Norah Jones Branches Out Musically on 'The Fall'
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
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