Norah Jones and Jesse Harris totally deserve all those Grammies for Don't Know Why

I was with my cousin Carrie in her car driving through her suburban town outside Hartford, CT the first time I heard Don't Know Why. It jumped right out at me, and not just because it was the first song we'd heard that day not from a kids' album (Carrie has three young sons.) The tune was just unbelievably compelling on that very first listen. Hooky, you might say. That month a lot of other people were having that same reaction, vaulting Norah into instant stardom and presumably setting up Jesse Harris financially lo unto his children's children. Just in case you haven't been in a Starbucks in the last five years:

Don't Know Why

I've never met Jesse Harris or Norah Jones, but we have some friends in common, we've jammed in some of the same apartments, played some of the same small NYC stages. Normally I'd resent their overnight success, but Don't Know Why is one of those rare meritocratic sensations, like Gnarls Barkley or Buena Vista Social Club - a meme that people eagerly spread around to their friends because it's given them genuine pleasure. Norah's debut was on Blue Note, not exactly a marketing juggernaut, and while she's easy on the eyes and everything, it's refreshing how little advertising and packaging was behind her sudden explosion into popular consciousness.

My sensibilities don't line up with Norah Jones et al, exactly - I like my music a lot more ornery - but we're exploring some overlapping territory. Norah is a conservatory-trained jazz pianist, while Jesse H is a guitar-strumming folky in the Joni Mitchell school. I think their idea of fusing the two genres and sprinkling country on top is a good way forward. Most commercially released music in America is aimed at teenagers, and there's a yawning vacuum among people like my cousin, adults with jobs and kids who are happy to buy CDs if the music is played well on acoustic instruments and the songs are about something other than adolescent angst. It's easy to make fun of Norah's comfy, unchallenging vibe, but she and her posse are earnestly trying to make well-crafted music that makes people like me and my cousin feel good, and who could possibly fault them for that? That said, rarely is Norah's music as compelling as Don't Know Why, and I haven't heard anything else of Jesse Harris' that particularly excites me. So why is that song such a devastatingly effective meme? Why am I always glad to hear it when it appears in the muzak rotation, or at Starbucks, or at brunch, or anywhere my fellow caucasians are to be found?

First of all, it isn't the lyrics. Cole Porter, Jesse Harris is not. The delivery is certainly a factor - Norah has one of the great sexy microphone voices of her generation. The production, mixing etc sounds lovely, but all of Norah's songs are recorded well. What really makes the tune so special is the wistfully descending chromatic guitar line under the verses. It's a great hook, on a level with Sir Paul McCartney's best stuff - in fact it uses the same V/V to IV to I cadence at the end that Blackbird does. Here's the lick, with the rhythm simplified:

This phrase is the heart and soul of the song, and it works with the vocal line beautifully. After a variation on the lick introduces the tune, Norah sings "I" on the root of the key a beat early, as a pickup, and when the downbeat of the first verse arrives, surprise! It's a rest, a pause. The next word, "waited", starts on the next eighth note, an extremely hip bit of bebop syncopation. That first syllable comes out all the way up on the major seventh of the chord, an extremely large intervallic jump onto what has historically been considered to be a tense and unstable tone. From that first jolt of tension, the rest of the phrase gently unwinds - the chords following an agreeable ragtime progression, the guitar climbing down each step of the chromatic ladder, Norah wafting down after it on the major pentatonic, until it all comes to rest on the root chord on "didn't come." Over and over, there's the initial surprise - the fakeout on the downbeat, the yawning major seventh - and then the reassuring restoration of peace and order as the progression works its way around.

What Jesse and Norah are trying to tell you is, after a shock, there can be resolution, an explanation, a settling. Maybe Norah's other material doesn't have the same effect on people because there's too much reassurance, not enough conflict. Her material tends not to include much dissonance or complex rhythm, so there's no tension to build a resolution out of. If no questions are being posed, there can't be satisfying answers either. Don't Know Why poses a question right in the title, and you get to hear the musical question answered over and over, with the occasional unobtrusive bridge or piano solo as a palate-cleanser between courses.

Aside from Don't Know Why, I have three favorite Norah recordings. One is the last track on her second album:

I Don't Miss You At All

It's a solo piano and voice rendition of a Duke Ellington tune, Melancholia, that Norah wrote some appropriately melancholy lyrics for. Ellington tunes kill me for their sense of push and pull, the occasional dark harmonic touch in an otherwise sunny pop song or a raw wailing muted trombone over a lush reed background. Even with Norah's mellifluous delivery, the song has gravitas. I'd love to hear her tackle more Ellington and Strayhorn tunes. And she should try some Wayne Shorter, too, I bet that'd sound great.

The second crucial Norah track is a duet she did with Willie Nelson, from the live album Willie Nelson And Friends called Wurlitzer Prize. I can't for the life of me find it on iTunes anymore - they have her singing the song solo, but you need to hear it with Willie to get the full effect. Willie is another cat who knows how to write an achingly sad song with a pretty surface - this is, after all, the man who wrote Crazy (Patsy Cline, not Gnarls Barkley) - and this tune is similarly depressive: "They ought to give me the Wurlitzer Prize for all the silver that I let slide down the slide, playin' those songs so blue/to help me remember you, 'cause I don't want to get over you." Imagine if Norah's crew could write lyrics like that? And Willie's ganja-cured croak makes a perfect foil for Norah's velvety purr, for the same reason Ella and Louis sounded so good together. I hope Norah cuts some tracks with Tom Waits someday, or Thom Yorke, or Ghostface Killa.

That last suggestion is for real. My third crucial Norah tune is by OutKast:

Take Off Your Cool

No joke, girlfriend does a guest vocal on Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. This seemingly inoffensive coffeeshop singer has made her way onto hip-hop's answer to the White Album. The song itself isn't anything special - Norah and André 3000 crooning an eccentric minute-and-a-half-long R&B ballad over a single acoustic guitar - until you take it in context, and then it kind of freaks me out, thinking of Ravi Shankar's globehopping DNA at work in her. And she was hip to the Jesse Harris lick! I say, you go, Norah Jones.

© ethan hein 2007 | back to memebase | back to top