The song was the Guns N’ Roses power ballad “Patience”: “Take it slow, things’ll be just fine . . .” (The video has been viewed more than four million times.) She posted a couple of videos of herself on guitar, doing songs from her rock band Puss N Boots. The camera showed her sitting at an upright piano in a plain white room a man in a plaid flannel shirt sat on a couch nearby, playing a lap steel guitar.
Jones posted her first at-home video the next week. And yet the video put her music-again-in the easy-listening category, making it an accessory to jazz-and-cocktails style. Posted on YouTube on March 13th, the video captured the easy socializing that the coronavirus pandemic had done away with: it shows an at-home drinks party, a fantasia of food, wine, friendship, and song, with Jones playing an upright piano and Tweedy strumming an acoustic guitar. Twenty years after she broke in at the Living Room, on the Lower East Side, and eighteen years after her first record, “Come Away with Me,” won five Grammy Awards and made her famous at age twenty-three, Jones’s onscreen living room has become a refuge from her celebrity, an ill-lit space where she is drawing deeply from the home piano, as if returning to the source.Īs quarantine began, Jones had recently finished recording her seventh studio record, “Pick Me Up Off the Floor.” Blue Note Records had produced a lavish video for “ I’m Alive,” a song that Jones co-wrote with Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco. But they represent a distinct moment in her career. Compared with most, Jones’s at-home performances have been modest: small batches of covers and requests, played before a propped-up phone. With the city reopening, three months of stay-at-home orders are suddenly past, and so, it might seem, are the at-home concerts: the ensemble collaborations across Zoom, the marathons of Beethoven and Satie, the crude videos offered by classic rockers as palliatives for restive audiences. Her performance soon drew attention on Facebook and YouTube, where she has been posting videos and playing short concerts since March. In her handling, the piece was a lamentation.
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The sequence of minor chords was Duke Ellington’s “Fleurette Africaine,” composed for a jazz festival in Senegal in the early sixties, when the movements for national independence in Africa were full of hope and strife. New Yorkers were marching, to protest the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, and Jones fit the music to the moment. She was wearing a striped dress, hoop earrings, and a dark cap of the kind sold in the corner groceries of Brooklyn. Last Thursday afternoon, Norah Jones took a seat at a piano in her home and played a sequence of minor chords, humming as she did.
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