Norah Jones Branches Out Musically on 'The Fall'

Posted on Dec 7th 2009 2:30PM by Steve Baltin
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Before making her new record, 'The Fall,' Norah Jones split up with her longtime boyfriend, Lee Alexander, who also happened to be her bassist and chief musical collaborator. While she has said the two are still friends and they hope to work together again at some point, it presented Jones with a perfect opportunity to stretch out musically.

"I wasn't planning on my next record being anything different necessarily," she tells Spinner. "But then it became obvious it was time to try new things." The song that led her to realize this album wasn't meant to be another piano-based collection and should be heavier on guitars was ironically one she first took the guitars out of.

"The first song that kind of sounded different was 'Chasing Pirates.' It wasn't because of guitars at all; it's because I took the guitar out of the mix, and the keyboard sound and the interesting drum groove for me was pretty different," she says. "It was the first song that made me think, 'Oh, this is cool. Maybe some of the other songs can go in a different direction like this.' At that point, I was working at home with people I worked with before and that's when I decided to find a producer outside of my circles to help me bring all this stuff together."

Without divulging names, Jones tells Spinner that finding the right producer was difficult. "I had gone through a lot of producers already, worked with one, talked with several and it just wasn't working out. I was pretty frustrated," she says. Then Tom Waits' 'Mule Variations' came to the rescue. "I thought, 'What I really want is a great engineer to get the sounds the way I want them. So I was kind of looking at ['Mule Variations'] for an engineer."

That's how she found her producer, Jacquire King, who engineered parts of 'Mule Variations' and has worked with Kings of Leon and Modest Mouse, among others. "He came to New York and we got together in the studio for one day just to see what would happen and it just worked out. It was great," she says. "He's a really nice, normal person. He's not some crazy producer guy."

After taking a few years away and going through all these personal and musical changes, what did Jones learn from making 'The Fall'? "The main thing that I learned is I'm adaptable," she says, which was a big lesson because she admits she was "a little nervous" about working with new people.

Ultimately, Jones says she is thrilled by the end result. "I was really proud of the group of my songs," she says. "I think they're my strongest. I only started writing really when I moved to New York at 20 and I just feel like I can call myself a songwriter now."