"Post by PAI....." (See our letter to you on 8/24/04 please.)Sunday, October 03, 2004
Copyright @ Las Vegas Review-Journal
Achieving Her Comfort Level
Norah Jones finds lightening up the best way to have fun onstage
By DOUG ELFMAN
REVIEW-JOURNAL
Norah Jones enjoys being thought of as sensual. "Hey, I'll take that. I'll take that, baby."
Norah Jones says she focuses on the melody and rhythm before connecting with the lyrics. "I'm a musician. Every time I hear a song, I hear the music first."
One song shot Norah Jones to sudden fame in 2002. "Don't Know Why" was a huge hit, partly because it had the sultry feel of a standard ballad. And yet, her record label wanted to release the song first as a dance club remix.
Jones says the song was doing pretty well on public radio before any other radio stations picked it up. But label executives got excited about "Don't Know Why" and hired Virgin Radio workers to speed it up and make it more like an electronic song. Jones put her foot down.
"So they did a really crappy remix of `Don't Know Why,' and I was just horrified, so bad," Jones, 25, says. "They wanted to get it on the radio and sell more records. It wasn't for musical reasons at all."
Jones -- who sings Monday and Tuesday at the Hard Rock Hotel -- ended up with more hit songs that critics and fans found to be pleasingly languid and sultry. In fact, Jones came to be known for singing such seductive lines as, "I waited 'til I saw the sun, I don't know why I didn't come," and "come away with me in the night."
Jones gets a kick out of the fact that someone could view her first two hits as dirty -- "No!" she says and laughs -- or at the very least as sexually loaded.
"But you know what the stupid thing is -- I didn't even write those songs. Those are mostly Jessie's songs," she says and laughs again, referring to songwriter Jesse Harris.
Still, she likes being thought of as sensual.
"Hey, I'll take that. I'll take that, baby," she says.
That doesn't mean she walks around thinking that she's sensual, though.
"No, but I have to say, you know the song, `Turn Me On'? We started doing that in the encore lately (in concert). When I get to the line, `Turn me on,' they go `Wahoo!' They start screaming, and the guys go, `Yeah, baby!' So I've been milking it a little more than I did before."
Ever since releasing "Don't Know Why" and "Come Away With Me," Jones has become more aware of the sexual connotations of her work, she says.
"I do think about lyrics a lot more now, because of that. Everybody talks about how melancholy and romantic my albums are. I know the sound of them is. But I never thought about the lyrics thing that way, because," she says, "I haven't ever placed that much emphasis on the lyrics."
"Lyrics are really hard for me."
What's this? Norah Jones, the vocalist, isn't obsessed with her lyrics? No, she says, but don't get the wrong idea. She does have an emotional connection with her lyrics. It's just that she's a melody and rhythm person, foremost.
"I'm a musician. Every time I hear a song, I hear the music first," she says. "The first time you hear a song, what makes you want to hear it again -- it's the music. It's the sound of it. Of course, maybe there's some lyrics you can connect with and relate to. But usually, I never connect to the lyrics until the second or third or fourth (time)."
Jones has even found herself surprised, once she started scrutinizing her favorite music.
"There are some songs I listened to in high school that I've been digging out and listening to and saying, `God, that's what he meant?' I didn't understand that in high school. I knew the words by heart, but I didn't ever think about them."
Jones has been playing piano for years, and she can play sparingly on guitar. But mostly, she thinks through a song before she commits it to an instrument. For instance, she came up with the melody for "The Prettiest Thing" on an airplane, and then her friends helped her with the lyrics later.
"Most of the songs I've been able to hear in my head, and then I go to the guitar or whatever instrument's just lying around."
For her breakthrough debut songs, she didn't have a piano in the home in New York she had just moved into. So she wrote them on guitar.
"At the time, I only had guitar. I didn't have a piano in my first apartment until I was there a few months," she says. "So I wrote the songs in my head, and I tried to pick it out on guitar."
She's not even a good guitarist. But, she says, "if you know three chords, you can write a song."
Then again, she is a classically trained pianist, to begin with, so she did have a pretty deep music knowledge.
"Because I'm so limited on the instrument, I have to concentrate on the melody, because I'm playing really dumbed down chords, and I don't play rhythm guitar very well. So it's really all about the melody and the lyrics."
She has tried playing simple triads on piano. But it hasn't worked out, yet.
"I find playing really simple chords -- when you're trying to come up with a song -- on piano sounds really elementary school. Where on guitar, it's easier to sound just strummy."
Either way, she has sold millions of albums and garnered much press praise. She used to read what journalists wrote about her, but not so much anymore. Reading about what others think of her music could change how she writes or performs, and she doesn't want that to happen.
"It's not healthy," she says. "Can you imagine reading about yourself all the time? Plus, if it's good, then nice. But if it's bad, you get so inside your own head about it and bummed out. So it's better not to. I don't want to know; that's my rule."
She really had to drive this point home with her family, she says.
"My mom kept, like, sending me links (to stories on the Internet), and I was, like, `Stop sending me this crap!' I don't want to see it. I live my life, I am me. I don't want to read about me, whether it's true or not."
Jones also feels more comfortable onstage, these days. She doesn't get down on herself is she messes up a lyric, she says.
"I used to get so bent out of shape about little things, and I'd get so nervous and awkward, and the littlest thing could turn my show into hell for me, just inside my own head," she says. "But now it's fun, just because I'm having fun. Thank God! It's about time."
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