Canter Bridge

Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at www.amazon.com.

I tried to stay off the Norah Jones bandwagon, honest I did.

Down in Costa Rica, trying to live a humble honest-man’s life, feeling deeply for the Latin musicians who were so very, very good but never had a chance to be heard by the big-spending millions because they were three yards off the marketing juggernaut’s path …

Norah, I says to myself, Norah doesn’t need one more gringo buyin’ her CDs, one more nameless addition to the anonymous pile of her fans.

Just about then the vague fear of losing out on something genuinely big set in. I responded prudently and did the only thing a ‘spectable man could do: I borrowed a friend’s copy of Come Away with Me and played it while the family slept in the Toyota Landcruiser on the way back from a long, lovely weekend in Savegre, where trout streams pound down out of the cloud-forested mountains, dogs run to their dog hearts’ delight, and stressed out educators stare out at the blue sky and green hills and wonder about things.

Norah didn’t click with me on that low-volume car ride and I almost sensed a quick triumph. But she was just gettin’ started.

Now, five years and countless listenings later, I come again under the spell of this effortlessly laid-back singer’s song. It is so very, very sweet.

The disk opens with Norah’s relentlessly enigmatic ‘Don’t Know Why’, a look-back to what might have been. This notion falls smack dab in the center of Blues Cosmology, but somehow rarely gets sung quite so persuasively. ‘I left you by the house of fun, I don’t know why I didn’t come’, she explains. The ‘what if’ question will endure a lifetime:

Out across the endless sea
I would die in ecstasy
But I’ll be a bag of bones
Driving down the road alone

My heart is drenched in wine
But you’ll be on my mind
Forever.

Norah didn’t write these words. Her task is simply to turn them into poignant sound that catches a snag on the heart’s doorknob and hangs there as long as memory lingers.

Yet she is no one-note crooner. From the über-sultry ‘Turn Me On’, to the tango-esque (yes, indeed) ‘I’ve Got to See You Again’, Norah simply convinces her listener that she’s articulating the sentiment for the very first time.

Lines on your face don’t bother me
Down in my chair where you dance over me
I can’t help myself
I’ve got to see you again

Late in the night when I’m all alone
And I look at the clock and I know you’re not home
I can’t help myself
I’ve got to see you again
I could almost go there
Just to watch you be seen
I could almost go there
Just to live in a dream

Come to think of it, the doorknob has snagged itself more than one memory, this time of a weathered face the seeing of which marked a point of no turning back. Norah looks too young to know about such moments, but truth is in the telling. She tells it well.

Norah has not followed this break-out CD with promiscuous releases.

Rather, she’s chosen to let us savour, return again, remember with her. Just like she sings.

Mind the door knob.