Norah Jones – Little Broken Hearts

Grammy winner Norah Jones’ fifth studio album reissued!

Celebrating a decade of Jones’ exquisite pop experiement with Daner Mouse!

“The second essential record of Norah Jones’ career.” — SPIN

“… Jones fits all of this smart material to perfection, marking her second decade as a star while making her sound cooler and more unflappably sophisticated than ever.” — NPR Music

A decade ago, Norah Jones defied expectations with her fifth studio album Little Broken Hearts, a striking collaboration with the producer Danger Mouse (a.k.a. Brian Burton) that arrived 10 years after her debut Come Away With Me prompting SPIN to call it “the second essential record of Norah Jones’ career.”

Released in 2012, Little Broken Hearts was a fascinating and unexpected step in Jones’ artistic evolution. Together she and Burton married their highly personal styles to create an entirely new sound. Created in the aftermath of a breakup, the album was a tour of stunningly nuanced environments. Twelve darkly luminous songs. Twelve little broken hearts. Each an exploration of wounded emotions from various perspectives that invariably led to a place of beauty and uplift.

While some tracks sounded like classic Norah Jones-such as the contemplative opener “Good Morning” — most explored rhythms, textures, and themes far from her comfort zone from the high-energy groove of “Say Goodbye” and the buoyant hooks of “Happy Pills” to the impressionistic dream-sequence reflections of “After The Fall” and the chilling murder ballad “Miriam.”

“Ten years later, these are still some of my favorite songs in my catalog to play live, no matter the instrumentation or arrangement, they just feel special,” says Jones. “And the way this album sounds makes my ears so happy. I’m incredibly thankful to Danger Mouse for letting me explore with him and opening up my world to a new way of doing things that continues to inspire and influence me.”

In a first for her, Jones arrived to the studio empty-handed — no tunes, no arrangements, just a few ideas in a notebook. The songs were all built from the ground up with Jones and Burton sharing all the songwriting credits and performing the majority of the instrumental parts; Jones on piano, keyboards, bass, and guitar, and Burton contributing drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, and string arrangements. The process was a complete change for Jones, but once they started it didn’t take long for her to warm to the challenges of creating on the fly using whatever resources she and Burton had between them. (Later, they brought in a band-including drummer Joey Waronker, bassist Gus Seyffert, and guitarist Blake Mills-to bolster many of the tracks.)

“I didn’t expect all the lyrics to tie in so well, especially since we wrote in such a spontaneous way,” Jones said at the time. “It turns out to be kind of a story. It has these different dimensions, things sneak up on you. And even though the record has all these cool sounds and interesting grooves that are Brian’s signature, mostly I’m proud of our writing together. The songs themselves.”

Format : Vinyl Record

1 Lp