Norah Jones new album produced by Leon Michels

 Norah Jones released her latest album Visions last week. It's produced and co-written with Leon Michels, of the Dapkings/El Michels Affair. I came across a video of it and gotta say, I dig it a lot. Great raw sound with soulful vocal harmonies.

If you haven't thought about Norah Jones since 2003 when she had her breakout hit Don't Know Why, this is a bit different. I remember that album seemed to be in the cd player of every cafe in Auckland. 

LA Times: 'Since then, Jones has used her talent and her curiosity — not to mention the resources she enjoys as one of the last success stories of the CD era — to pursue all kinds of projects, including collaborations with Willie Nelson, Danger Mouse and Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong; a scrappy country trio called Puss N Boots; a podcast in which she jams with friends like Dave Grohl and Mavis Staples; even a foray into acting with her role in Wong Kar-wai’s 2007 film “My Blueberry Nights.”

Leon Michels told Everything Jazz: “I met Norah probably somewhere around 2016 or 2017. She was working on a record and called Dave Guy and me to do horns for [it]. That’s how we met. She occasionally called us to do the horns whenever she needed them. Then she moved up to Hudson [Valley] during the pandemic, and I lived upstate. We just started talking at one point. It was the pandemic, so we hadn’t gotten to anybody then. When it loosened up, she came over, and we just jammed.”

“There wasn’t a concept. I think [the songs] came together like halfway through the record. When we started, we were just writing. Maybe Norah had a different idea, but in my head, I was like, ‘Oh, we’re just making these songwriting demos,’ so I would put one mic on the drums and haphazardly one mic on the piano, but a lot of those like, quote-unquote demos just became the recordings.”

“I think her songwriting was very open, and a lot of the songs came together really quickly. [Norah] would come over and have like these loose ideas. She would come over while the kids were at school, so from 10 am to 3 pm, and we would usually knock out a song within that timeframe.” 

The video above gives you a look into that process. 

LA Times: “In the beginning it was pretty ratty-sounding,” Michels said of the recording process. “I was thinking to myself, OK, cool, eventually we’ll call in players and do really clean versions, which we tried a couple of times.” He laughed. “Every time, Norah was like, ‘This is not better.’ So a lot of the songs that made the record are just our demos.”

From Grammys.com: 'When Jones had a shred of an idea — a few lyrics, a sketch of a melody — she would sit at a piano or guitar, Michels would get behind the kit, and they'd jam it out, garage band-style.

From there, the collaborators would add "a ton of harmonies" as well as bass, guitar, horns, organ, or whatever else would elevate the songs.

"The live energy you feel on those recordings is from me and him playing drums and piano or guitar," Jones says, "and just having fun."

This is the second time she's worked with Michels, the first was on her 2021 holiday album.

LA Times Q&A:

What was on your mind when you were writing the songs on “Visions”? They talk about home and solitude but also about yearning for freedom.

Norah Jones: I’m not sure. I don’t really know until things are out that I was feeling a certain way. I was just mom-ing around, you know? Same juggle as always: working, hanging with the kids, figuring out after-school activities.

Do you carve out time from your home life to write songs?

I’ve never been good at that. I’m more likely to pick up a melody that’s bouncing around my brain and record it real quick so I don’t forget it. Of course, there’s no time when your mind can be quiet because there’s always somebody asking a question. So it really happens in the bathtub when the door’s locked. A lot of my voice memos have the bath running in the background.

You’re pro-bath.

There’s a really beautiful Sylvia Plath [line] about how a hot bath can fix just about everything. I’m on board with that notion.