Feels Like Home

2004 release, the sophomore album from Jazz/Pop singer/songwriter Norah Jones. Feels Like Home sold a million copies in the first week of its U.S. release, the first album to do so since Eminem's The Eminem Show (2002) and it was the second best-selling album of 2004, with about four million copies sold in U.S. alone.

Norah Jones blew everybody away with her jazzy, country-tinged, Grammy-winning debut CD, Come Away with Me. On this recording, Jones doesn't mess with her trademark formula. Under Arif Mardin's cozy coproduction, Jones is supported by her writing partners, her Handsome Band, and some special guests (country legend Dolly Parton, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson of the Band, and jazz drummer Brian Blade, to name a few). Jones's Texas-twanged vocals and her sparse acoustic and electric Wurlitzer piano lines enliven the CD's 13 tracks, from the light and lively single "Sunrise" to Tom Waits's "The Long Way Home" and the bouncy duet with Parton, "Creepin' In." Jones's soul-baring piano/vocal rendition of Duke Ellington's "Melancholia," retitled "Don't Miss You at All," proves she's a true Blue Note artist with unlimited potential. --Eugene Holley Jr.