Norah+jones

…Featuring Norah Jones is a compilation album by American singer Norah Jones that was released on November 16, 2010, by Blue Note Records. The album includes songs by other artists on which Jones is featured, including songs by her side bands The Little Willies and El Madmo. The album includes "Here We Go Again", a duet with Ray Charles, which won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 2005. The song "Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John" by Belle & Sebastian had only been released one month prior to the release of this album on the group's October 2010 album Belle and Sebastian Write About Love.

Norah Jones took liberty with her blockbuster success to set out on a musical walkabout, spending a good portion of the decade following 2004's Feels Like Home experimenting, either on her own albums or on a variety of collaborations. Day Breaks, released four years after the atmospheric adult alternative pop of the Danger Mouse-produced Little Broken Hearts, finds Jones returning home to an extent: it, like her 2002 debut Come Away with Me, is a singer/songwriter album with roots in pop and jazz, divided between originals and sharply selected covers. Such similarities are immediately apparent, but Day Breaks is much slyer than a mere revival.

Norah Jones' debut on Blue Note is a mellow, acoustic pop affair with soul and country overtones, immaculately produced by the great Arif Mardin. (It's pretty much an open secret that the 22-year-old vocalist and pianist is the daughter of Ravi Shankar.) Jones is not quite a jazz singer, but she is joined by some highly regarded jazz talent: guitarists Adam Levy, Adam Rogers, Tony Scherr, Bill Frisell, and Kevin Breit; drummers Brian Blade, Dan Rieser, and Kenny Wollesen; organist Sam Yahel; accordionist Rob Burger; and violinist Jenny Scheinman. Her regular guitarist and bassist, Jesse Harris and Lee Alexander, respectively, play on every track and also serve as the chief songwriters.

Exorcizing the ghost of a failed relationship via the time-honored tradition of the breakup album, Norah Jones luxuriates in beautiful misery on Little Broken Hearts. Liberated by the separation but not quite ready to let it go, Jones achieves a curious subdued tension here, dressing unadorned confessionals in softly stylized studio noir created with the assistance of producer Danger Mouse, who collaborated with her the year before on the collective Rome. Seeming opposites – the classicist meets the futurist – Jones and Danger Mouse are well matched, as both artists are not as set in their ways as their individual reputations would suggest.

Listeners with even a passing familiarity with Norah Jones' fine official debut, Come Away With Me, will be captivated by First Sessions; for an artist making her earliest attempts at studio recording, Jones is remarkably assured and mature on these six cuts, revealing a unique sound and sensibility fully formed long before she signed to Blue Note. The opening "Don't Know Why" is the litmus test: the version here is nearly identical to the rendition on Come Away With Me, its impressive marriage of cocktail jazz and coffeehouse folk already solidified. Likewise, Jones' alluring readings of "Come Away With Me," "Turn Me On," and "Lonestar" anticipate the more robust versions captured on the LP. First Sessions is also worth seeking out because it contains a pair of songs yet to surface anywhere else – the Jesse Harris original "Something Is Calling You" and more intriguingly, a cover of jazz legend Horace Silver's "Peace."

It may be far too obvious to even mention that Norah Jones' follow-up to her 18-million-unit-selling, eight-Grammy-winning, genre-bending, super-smash album Come Away with Me has perhaps a bit too much to live up to. But that's probably the biggest conundrum for Jones: having to follow up the phenomenal success of an album that was never designed to be so hugely popular in the first place. Come Away with Me was a little album by an unknown pianist/vocalist who attempted to mix jazz, country, and folk in an acoustic setting – who knew? Feels Like Home could be seen as "Come Away with Me Again" if not for that fact that it's actually better. Smartly following the template forged by Jones and producer Arif Mardin, there is the intimate single "Sunrise," some reworked cover tunes, some interesting originals, and one ostensible jazz standard.

It may be far too obvious to even mention that Norah Jones' follow-up to her 18-million-unit-selling, eight-Grammy-winning, genre-bending, super-smash album Come Away with Me has perhaps a bit too much to live up to. But that's probably the biggest conundrum for Jones: having to follow up the phenomenal success of an album that was never designed to be so hugely popular in the first place. Come Away with Me was a little album by an unknown pianist/vocalist who attempted to mix jazz, country, and folk in an acoustic setting – who knew? Feels Like Home could be seen as "Come Away with Me Again" if not for that fact that it's actually better.

Norah Jones named her eighth proper studio set Visions because many of the musical ideas occurred to her in the middle of the night, right when her consciousness was hazy: they weren't fully realized so much as an apparition. That sense of dreaminess carries through to the finished product but not in ways that are commonly associated with such a description. Far from being an album constructed for twilight hours – a dimly lit excursion into mood music – Visions is clear and light, its textures vividly articulated and its rhythms mellow and fluid. It's music that feels alive, inhaling and exhaling with a gentle insistence; it's never rushed, never clipped. Despite the record's inherent relaxation, Visions never quite proceeds in a linear path.