own right. Jones would not see her dad again until she was 18, which may explain why the subject of her famous father is the third rail of Norah Jones profile-writing.
“She really didn’t want that to be a focal point, and she was very adamant about telling Blue Note what she was willing to talk about and what she wasn’t willing to talk about,” says Lee Alexander, Jones’ boyfriend from 1999 to 2007, longtime bass player, co-songwriter and producer of her third album, Not Too Late. “She just didn’t want to talk about it because it’s personal. That’s the way she grew up, and just the things surrounding her mom and her dad and all of that were nobody’s business as far as she was concerned.”
Back in 2003, word got out that legendary Bollywood actor/filmmaker Dev Anand was working on a movie inspired by Jones’ complicated relationship with her father, with the working title of Song Of Life. Anand was reportedly set to star as Shankar, as well as direct, and names like Nicole Kidman and Salma Hayek were reportedly being considered to play Jones. Norah was livid. “He has no idea of our story, and he’s not going to represent it in a truthful way, I’m sure,” she told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper at the time. “It’s sad because it’s personal stuff and nobody’s business but ours. I don’t like talking about (my father) because he doesn’t have anything to do with me or my music.”
Later in that interview, Jones says, “I’m over everything; I don’t resent him. I love my dad, but I don’t want him to be given credit for something he didn’t do. I grew up with my mum, and he wasn’t around.”
The project never came to fruition, and Anand died in December 2011. Still, the subject of Jones’ childhood and her relationship with her father remains a no-go zone. When asked why she legally changed her name to Norah when she was 16, her eyes dim and her demeanor hardens.
“Look, (Geethali) is just my name,” she says. “Norah Jones? That’s me.”
Does Geethali mean something in Hindi?
“I don’t know, you’d have to ask my father,” she says curtly, signaling the close of our discussion of the topic.
For the record, MAGNET did try to ask her father. Surprisingly, given that there is no known record of him ever commenting publicly on his daughter, he agreed to an interview. However, the 92-year-old sitar master’s failing health caused the postponement of our interview, as well as a scheduled follow-up a week later. As of press time, Shankar was still too ill to reschedule an interview. (According to the internet, Geethali means “melodious song.”)
Jones lived in Texas until she was 19, and as such, she identifies as Texan, with a soft spot for cowboy boots, red meat and country music. She learned to sing in the church choir, where it soon became apparent she was in possession of inordinate vocal talent. Her mother’s record collection—Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Nancy Wilson, Shirley Horn, Blossom Dearie—provided early and invaluable inspiration. She started playing piano when she was seven and became a full-blown jazz hound by age 15. She attended Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and studied jazz piano and performed with the UNT Jazz Singers at the University of North Texas. She quit after just two years and headed to New York to pursue her fortunes as a jazz singer.
“I took all of my music classes my first two years, so I was faced with having to go back to school and only doing academics for the next two years, and I just didn’t want to,” she says. “So, I came here for the summer and really liked it, and I just decided to stay. My mom was not happy. After a few months, of course, I couldn’t make enough money and it was really hard getting gigs, and I said, ‘Mom, I want to come home!’ and she said, ‘No, just give it a year and then you can come home.’”
Jones fell in with a group of jazz players and singer/songwriters that would eventually become her backing band for the first three albums and tours: Lee Alexander, Jesse Harris, Adam Levy, Richard Julian, Daru Oda and Andrew Borger. She waitressed to pay her rent, and played a number of ignominious long-hours-for-low-pay piano-bar gigs in Times Square for audiences of disinterested tourists on their way to or from schlocky Broadway shows. Chock it up to misery loves company, but it was during these insufferable dues-paying gigs that Jones’ musical relationship with Alexander blossomed into a romance.
“It was an endurance test,” says Alexander. “You’ve got to play for four hours straight with no drummer and nobody’s really listening and you get paid, like, 50 bucks and a plate of spaghetti. And it was in a horrible time of day, too. Like, the gig started around six and I was living in Queens, so I’d pick her up and then drive in Times Square, and it was impossible to find a parking space, so I’d invariably get a ticket for $130 and the gig paid $50, so I wound up $80 in the hole. At one point, I just told her, you know, ‘I can see why you want to keep doing this, but I just can’t do it anymore.’ She agreed.”
Somewhere around this time, an employee of Blue Note—the legendary jazz label, with a storied discography that includes landmark albums by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman—caught one of Jones’ performances around town and passed her demo tape to her bosses. The demo was a combination of jazz singer standards and her non-jazz singer/songwriter collaborations with Jesse Harris, including a song called “Don’t Know Why.” Within weeks, Jones was signed to Blue Note.
After an aborted initial attempt to record her debut, Jones and Co. were paired with legendary arranger/producer Arif Mardin (Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Diana Ross), and the result was Come Away With Me. Released in February 2002, the album sold well out of the gate, quickly going gold, and then, in August, platinum. At the 2003 Grammys, the album netted five awards, including Album Of The Year, Record Of The Year and Song Of The Year for “Don’t Know Why.”
As Jones would later tell Katie Couric in a 60 Minutes interview, “I felt like I went to somebody else’s birthday party, and I ate all their cake. Without anybody else getting a piece.” There were other downsides to overnight superstardom. The next day, the New York Post plastered a picture of the downmarket apartment building where Jones and Alexander were living at the time on the front page with the headline:
NORAH’S B’KLYN NEST: HUMBLE PAD IS GRAMMY QUEEN’S CASTLE
“We basically never went back there,” says Alexander. “I mean, it wasn’t safe with all these stalker guys and paparazzi guys staked out front for weeks. Blue Note wound up putting us up in the W Hotel for a month until we could find a new place.”
It was all part of the blowback of instant fame, a status that exacts a heavy price from its initiates. “It was just a lot of damn work,” says Jones. “It was just like constant work and not always the fun kind. Not always the ‘Oh, I’m just going to play a gig’ part. Tons of traveling, and not to be like, ‘My diamond shoes are too tight’—I mean, obviously there were some amazing moments—but it was very overwhelming. People would say rude stuff, people could be mean, or people would act like you’re a genius and you’re like, ‘Dude, relax. I’m not a genius, but I’m glad you liked it.’ I mean, it was fabulous, and it was fun. I was surrounded by people I loved because, you know, Lee and I were together at the time and we went on this trip together, which was great. My friends were in my band. It was like a little family, and without them I probably would have had a nervous breakdown. So, we had a lot of fun and the travel was amazing, but I was really glad when everything calmed down.”
The good news was the Grammy sweep pushed album sales through the roof. “It just got crazier and crazier; every day I thought, ‘Oh, wow, this has been fun. It’s gonna end tomorrow.’ But it never did,” says Jones. Come Away With Me stayed on the Billboard charts for a whopping 153 weeks and, to date, has sold more than 27 million copies worldwide. Jones and Co. would stay out on the road for the next three years, criss-crossing the globe repeatedly. More than once, they were reminded that they weren’t in Kansas anymore.
“I remember when we played Beijing it seemed like there were more armed guards than people,” says Alexander. “The venue probably held 4,000 people, and there were maybe 600 guards. It just looked really ominous seeing 600 soldiers with machine guns in their hands.”
In between legs of the tour, Jones and Alexander managed to write and record a like-minded follow-up to Come Away With Me, the more country-leaning Feels Like Home. It sold a million copies the first week it was released, and to date, it’s sold in excess of 10 times that.
Jones never even bothered to tell her record label that she was recording her third album, Not Too Late, with Alexander in the home studio they built together, and the first Blue Note learned of it was when they had a finished album in their hands. On the eve of its release in late January 2007, Not Too Late earned the distinction of being the most pre-ordered album of all time on Amazon.com. Still, there were signs the formula was getting a little stale. Not Too Late would go on to sell roughly five million copies, about half of what Feels Like Home did. And just one-fifth of Come Away With Me’s sales.
“Having such a big-selling first record, it’s kind of hard to go anywhere but down,” says Alexander. “So, we tried not to care about it so much and tried just to move forward somehow.”
The never-ending tours started to feel like more of a job than an adventure, and the drudgery of the road was compounded by the fact that Jones and Alexander were bickering their way toward a painful breakup. “That tour was much shorter than the others; it was probably only about four months, but it felt like four years,” says Alexander, who has since given up music for race-car driving. “You’re trying to not let the stuff happening in our personal life affect everybody on the tour. You’re stuck on a bus with other people who have feelings, and just trying to keep it all cool, so you end up bottling a lot of stuff up, and it just made it even harder. I think it was kind of apparent at the gigs. I don’t think the gigs were very magical, and I think that’s part of the reason why. So, yeah, it wasn’t the way I wanted it to go down, but you know—that’s how it went down.
“I look back and I’m kind of amazed we were even able to stay together as long as we did considering all of the crap that was going on. I mean, it was stressful for her, especially. What with the success getting dumped on her, and I was kind of reeling from the success as well, but I didn’t have to do 12 interviews a day and talk about myself all of the time. I think she kind of got—I wouldn’t say robbed of her childhood—but her first record comes out and she’s kind of this overnight international superstar, and I think she’s trying to regain a little bit of that innocence. So, it kind of made sense; we kind of both were growing in different directions, and it was natural. I mean, obviously it was painful—we were together for a long time—but I could see it for what it was, and now we’re obviously still really good friends and I wouldn’t trade anything that we went through, you know?”
There were other low-intensity existential crises, not the least of which was that Jones was beginning to feel like her career was defining her instead of the other way around. “That first record became so huge that it defined who she is before she had even figured out who she is,” says Alexander. Likewise she was growing increasingly frustrated with the inability of her music to connect with people her own age. “That’s always been eating at her,” says Alexander. “The crowds (on tour) were mostly—well, I can’t say mostly—it wasn’t really a mix. Because she was on a jazz label, it automatically puts you within a certain demographic and a lot of jazz lovers who tend to be middle-aged.”
Jones’ response was to embark on side projects that allowed her to express sides of herself the strictures of her fame didn’t allow room for, such the Little Willies, her shambling countrypolitan cover band, and El Madmo, wherein Jones belted out loud, punk-ish songs about sex and dope in fishnets, short shorts, a blonde wig and lots of eyeliner. Or White On Rice, a comedy-rap trio featuring Jones and her gal pals Sarah Oda and Maria Falgione that recently released “Dealbreaker,” a ribald-rap internet short in the mold of Garfunkel & Oates’ viral hit “This Party Took A Turn For The Douche.”
“Nobody knows she’s funny,” says Falgione.
“She’s pretty hilarious,” says Oda, who’s been friends with Jones since their days waitressing together on New York’s Upper East Side when they were all of 19. “I guess that most of her fans just know her through her music, and the lyrics in her music speak in a certain tone. But she’s one of the silliest people I know.”
I ask Jones if the relative raunchiness of El Madmo and White On Rice were on some level an attempt to scuff up her “good girl image” a little, but she’s not having it. “I don’t want to scuff up my image,” she says. “I don’t even care. If people want to think I’m nice, I don’t care.”
Perhaps the farthest she ventured out of her comfort zone was accepting, at the filmmaker’s behest, the starring role in acclaimed Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s episodic romantic drama My Blueberry Nights, alongside Jude Law, Natalie Portman, David Strathairn and Rachel Weisz. “I started taking acting lessons and told (Kar-wai) that and asked if he could send me a copy of the script,” says Jones. “And he’s like, ‘No, no, I don’t want you taking acting lessons. Stop. There’s no script.’ Talk about jumping into the deep end.”
As if to mark all this change with some outward manifestation, she cut her hair short. “I feel like I grew up a lot and became less of a little kid,” she says. “Lee and I split up, and I made (2009’s) The Fall without him, which was a big deal because I had never done anything musically without him. I think in a way it was really big for me, even though I love working with him and I’d do it again, but, you know … It was just an interesting process making that. I had to find the right producer. I was looking for somebody to be my partner in the way that Lee used to be my partner, musically.”
Arguably, Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton has been filling those shoes as of late. In 2008, he called Jones and asked if she would be interested in singing on a project he was working on called Rome, which he described as an homage to the epic soundtracks of spaghetti-Westerns like A Fistful Of Dollars and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. The other singer attached to the project was Jack White. “When I met Brian, I was like, ‘Wow! I love this guy!’” says Jones. “I was already a fan. I knew enough about him to know that he was cool, but I loved working with him and we became friends almost instantly.”
She eventually got around to asking Burton if he would produce her next album. Burton said he didn’t want to just produce her next record; he wanted to help write it, too.
They recorded in his Los Angeles studio, which is decorated with old movie posters that wound up serving as inspiration, says Jones. It was the lurid pulp noir of posters for Russ Meyer movies that made the biggest impression, specifically the one for Mudhoney, which served as a template for …Little Broken Hearts’ cover.
“That poster was so present during the record that I felt like it became part of it,”she says. “I stared at it every day and was just so fascinated by it. I remember about halfway through I went, ‘What if we made that the record cover?’ I mean I wasn’t going to use one of the posters with the boobs and the guns necessarily, but I like the way he portrays women in his films. They’re very exploited, but they’re also happy to have the power.”
…Little Broken Hearts is a song cycle about sifting through the wreckage of broken romance. Reportedly the break-up in question is with an unnamed “fiction writer,” who, like the Brooklyn restaurant we’re sitting in, shall remain unnamed. Jones makes it clear that the songs on the album will be her only public comment on the matter. “Why would I need to talk about it?” she says. “I made this album instead.”
I ask her what inspired the album title. Why little broken hearts? “I think Brian came up with that,” she says. “I get this image of, like, this army of little broken hearts—they’re sad, they’re wounded, and they’re out for revenge, but they’re also cute and sweet and sad.”
Just like Norah Jones, I say.
She just smiles and shrugs, waving goodbye as she heads for the door.
This is where we came in. That’s how you woke up in bed with Danger Mouse and Norah Jones. It’s sort of like Groundhog Day. The sun comes in through the window along with the sounds of the Brooklyn streets coming to life. Danger Mouse’s guitar gently weeping, Norah’s piano chasing waterfalls, the lush pneumatic wheeze of vintage analog keyboards. Another lazy Sunday morning coming down. “Good morning/My thoughts on leaving/Are back on the table/I thought you should know,” she sings.
Perfect, you think. You wouldn’t have it any other way.
