As huge as she is, Jones still keeps her music and her music-making down home: her writing partner/bass player and boyfriend, Lee Alexander, produced the new CD in their home studio. Old friend Jesse Harris, who wrote the massive hit “Don’t Know Why” for her 2002 debut, “Come Away With Me,” shares in the work again, but this time it’s by playing guitar as part of her studio band. Other players on the record are people she’s known for years. Any master chef will tell you that you don’t mess with a good recipe, and in this case, it’s this lovely girl still playing lovely and very listenable songs.
Some might even say too listenable: Jones doesn’t change much from one album to the next, and there’s not much risk-taking. The new song “Thinking About You,” for example, could be a bonus track on her jazz-friendly debut or its more countrified follow-up, “Feels Like Home.” The sparse, gliding lap steel on “Wake Me Up” adds to the overall relaxed vibe, which, along with her rolling sounds on the Wurlitzer, is her signature. But there are differences: starting with the plaintive opening track, “Wish I Could,” several new songs display a surprisingly darker, minor-chord mood that she hasn’t shown before (although she makes sure to balance the darkness with some sunny mandolin and piano on the upbeat “Sinkin’ Soon”). Also, she stretches out politically on “My Dear Country,” which takes a musical swipe at the president: “But fear’s the only thing I saw/ and three days later was clear to all/ that nothing is as scary as Election Day.”
What shows through in this collection of originals is that she clearly will do what she wants to do at this point—she has nothing to prove and that’s a privilege that an artist must earn, and earn it she has, even if she did it astonishingly quickly. To the casual listener, this record will not sound like much of a departure. But if you listen more closely, you’ll hear Jones putting herself out there in subtly new ways.
