There are albums that arrive quietly and then simply refuse to leave, and Come Away with Me is one of them — the kind of record that somehow managed to sell twenty-seven million copies without ever raising its voice.
Norah Jones was twenty-two years old when she walked into Blue Rock Studio in Wimberley, Texas, and then later into Clinton Recording in New York City, and the remarkable thing is that you can hear exactly how young and unworried she was. No calculation, no production safety net. Just a voice that knew where it lived.
The Room Where It Happened
Producer Arif Mardin — the man who had already shaped records for Aretha Franklin, Bette Midler, and the Bee Gees — heard something in Jones that resisted embellishment. His instinct was to get out of the way. Engineer Jay Newland set up the sessions with an almost willful simplicity, positioning Jones close to the microphone and letting the piano breathe into the same air as everything else.
The band they assembled was working musicians of the highest order, not studio cowboys hunting a trend. Jesse Harris, who wrote “Don’t Know Why,” played guitar. Lee Alexander, Jones’s then-boyfriend, held down bass with a kind of patient gravity. Kevin Mahogany was around, but it was drummer Dan Rieser who gave the record its particular pulse — loose, brushed, back-pocket drumming that sits just slightly behind the beat in a way that makes you feel the floor.
Adam Levy came in on guitar. Tony Scherr played upright bass on several tracks. Sam Yahel added organ where the songs wanted warmth. Nobody soloed longer than the song needed.
What Blue Actually Sounds Like
“Don’t Know Why” opens the record and functions like a key turning in a lock you forgot you had. But the deeper pleasures are in tracks people skip: “Lonestar,” which is barely more than Jones and a guitar and a feeling of leaving somewhere you should probably have left sooner. “Nightingale,” which Mardin shaped into something that sounds like it was recorded in the 1950s and somehow also recorded last Tuesday.
The production borrowed from country, jazz, folk, and soul without ever landing in any of them. That’s actually the harder trick. Most artists trying to straddle genre end up in a neutral nowhere. Jones ended up somewhere that felt entirely her own.
Blue Note Records — which had not had a record this commercially significant since, arguably, ever — watched it win five Grammy Awards in 2003, including Album of the Year, and must have wondered what to do next. The answer, as it turned out, was nothing. The album simply was what it was.
The piano on “Come Away with Me” — the title track — sits slightly left of center in the mix. Jones’s voice is just above it, unhurried, the way someone talks when they already know the answer. Newland got a sound on that piano that is warm without being muddy, present without being clinical. It is one of the finer piano recordings of the decade, and most people who love the album have never consciously noticed it.
Put it on after the house gets quiet. Let it fill the room from wherever the speakers are. At some point, probably around “Turn Me On,” you’ll stop doing whatever else you were doing.