Last summer, Norah Jones went into the office of Bruce Lundvall, the president of Blue Note Records, and asked him something no musician has ever asked a record label boss.
“Haven’t I sold enough records yet?” she wondered. She was tired, cranky, and verging on burnout. Twelve-hour days spent giving interviews, dispiriting meet-and-greets, and the shock of being a 23-year-old with a boatload of Grammys and a platinum record will do that to you.
“It’s not like the press is mean — it’s just a lot of work that I didn’t really want to do,” she explains. “I mean, a lot of another kind of work that I didn’t really know I was going to have to do. Yeah, I guess I did say that to Bruce.”
Lundvall likes that story: To him, it’s unfathomable that a musician would want to stop selling albums. “This is all because of you,” he told her. “There are no tricks. But there is a lot of work involved.”
“I just don’t wanna be burned out,” she responded. “I want a career, and people might get tired of me.”
Not yet.
At the end of February 2002, Blue Note released Jones’ Come Away with Me, on which she sings like an angel and plays piano as though her fingertips were feathers. The album is neither jazz nor pop, but somewhere in the ethereal in-between, and it has sold beyond anyone’s expectations — especially hers — to the tune of seven million copies and eight Grammys, including song, record, and album of the year.
“It’s staggering,” says an executive at another label. “It could be the biggest-selling jazz album in the last God-knows-how-long. This proves you can’t stop a hit album. And it makes me believe.”
Rewind to August 29, 2001, the day Norah Jones gave her second-ever interview, and to this writer. That very afternoon, she was hand-delivering the finished copy of Come Away with Me to Bruce Lundvall.
“Hopefully, he’ll like it. I know he will — but if he doesn’t, then I do, so it doesn’t really matter,” she said then, adding a nervous giggle. “I mean, it matters that he likes it, of course, but I feel 100 percent about it this time, so I’m pretty confident that if he doesn’t like it, I don’t belong here.”
Later that day, Lundvall hopped on the phone to insist he was in this for the long haul. “I have to be realistic,” he said two years ago. “We’re not saying we’ll have a platinum record. It’s not about that.”
Today, it is. Good God, it’s all about that. At this very moment, Jones is a quiet pop star, in spite of her staggering fame. As all those connected with Jones will tell you, she’s as stubborn as she is savvy.
“In her naive statement [about wanting to stop selling albums], there’s a great deal of homespun intelligence,” says Steve Macklam, her manager. “It’s like, ‘Be careful what you ask for.’ If you sell too many records, if everything you do on your first record lifts the bar and sets such high expectations, there’s the danger people will have had enough or feel let down when the next record comes out. There’s a common-sense self-regulation she sees instinctively. The intention is just to put out a good record and to not sell it as the Second Coming. That’s not what it is.”
Certainly, Blue Note couldn’t have predicted this. Since its inception in 1939, it’s been strictly a jazz label, a safe haven for artists who judge success between the grooves, not at the cash register: Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Cassandra Williams, Dianne Reeves.
“That is why Norah signed to Blue Note,” Lundvall says. “She didn’t want to be a pop artist.”
Yet now she is, for better or worse. And though there are copious explanations — the right gigs, the right critics, the right timing — how often do all those things add up to seven-plus million sold? Usually never.
“She has no illusions about this success,” Lundvall says. “She didn’t expect this. She never expected to be signed. I told her we’ve been looking for this forever.”
He pauses, and you can hear the grin over the phone.
“It’s all a mystery.”
The Lovesick Critic Snowball
Making Come Away with Me reminded producer Arif Mardin of the “electrifying moments” he experienced recording “Jive Talkin'” with the Bee Gees in 1975. Jones’ crossover success reminds her booking agent, Joe Brauner, of his client Harry Connick Jr. around the time 1989’s When Harry Met Sally wooed millions of customers who didn’t normally buy big-band albums. Her focus on career over instant gratification reminds manager Macklam of two other clients, Joni Mitchell and Diana Krall.
So, yes, Norah Jones is not without precedent. But there was no master plan, either. All Blue Note had to do was let the music do the work.
During the summer of 2001, Blue Note made available on NorahJones.com a six-song EP, First Sessions, consisting of demos she cut for the label in October 2000. It wasn’t sent to radio or press — at least, not until people began begging for it. The out-of-print collection now sells for more than $100 on eBay.
Meanwhile, in the fourth-month interim between Come Away‘s mastering and its release, Blue Note coaxed New York writers out to tiny clubs to hear Jones and fall in love with her. Which they did, like teenagers with schoolboy crushes.
Jones and her band — bassist and boyfriend Lee Alexander, guitarist Adam Levy, and drummer Andy Borger — hit the road for long weekends, exposing her to new audiences and polishing up the live set. Booking agent Brauner was adamant about where he wanted Jones to play: not jazz venues, but folk clubs populated by other singer-songwriters.
In short order, Jones was tagged as a Next Big Thing by two magazines: In late January Entertainment Weekly included her in its 2002 music guide, “Brand New Heavies.” A week later, Rolling Stone praised Come Away‘s “timeless groove” in its “Ten Artists to Watch” section.
“We were pitching Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly from the outset, because we didn’t see Norah as strictly jazz,” Hanks says. “We saw her from the beginning as an artist who could appeal to a lot of different audiences.”
Come Away came out on February 26; the following day, Jones appeared on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show. When the album sold 10,000 copies its first week, the numbers were fairly staggering for a new artist — jaw-dropping, some might say. Certainly the TV appearance helped, but there’s another simple reason why Jones’ album sold well: Blue Note made the first 100,000 copies available at a “developing artist” rate of $7.99. The label’s research revealed that since it was so inexpensive, people were buying several copies at once and handing them out to friends and family. Lundvall and Zach Hochkeppel, head of marketing at Blue Note, decided to keep the price low until it sold 250,000 copies.
“My mom used to say, ‘Why is your CD so cheap? That doesn’t look very good, Norah,'” Jones says, laughing. “You know, you always think, it’s in the bargain bin; it must not be selling. But I think it’s a good idea. I think $18 is too much for any CD, much less a new artist.”
So by the time Jones arrived in Austin in March 2002 for the annual music-biz circle jerk South by Southwest, it was amazing that you could hear her over the burgeoning buzz. In three days she played six gigs, which proved way too much, too soon. Yes, she received an astonishing amount of good press, but she also discovered that if selling Come Away meant giving away herself, well, it just wasn’t worth it.
“I had a breakdown because of it,” Jones says of SXSW. “It was a long week, man. It was a really hard week for me, and it was way too much stuff, with way too many people coming at me — weird. It was a turning point, and I was learning that I need to just chill out, because I can’t do every single thing. I have a lot of rules now that are set into place for the label and management, and if they need me to break one, they approach me very warily, because, you know, it’s a sanity issue.”
The Crossover Dribble
Blue Note never intended to sell Norah Jones as a jazz artist. Lundvall even asked her, before the album’s release, if she wanted to move to its pop subsidiary, Manhattan Records. She quickly and vehemently declined. Though Come Away features a Hank Williams song, though she’s as influenced by Willie Nelson as by Sarah Vaughan, and though she’s covering AC/DC’s “Ride On” in concert, she insisted on staying with Blue Note. Everyone would just have to adjust.
And they did — by putting her on bills with John Mayer, Nelson, the Dave Matthews Band, and the Indigo Girls; by getting her on adult-oriented pop radio stations; by sneaking her onto MTV2. Last June, she played the Bonnaroo Music Festival outside Nashville, a three-day gathering of jam bands including Widespread Panic, members of the Grateful Dead, Phish’s Trey Anastasio, and the patchouli-abusers who love them. Everyone loved her, too.
“I know that a lot of the jazz fanatics don’t like that I’m on Blue Note, because it’s not real jazz, you know?” Jones says, her voice coated in sugary sarcasm. “They always get their panties in a knot when something that’s not real jazz gets successful.”
Yet last May, she turned down VH1’s invitation to perform at its Divas Live concert in Las Vegas. True, she was overseas at the time, but she’d still never try to outgun the likes of Cher, the Dixie Chicks, Mary J. Blige, and Stevie Nicks. Where most labels and managers would’ve insisted Jones take the gig — it would have meant higher sales and probably compelled VH1 to put Jones’ “Don’t Know Why” video in heavier rotation — everyone agreed it would’ve been a major mistake.
“I’m not a diva,” Jones says, laughing. “That’s not my personality. I would love to meet, like, Stevie Nicks or hang out with the Dixie Chicks or whatever, and I think it’s really fun to watch, and all of those singers are great. I just don’t think it’s for me.” Neither was cutting a new, bigger-budget video for “Don’t Know Why,” which Lundvall had suggested. Neither was releasing an edited version of the second single, “Come Away with Me.” Jones knows what she wants — and, more importantly, what she doesn’t want.
“She’s in complete control,” says Blue Note’s Zach Hochkeppel. “She isn’t willing to go along because you tell her, ‘This is what people do.’ Her choices have been perfect. It’s now to the point where we let her decide. Her management has taken that stance, and it has made it a nicer relationship to be in.”
Because, you see, this is only the beginning of Jones’ career — a baby step, not the giant leap most new major label artists crave. She could easily have sold out and bought in; she could easily play arenas every night on her current tour. She didn’t, and she’s not.
“It would be a shame to put everything into a first album and have audiences go, ‘It’s wonderful — next,'” Macklam adds. “She has so much more to offer.”
Lundvall expects Jones to go back into the studio this year; certainly, she’s desperate for time off. It has been difficult to write on the road, because she needs to be back in New York, back among friends instead of fans who can kill — or at least injure — the sensitive artist with their overwhelming kindness. And hasn’t she done enough, given enough, sold enough?
“The moments I get astonished are when SoundScan comes, and the record just kept going up,” Jones says. “Like I don’t even want to know that stuff, but my boyfriend, Lee … every week he tells me the numbers, and we just take a minute and are like, ‘What the fuck is going on? Like, why are they still buying it, what’s going on?’ And every week, I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, so this is where we peak. Next week it’s going to start dropping.’ I’m always ready for it to start dropping. It’s weird that it hasn’t yet. I guess it has a lot to do with timing. I mean, I don’t think it’s all because of me. I certainly don’t. It’s like, gosh, something was aligned, the stars are aligned, and all that hippy-dippy stuff, but it’s kind of true, you know? I just got lucky.”
