Two days after Norah Jones swept last year's Grammys -- her debut, Come Away With Me, beat out Bruce Springsteen's The Rising for Album of the Year and picked up seven other awards -- her boyfriend and bassist, Lee Alexander, received a perplexing wake-up call.

ALEXANDER: "The label put us up at this hotel in Times Square. My friend Jim, who was staying at our apartment in Brooklyn, called and said, 'Um, there's a bunch of people outside.' And he asked if I'd seen the [New York] Post."

JONES: "They printed my address on the cover."

ALEXANDER: "It was like, 'Look at this dump in Brooklyn where the Grammy winner lives!' We called the label and asked if we could stay at the hotel a few days longer."

JONES: "We never went back. We just got a new place in Manhattan. We did go back later to pick up some stuff, and there was a big stack of mail. Most of it was random mail from sweet people. One letter was from a realtor. It said, 'Well, you'll probably want to move now. . . . ' "

Come Away With Me was released in February 2002 on Blue Note Records, a jazz label. The album was not quite jazz -- it was more like jazz-tinged, with obvious country and soul influences as well. The key ingredient was Jones herself, an unknown, immediately riveting twenty-two-year-old with a voice that sounded decades older. Still, nobody -- not the label, not the critics, least of all Jones -- expected the album to be any kind of pop sensation. Though Jones was young and pretty, she would not be promoting her album with Pepsi commercials or fake lesbian kisses. She has a famous father -- the renowned sitar player and Beatles pal Ravi Shankar -- but she barely knew him growing up and declined to talk about him at length when interviewed. Jones says she hoped her album would sell 10,000 copies -- a respectable enough showing to persuade the label to let her make a follow-up. Instead, Come Away With Me has sold 8 million records and at press time is bearing down on its 102nd week on the Billboard charts. Her new album, Feels Like Home, could be even bigger -- it sold more than a million copies in its first week. The last artist to have such a big opening week was 'NSync in 2001.

Now Jones is a household name, but her initial success was driven by little hype and even less radio airplay, and that was for, essentially, one song. A single listen to "Don't Know Why" -- an old demo track that Jones refused to rerecord and initially resisted including on the album -- and you immediately get it, "it" being Jones' appeal. The song is, in effect, an instant standard: lush, romantic, suggestive and sung by Jones as if she's been singing it forever, as if it's a song your grandparents slow-danced to after the liberation of Paris. And, incredibly enough, she sounds natural doing it, wholly avoiding the self-consciously retro contrivances that often result from channeling the sounds of bygone eras.

"Everyone's trying to figure out what she has and do that," says Adam Levy, Jones' guitarist, and possibly the chattiest member of her band. "But it's not like that swing revival. It's not like you can buy a zoot suit and a sax and copy what she does. Her music is an honest amalgam of everything she likes. It's this cocktail of Ray Charles and Etta James, and Bill Evans on piano, and these simple country vocals, the way Loretta Lynn sings, so direct you can't ignore it. You hear all that in her music. And that's just who she is."

Levy, a veteran of the San Francisco jazz scene, met Jones in New York, in 1999, when she had just moved to the city. "Some friends of mine told me they'd met this piano-player kid from Dallas," Levy recalls. "She was just here to -- well, I was gonna say 'fuck around.' She was in New York to do what any nineteen-year-old would do on her summer break. She wasn't even gigging at the time. But I gave her my number and said, 'If you ever need a guitar player, call me.' The first time we played together, we hadn't rehearsed. It was just me and her in this art gallery inside a big Mercedes dealership, near the Lincoln Tunnel. People are dipping celery sticks into spinach dip and sipping champagne out of plastic cups, generally ignoring us, and I'm standing there playing guitar behind Norah and going, 'Whoa. Something really different is going on here.' Those were three blissful hours for me. That gig was some of the best ignored music I've ever made."

Since Jones in no way expected the level of fame she wound up receiving, she's been understandably wary of the pop life. She's also decidedly low-key about Feels Like Home. The album is by no means a radical departure, though it's certainly a more eclectic affair, featuring guest appearances by Levon Helm and Garth Hudson of the Band, as well as Dolly Parton, who joins Jones on a straight-up twang duet, "Creepin' In." Even Tom Waits sent Jones a couple of songs for consideration. Jones was not aware of this fact when she met Waits backstage at a Tibet benefit concert. "He was like, 'Did you get the songs I sent you?' " Jones recalls. "I was like, 'Uh, no. Why would you send me songs? You're Tom Waits.' " For the new album, Jones eventually recorded a pretty hobo ballad by Waits called "The Long Way Home."

"This record is different, which is good, but it's not a heavy-metal record," Jones continues. "I love the last album. I'm glad I did it. But I was ready to move on. It'll be nice to have something else out there. I mean, we did Come Away With Me two years ago. I'm glad people like it, but the success is kind of ridiculous. It doesn't seem real. I signed to Blue Note. I didn't sign with Clive Davis -- not that he would've signed me. But this isn't what I signed up for. I remember we played at this club called the Iron Horse, in Massachusetts, opening for Livingston Taylor. He sold it out two nights in a row. Three hundred people. I remember thinking, 'What a great career!' That was optimistic for me."

Bruce Lundvall, the president of Blue Note, is far less ambivalent about Jones' success. Come Away With Me was the biggest seller in Blue Note's history. "I don't want to compare the new record with the first record," Lundvall says. "That would be foolhardy of me. And we're not hyping it or going after Top Forty radio or any of that business. But," he adds with a chuckle, "expectations are very high."

On one of the coldest afternoons of the new year, Jones and I meet at one of her favorite bars, the Kettle of Fish. It's the sort of Greenwich Village dive where the bartender leaves her post to stare up at a television set as if it is a human face and yell at the football players running across the screen. Christmas-cookie tins have been hung on the wall as decoration, and a couple of guys play darts while their collie pads around the bar's wood floors. Jones is wearing jeans, a tight black shirt, high-heeled purple boots and black cat-eye glasses. Though her onstage look and voice would make you expect a sophisticated chanteuse, Jones in the flesh is very much a twenty-four-year-old. She giggles. She says things like, "I was so excited, I almost peed my pants!" Today, her hair is pulled back and she is leaning forward, blowing into her first-ever hot toddy (she likes) and speaking over Robert Plant, whose voice emanates from the jukebox to warn us all about the imminent arrival of Gollum, the evil one.

Jones tells me about her country side project, which often gigs at the tiny 55 Bar a few doors down. The original concept was an all-Willie Nelson cover band, hence its name (the Little Willies), though now the group has added material by simpatico country artists such as Kris Kristofferson and John Prine. Since forming the band, Jones has met and performed with Nelson himself, who, when informed of the existence of the Little Willies, laughed and told Jones, "Maybe I'll come down one night."

"My grandparents were from Oklahoma, so they loved Willie and Dolly, but I rejected country in junior high," Jones says. "It was Texas. Garth [Brooks] was king. I listened to oldies radio until I was ten. Then from fifth to eighth grade, I listened to Motley Crue, Guns n' Roses, even Warrant. I loved MC Hammer. That was my first concert, in seventh grade. And I really fell in love with Nirvana. That was the first time I played air drums."

Then Jones got into jazz. She attended a performing-arts high school in Dallas and studied jazz piano for two years at the University of North Texas in Denton. Jones was born in New York -- her mother, Sue Jones, met Ravi Shankar while working as a concert promoter -- and she spent the summer after her sophomore year in the city. After landing a few gigs, she decided to stay, earning eight bucks an hour (ten on Sundays) singing and playing piano in Italian restaurants and theater-district lounges.

"I think I moved to town six months before Norah," says Alexander, who'd also been playing jazz in San Francisco. "I knew Adam Levy, and he gave her a list of bass players she might want to use for gigs. Luckily, his list was alphabetical, so I was the first person she called. She was playing a Sunday brunch at the Washington Square Hotel. I wasn't really excited, and I had another gig that morning. I said, 'I'll try to get there by noon,' but I was, like, forty minutes late. They were already playing. I started unpacking my bass, and then I thought, 'Wow. She can actually sing.'"

Jones also reconnected with her old friend Daru Oda, who is now a backup singer in her band. They'd originally met in band camp when they were fifteen. " 'That one time at band camp . . . ' -- I get that a lot," Oda says. "I play the flute. Anyway, I'd just moved from Chicago to New York, and I was walking down Bleecker Street, and there was this girl walking toward me. She was carrying an amp and just staring at me. I was like, 'God, man, these New Yorkers can't keep it to themselves!' I have this complex -- I have one white eyebrow -- and I was like, 'Man, everybody's staring at my eyebrow.' So she stared at me, I glared at her, we passed each other, and then we looked back and were like, 'Hey, it's you.' And we hung out every night for a week."

Jones thought of her piano-bar gigs as four-hour practice sessions. Her sets consisted of tunes by Cole Porter and Gershwin. She was a dedicated jazz nerd and had never thought about attempting rock or pop songs. "I didn't know what the term covers meant," she admits. "We called them standards."

That changed when Jones' friend Jesse Harris, an aspiring singer-songwriter, got a publishing deal with Sony Music. He had to submit new songs to the company, and he decided it might be fun if a girl singer tried out a few of his numbers -- including "Don't Know Why." He persuaded Jones to give it a shot and then began booking gigs at a tiny Lower East Side club, the Living Room, with Jones singing, Harris on guitar and Alexander on bass. "Jesse and Lee really had to convince me at first," Jones says. "But I then started to enjoy it. At the Living Room, people were actually listening to me, more than at some cocktail bar in the theater district where people would ask me to play 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' as a solo pianist."

Based on her gigs with Alexander and Harris, Jones scored an audition with Bruce Lundvall, the day after her twenty-first birthday. The first song she recorded for the demo session, in August 2000, was "Don't Know Why." When Come Away With Me was released a year and a half later, Jones was still waitressing, and Alexander had a gig on a cruise boat. The album sold 10,000 copies its first week, immediately fulfilling Jones' best-case scenario. Then it continued to sell. The group went from opening for Livingston Taylor to opening for the Dave Matthews Band. Jones came close to having a nervous breakdown during her first European tour, due to a nonstop schedule of interviews and performances. Eventually she learned to say no, and life improved. She nixed, for example, a Top Forty dance remix of "Don't Know Why." "I said no before I heard it, and then I heard it, and it was awful," Jones says. "We'd already sold a million records at that point. I was like, 'What more do you want?'"

Other than being able to go out to eat whenever she likes, Jones says her day-to-day life hasn't changed significantly. When she's not on the road, she likes to cook or stay home and listen to music (the night before our interview, it was Aretha Franklin's Young, Gifted and Black, which, she says, she was air-choir-conducting for Alexander) or check out friends' gigs at local clubs.

The Jones tour bus is not exactly fodder for a Hammer of the Gods sequel, either -- unless that sequel includes competitive Scrabble tournaments. Jones has also become addicted to Grand Theft Auto, and all the band members read Levon Helm's autobiography, at which point they had to stop obsessively watching The Last Waltz because it became too depressing.

"We're pretty nerdy," Jones admits. "I mean, we'll drink beer, go to a bar, shoot pool. We're not total squares. But I'm with Lee. Andy [Borger, Jones' drummer] and Daru are going out. It's not like we're looking for girls."

The tour bus has also become a tutorial of sorts, with the older guys in the band attempting to school Jones in some of the pop culture she missed out on during years of jazz-geekdom.

JONES: "When I got into jazz, I stopped paying attention to pop music. I had no idea what was going on in that world until two years ago. So there's a big gap."

LEVY: "Oh, dude, you have no idea. We'll be on the bus, mentioning . . . I don't know. She has no Zeppelin references. Maybe it's an age thing. But I don't know. How do you not have one Zeppelin record? She's really open, though. We're doing our best to hip her to stuff. Andy bought her this bootleg Runaways video. It was Lita Ford and Joan Jett, and they're all seventeen, eighteen, with these crazy costumes, singing 'Cherry Bomb.' Norah had never heard of them. But she just flipped out when she saw it. She has a real rock & roll side of her. When she sees stuff like that, she just wants to rock."

JONES: "Andy turned me on to AC/DC. I wasn't familiar with them. Last summer we started covering 'Ride On,' from Dirty Deeds [Done Dirt Cheap]. I got self-conscious doing it because Bon Scott was such a great singer."

LEVY: "I think Norah's gonna surprise everyone someday with a full-on rock record. She and Daru have a little side band called the Mazzelles. Neither of them plays guitar that well, but they'll sit on the bus and write these insane songs. It's hard rock with sweet two-part harmony. One of the songs is called 'What Good Is a Smile When Your Head's in a Vise?' I don't know. You've kinda gotta hear it."

JONES: "Jack Black is one of the greatest singers in the world. That Tenacious D song 'Tribute' -- 'the greatest song in the world'? I can't even sing like that. He could scat-sing if he wanted to. I feel this connection with him that he probably would not feel with me."

Recently, Jones played a handful of new songs in a New York studio, taping part of the performance for the BBC's Top of the Pops. She leads off with the new single, "Sunrise," the chorus of which goes "hoo ooh ooh ooh." She delivers a gorgeous rendition of the country-gospel "Humble Me," and Waits' "Long Way Home" is given a jaunty run-through. When a makeup artist scampers onstage to re-dust Jones' face, she grimaces as if she's being dusted with powdered onion. Later, a producer informs her she'll have to redo a song. She looks deflated, apologizes profusely to the tiny audience and then insists on performing a "palate cleanser": a cover of Gram Parsons' "She," about a poor woman who, nonetheless, had faith, believin' and sure could sing.

Back at the bar, Jones shrugs off the pressures of following up an octuple-platinum debut. "The new album isn't . . . the greatest album in the worllld," she says, singing the last part a la Tenacious D, then giggling. "Look, I get why people like my music. It's easy to listen to. It's easy to digest. It's not offensive. I get it. It's also not genius. But I think it's where I'm supposed to be. It'd be great if it does well, but also, what the heck, man." Jones smiles. "Hey, there's no way to go but down anyway. We've already got more than we ever hoped for. I mean, what didn't go right?"

(February 25, 2004)