The princess and the punk

Feels Like Home, Norah Jones, Blue Note/EMI *** There’s a becoming modesty to the presentation of 24-year-old sensation Norah Jones’s second album. Her 2002 debut, Come Away with Me, may have sold some 20 million copies wordlwide, she may have won eight Grammies for it, and she may be an overnight superstar, but on the liner notes front cover, she’s pictured in profile, looking almost shyly down; and on the back there’s a photo of the band — which seems to be taped on, almost as an afterthought — in which Jones is unobtrusively in the background. And there is a quiet mellowness toFeels Like Home, although it represents in some ways a departure from the mostly jazzy Come Away With Me. Although Jones studied jazz piano, and Blue Note is famously a jazz label, there’s as much Nashville as New Orleans in the 13 songs here. That’s most evident in the elevation of guitar here. Jone’s piano work, dominant in her debut, takes a back seat, except for the finale, Don’t Miss You at All, a lovely reworking of Duke Ellington’s classic Melancholia, with lyrics by Jones added. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Jones also has a roster of high-profile guests, Creepin’ In is a funny, high-spirited and surprising duet with country diva Dolly Parton, while members of The Band, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson, help out on What Am I To You? Hudson also pitches in on accordion for a bluesy version of Townes van Zandt’s Be Here to Love Me. And, although Jones herself penned about half the tracks, there’s also a bare bones, countrified rendering of a Tom Waits song, The Long Way Home. Some critics have dismissed Jones as little more than sophisticated Muzak, easy listening for troubled times, unchallenging. And it’s true that her work is mellow, her lovely, smoky voice deceptively smooth. But there’s a subtle rawness aching to emerge, a willingness to experiment with form and genre, a hidden power that’s seductive and which hints at even better things to come. America’s Sweetheart, Courtney Love, Virgin **1/2 If Norah Jones is mellow, sweetly shy, innocent, Courtney Love is her antithesis. The frontwoman of Hole, widow of rock self-martyr Kurt Cobain, erstwhile actress and in your face celebrity is the essence of bad girl, punk personified. Sweet she ain’t. Mellow? Anything but. Her first solo album, the ironically titled America’s Sweetheart (the CD notes feature Vargas-like drawings of a semi-nude Love sporting angel’s wings), is a piece of raw rage, in which the crazy mosaic of her life — her husband’s suicide, her arrest for drugs, her child-custody battle — are on open parade in song after song. The 12 tracks come at us like an assault, Love declaring her unrepentant fondness for drugs and for cheap sex (“give me white boy skinny/ give me big black men,” she declares in I’ll Do Anything). And her unrelieved anger against Cobain comes through frequently in such songs as Hello. As usual, Love’s voice is a wild rasp, the songs fast, blistering and enraged, the lyrics sharp, painful, threatening. The best song on the album is Sunset Strip, which, compared to the constant guitar/vocal attack elsewhere, is comparatively melodic and restrained, and quite sharp. This sort of naked aggression is not, it need hardly be said, for every taste. But Love’s fans, and even some others, will find in its open neediness a potent alternative to the anodyne pop that dominates airwaves. An aesthetic complaint: Why do CD producers give us album notes in colours that make them virtually unreadable? The Norah Jones album is in a sort of dead pumpkin hue, with the lyrics and notes in a small, fancy font. But that eyestrain is nothing compared to America’s Sweetheart; bubble-gum pink pages with lyrics so teeny-tiny you need a magnifying glass to make them out at all. What’s the point?

Photo Credit: norahjones.com