Nine-time Grammy award winner Norah Jones is back with her sixth album ‘Day Breaks’.
After forays into pop and folk, it marks Jones’ long-awaited return to piano-based jazz. She says it’s been awhile since she’s written songs using the instrument she was trained on.
“I think I wrote my first two songs on piano when I was in high school and I hated them. I mean they were just so cheesy and piano-y and I don’t know, it became hard for me to want to write music after that. And then when I moved to New York when I was 20, I got into the song-writing scene and that kind of inspired me… I also didn’t have a piano in my tiny apartment, so I picked up a guitar and I knew like four or five chords and I wrote ‘Come Away with Me’.”
Jones was in her early twenties when she recorded her hit debut album ‘Come Away With Me’. She is now “37 and a mother-of-two“http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/magazine-feature/7525632/norah-jones-new-album-day-breaks, and, according to critics, this new record features added layers of maturity, complexity and experimentation.
It also reflects her jazz training with more challenging arrangements and an all-star band of players, including saxophonist Wayne Shorter.
“I feel like I’ve done some new things on this record that I’ve never really experimented before like, you know, just listening to Les McCann and a lot of this stuff from the sixties and seventies, the really good soul, jazz stuff. Playing a lot harder. I didn’t really play like that before, it’s been fun to kind of dig in more on piano and that’s what I’ve been doing.”
Norah Jones’ ‘Day Breaks’ debuted at Number Two on the US Billboard 200.
She’s touring the US and Europe this autumn and will be performing in Japan next April.
