Watch The Video For Norah Jones’ ‘To Live’ From New Album ‘Pick Me Up Off The Floor’
Released through the legendary Blue Note imprint, Jones’ new album is out now.
Norah Jones has shared the video for ‘To Live’, from her new album, Pick Me Up Off The Floor. You can check it out below.
Jones’ seventh solo studio album Pick Me Up Off The Floor, is out now on Blue Note Records. The album features collaborators including Jeff Tweedy and Brian Blade on a set of 11 new songs written or co-written by Jones that speak deeply to the moment. You can also in to ABC’s Good Morning America on Tuesday, 16 June to hear Jones perform the uplifting ‘To Live’.
Jones’ much-loved weekly livestream performances on her Facebook page have been bringing solace and joy to her fans and herself alike, as she has performed tributes to Willie Nelson, John Prine, Ravi Shankar, and George Floyd, and played requests for covers and originals from across her catalogue.
The New Yorker took notice, writing “The live-at-home approach suits Jones ideally. It foregrounds her directness and natural musicianship, reminding us (as if we could have forgotten) that she is a truly great singer and a stylish pianist… The music is what Jones’s music has been all along: standards, in the broadest sense, and originals akin to the standards, all founded on her economical, artful piano playing and her extraordinary voice.”
Jones didn’t mean to make another album. After she finished touring 2016’s Day Breaks — her beloved return to piano-based jazz — she walked away from the well-worn album cycle grind and into an unfamiliar territory without boundaries: a series of short sessions with an ever-changing array of collaborators resulting in a diverse stream of singles (with Mavis Staples, Rodrigo Amarante, Thomas Bartlett, Tarriona Tank Ball, and more). But then slowly but surely, the session songs Jones hadn’t released congealed into that very thing she’d meant to avoid — an album.
“Every session I’ve done, there’ve been extra songs I didn’t release, and they’ve sort of been collecting for the last two years,” says Jones. “I became really enamored with them, having the rough mixes on my phone, listening while I walk the dog. The songs stayed stuck in my head and I realized that they had this surreal thread running through them. It feels like a fever dream taking place somewhere between God, the Devil, the heart, the Country, the planet, and me.”
Sure enough, just as this set of songs blurs sonic colors (blues, soul, Americana, and various shades of jazz) it also swirls the personal and political, specific pain and societal trauma, into one mercurial body. Even the album title’s meaning seems to shift. The words “Pick Me Up Off the Floor” at times play as a plea for outside intervention, but in other moments the phrase feels like a bootstraps-style statement of purpose.
“Living in this country — this world — the last few years, I think there’s an underlying sense of, ‘Lift me up. Let’s get up out of this mess and try to figure some things out,'” says Jones. “If there’s a darkness to this album, it’s not meant to be an impending sense of doom, if feels more like a human longing for connection. Some of the songs that are personal also apply to the larger issues we’re all facing. And some of the songs that are about very specific larger things also feel quite personal.”
“I don’t know if I was just in a zone or if this process turned it on, but I’ve felt more creative in the last year than I ever have,” says Jones. By completely rethinking the way she made music, Jones discovered a new wellspring of inspiration, with the fortunate if unexpected result of making an album of tremendous depth and beauty that she was not trying to make.
Pick Me Up Off The Floor is out now and can be bought here.
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