Know How

Four months ago, Norah Jones went into the office of Bruce Lundvall, the president of Blue Note Records, and asked of him something no musician has ever asked of a record-label boss.

"Haven't I sold enough records yet?" she wondered. She was tired, cranky, verging on burnout. Twelve-hour days spent giving interviews to the foreign press will do that to a person. Promotional appearances, dispiriting meet-and-greets, will do that to a person. Being a Top 10 artist with a platinum album will do that to a person, particularly when that person is 23 and never expected to find herself atop the pops.

All Jones wanted was for Lundvall and the label to cut her some slack. No more press, no more selling. All she wanted to do was play, let her music answer any questions. All she wanted then, and now, was to be left alone.

Lundvall likes to tell the story about the day Jones made the request, because it's so unfathomable to him that a musician would want to stop selling albums. One can only imagine his expression when he said he couldn't very well mount a publicity campaign telling people to stop buying her album.

"I just don't want to be burned out," she told him. "I want a career, and people might get tired of me."

Lundvall cannot imagine such a thing. So far, the sales charts have proved him right.

At the end of February, Blue Note Records released Jones' Come Away With Me, on which she sings like an angel and plays piano as though her fingertips were feathers. The album is neither jazz nor pop but somewhere in the ethereal in-between, and it has sold beyond anyone's expectations, especially Jones' and Lundvall's.

Come Away With Me, buoyed by the single "Don't Know Why," currently sits at the No. 6 position on the BillboardHot 200 chart. Each week, with rare exception, the album floats higher and higher toward the top of the charts. Two weeks ago, according to figures provided by Nielsen SoundScan, Blue Note sold 72,636 copies of Come Away With Me; a week later, 74,835 copies. As of last week, Come Away With Me has sold 1,113,195 copies in the United States; foreign sales more than double that figure.

"It's staggering," says an executive at another label. "It could be the biggest-selling jazz album in the last God-knows-how-long. This proves you can't stop a hit album. And it makes me believe."

Wait, wait, wait. Hold up a second. Rewind the tape. Stop right there: August 29, 2001. That was the day Norah Jones gave only her second interview, to the Pitch's sister paper, the Dallas Observer. The conversation almost didn't happen; that Wednesday was shaping up to be one hell of a day. First, Jones woke up to find out that the talent booker from The Late Show With David Lettermanhad contacted Blue Note to see if she was available to perform on that night's show. She was -- hell yeah, she was -- but it didn't happen; someone else got the slot. Fine, whatever. Besides, Jones had other things to worry about: That afternoon, she was hand-delivering the finished copy of Come Away With Meto Bruce Lundvall.

"Hopefully, he'll like it. I know he will, but if he doesn't, then I do, so it doesn't really matter," she said then. "I mean, it matters that he likes it, but I feel 100 percent about it this time, so I'm pretty confident that if he doesn't like it, I don't belong here."

A little later that day, Lundvall hopped on the phone to insist he was in this for the long haul, that he didn't expect Jones to sell a million records. "I have to be realistic," he said a year ago. "We're not saying we'll have a platinum record. If the world's right and the music breaks through the crap we have to go through in this business, things on this record will catch on at radio, but it's not about that."

Today, it is. Good God, it's allabout that.

At this very moment, Jones is a quiet pop star, a woman on the verge of staggering fame. She never planned it, never expected it, never even wanted it. But there it is nonetheless, almost despite her every action. Norah Jones decides what she will and will not do to sell her album, and usually she decides not to do something. The fact is, she could have sold more copies of Come Away With Me had she chosen to accept her fate as a pop star. But as all those connected with Jones -- Lundvall, her manager, her booking agent, her producer, her publicist, the label's marketing director -- will tell you, Jones is as stubborn as she is savvy. She will not acquiesce to the machine; she will not bend, for fear of breaking.

"In her naïve statement [about wanting to stop selling albums], there's a great deal of homespun intelligence," says Steve Macklam, Jones' manager since February. "It's like, be careful what you ask for. If everything you do on your first record lifts the bar and sets such high expectations, there's the danger people will have had enough or feel let down when the next record comes out. If people buy 3.5 million copies of the album, glory hallelujah, but the intention is just to put out a good record and to not sell it as the Second Coming."