The Singles Jukebox

Another kind of nostalgia…

[Video][Website]
[5.43]

Thomas Inskeep: I didn’t understand what Jones was doing, going in a “pop” direction on her last album. What she does best, and in my view has always done best, is country-tinged jazz (and jazz-tinged country, cf. the Little Willies), and she’s back to it here. “Carry On” moves at a slow waltz tempo that reminds me of nothing so much as Dolly Parton and Ricky Van Shelton’s “Rockin’ Years.” She’s returned to composing on the piano, and it suits her. This is stripped-down Jones: piano, organ, softly-brushed drums, and voice, and it works expertly.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: “Come Away With Me,” trying to be “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” trying to be gospel.
[5]

Katie Gill: Bringing in a gospel choir is the laziest way to give your white-bread pop song “soul,” but these are gospel stylings. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about said stylings, but I can’t deny that they made me give Norah Jones my full attention, a sentence that I haven’t said in a good 10 years.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: The songwriting is as lean as Hank Williams’ but without the wit or fear. She’s returned to making wallpaper music for people who want the patina of age without the drawn blood or resigned damnation that made it live in the first place.
[5]

Cassy Gress: I was 20 when “Don’t Know Why” came out, and I remember being thoroughly bored with its beige jazz cafe-ness. This is fundamentally a lot like her first hit, except compositionally much less varied and with some organ thrown in to give it a bit of soul, and yet somehow I find it more warm and soothing. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting old.
[5]

Tim de Reuse: In the early-mid-aughts my mother began to entertain glimpses into the alternate universe where she’d become a jazz pianist instead of a tenure-chasing academic. As a result, Come Away With Me played in my house at all hours of the afternoon, both as rendered by Norah Jones herself in-studio and as rendered by my mother at an upright piano, studiously crawling her way through the sheet music. Hearing someone other than Norah Jones sing through Norah Jones brings up interesting angle with which to interpret her formerly explosive popularity: there is a Paul Simonian friendly straightforwardness to her songwriting that makes her preternaturally easy to sing along with. Carry On exemplifies these qualities in a way that her genre-hopping, key-changing material from the turn of the decade hasn’t. She uses a chord progression from deep in the established canon of Western popular music, simply realized lyrics that carry a vague melancholy, and sparse instrumentation that cradles her voice, the unambiguous star of the show. But she never sounds like she’s showing off her technical chops or trying to dazzle by reaching to the edges of her abilities; it’s accessible and inviting to a listener who doesn’t know a damn thing about singing or jazz or gospel or melody. Even by these standards she’s done better — this particular cut is so short and underdeveloped it feels like a sketch recorded to fill out an album’s running length — but she’s still made something soothing and catchy that cares not so much about being musically ambitious but cares a lot about being easy to engage with.
[7]

Alfred Soto: I swear she’s got a song for the next Grammys ceremony, but all I hear is a low hiss from my speakers and a piano fingered as if six inches of dust had settled over the keys.
[4]