After her fourth album The Fall in 2009 proved to be a departure from the well known blend of blues-jazz-country-pop, Norah Jones received a fan letter:

“After I made The Fall, I received the sweetest letter from a fan in Argentina, but it was also criticising me as well. It said “I’m a really big fan but would you please go back to singing the ballads, because you do that better and I really need that from you”. It was a sweet letter but I decided then, you are never going to please everyone”. 

As Norah prepared to release a box set 20th anniversary edition of her quietly colossal debut Come Away With Me, I invited her to talk with me on The Art of Longevity with the aim of exploring just how far she had come in the intervening 20 years, musically speaking. After all, when an artist achieves the sort of success Jones did with a debut record, there is no point trying to repeat it. Instead, with each new album since, she has moved forward, while collaborating with some of the world’s finest instrumentalists and producers. Genre blending was on the agenda from the off, yet Norah has continued to play with more different styles in such a way as to be a true alchemist. 

Do such talents pose a dilemma, I wondered? Was The Fall and then Little Broken Hearts a deliberate rebellion against the mould? Yes and no seems to be the answer. Jones was always a creator without boundaries, it was simply her massive early following (including the author of that fan letter) that placed certain expectations on her music. 

Our own fan letter to Norah would contain a somewhat different narrative. Never go back, keep moving forward and go even closer to the edge. Let’s see where she travels next. 

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