Norah Jones “The Fall” on Blue Note Records

Written by Susie Salva
Norah Jones has released her fourth studio CD entitled, “The Fall,” on Blue Note records. The sexy, sultry songstress delivers her signature sound and claims to have sold more albums than any other female jazz artists during the 2000’s. In 2009 with a new image and several new sounds Jones proves that her adult contemporary vocal jazz influences are still alive and thriving.

“For this record, I just had a sound in my head,” says Norah Jones. “I wanted the grooves to be more present and heavy. And I also just wanted something different—I had been hanging with the same group of musicians for a long time and I thought it was a good time for me to work with different people and experiment a little.”

The result of these experiments is the multiple Grammy award winner’s new album, “The Fall.” This album is an exciting evolution from her previous three releases, which have sold a combined 36 million copies. Jones has established a strong identity based around her sultry vocals and jazz-informed, piano-driven pop style. On “The Fall,” Jones brings her own guitar playing front and center in the sound.

The direction for “The Fall,” didn’t take long to unfold – it started to present itself on one of the song she wrote for the project. “About a year ago, I did some demos in my home studio,” she says. “I had some friends come in and we figured out a cool arrangement for this song, “Chasing Pirates” with a cool drum part. It went somewhere I didn’t expect it to go, and that became the direction to look in.”

As she worked with multiple sets of musicians in studios in both New York and Los Angeles Jones and producer Jacquire King kept pushing their sonic experimentation further. “There’s a song called, “Light as a Feather,” that I wrote with Ryan Adams,” she says. “For this album, I wanted to keep my country side away, so I needed to figure out how to make this song work and tie in with the others. We did it by taking the guitar out and there was this crazy organ sample and it sounded like razor blade underneath everything. It was this cool moment where I realized that you can just strip away some of the elements and you can do something totally new.”

Most of the songs on this CD deal with the dichotomy of wanting so badly to be with somebody but not wanting to be with that somebody. The songs that drew on the jazzier side of Norah Jones, like “It’s Gonna Be,” demanded new treatments. “The one has a swingy sound, a lot of words,” she says. “it could have been really hokey. But the drummer, my friend Robert DiPietro, came up with a part that was part Gene Krupa, part Adam Ant, and that just made the song completely different. The rhythm really dictated the sound of that song.”

From the swaying rock thump of “Stuck” to an intimate ballad like “Back to Manhattan,” one thing that hasn’t gone away on “The Fall,” is the distinctiveness and expressiveness of Jones’s singing. “The Fall,” has the feeling of an artist growing into a new phase in her creative development. Beyond the changes in her singing, her instrumental work, and even her conception of her own sound, she maintains that her songwriting is at the very foundation of her new approach.