Ravinia 2024 Issue 2

WE MEET AGAIN EARLIER THIS YEAR, Norah Jones achieved yet another milestone in her estimable more-than- 20-year career: She replaced herself at the top of Billboard ’s Contemporary Jazz chart. Her most recent album, Visions , debuted at No. 1. At No. 2 was her astonishing 2002 debut, Come Away With Me, which, as of this writing, has charted for 378 weeks, 335 of them in the top spot. The following week, the two albums switched posi- tions, with Come Away With Me returning to No. 1 Visions was Jones’s fourth No. 1 on the Billboard chart, following Come Away With Me , 2020’s Pick Me Up Off the Floor and the live album …’Til We Meet Again a year later. Seven of her albums have charted in the top 10. The last time Norah Jones played Ravinia— where the Visions tour brings her on July 14—was in 2003 on the heels of her Grammy-palooza that was Come Away With Me , which earned eight awards, including Album of the Year. Jones, the rising star, beat out Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising , as well as al- bums by the Dixie Chicks, Eminem, and Nelly. She earned five of those statuettes, including Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, as well as Record of the Year with “Don’t Know Why.” A photo of Jones struggling to hold all of her Gram- mys in her arms went 2003’s version of viral. Said Jones that night of glittering prizes, “Ca- reer-wise, this is probably the biggest thing I’ll ever do.” She later told Katie Couric on 60 Minutes , “I feel like I went to somebody else’s birthday party, and I ate all their cake.” The album has sold nearly 30 million (and counting) copies. Rolling Stone ranked it among its top 100 albums of the decade: “She sings in an earthy growl that can send chills, or a conspiratorial whisper that suggests she’s sharing sworn secrets, or a weary sigh that exudes the kind of quiet, easygoing intimacy that doesn’t come around in songs too much anymore.” So, what’s she been up to since her last visit to Ravinia? Musically, she has released eight addition- al solo albums, including a Grammy-nominated Christmas album (she’s received 19 Grammy nomi- nations in all), a live album, and seven collaborative projects, including Rome with Danger Mouse and the live tribute album Here We Go Again: Celebrat- ing the Genius of Ray Charles , which was spear- headed by Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis and earned her another Grammy. The song “Sunrise” from her second album, Feels Like Home , brought her more Grammy love as the Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. She hasn’t been resting on her considerable lau- rels is our point, but it’s hard to keep up with all the Joneses. In 2008, in perhaps a kick against what Joni Mitchell called “the star-maker machinery behind the popular song,” she stepped away from the piano, picked up her guitar, put on a blonde wig, donned some Blade Runner- style makeup, and formed a side project, El Madmo under the stage alias Maddie. In March 2020, during the pandemic, Jones debuted a series of at-home concerts on YouTube. The first was viewed more than four million times. The New Yorker marked Jones’s long, strange trip: “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 , made her famous at the age of 23, 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.” Two years later, Jones launched a podcast, Norah Jones Is Playing Along , featuring conversations and jams with a wide range of artists, including Jeff Tweedy from Wilco, the legendary Mavis Staples, RAVINIA.ORG  • RAVINIAMAGAZINE 7