Come Away With Me
Norah Jones · Blue Note · 2002
Edition №8
You can own this record and still be missing the thing Blue Note paid for twice.
Norah Jones had finished her first album when her manager called to say the label had refused it. “I had a pit in my stomach and my manager at the time, Shell, called me and said that they rejected the record.” She had one deal and she assumed it was gone. “I was also just scared that I was going to lose the deal and it was over.”
The deal was unusual to begin with. Bruce Lundvall heard her demos and offered to sign her to Manhattan Records, the more pop-facing label down the hall. She turned it down and asked for the jazz one. Michael Cuscuna, who had run Blue Note’s reissue campaigns since 1984 and consulted on its signings, put her case plainly: “She was a jazz artist, playing piano and singing standards with an acoustic bass and a jazz drummer.”
She asked for Craig Street to produce, after hearing New Moon Daughter. Street took her to Allaire Studios in the Catskills with Bill Frisell, Brian Blade, Kenny Wollesen and Kevin Breit. They cut most of the songs you know, and they finished the record.
Lundvall’s objection was that it “had strayed too far from what was so special about the demos.”
Jones assumed at first that the problem was her singing. “I didn’t really understand what it was about it, but I thought maybe I didn’t sing very great.” Listening again, she put it somewhere else. “I didn’t love the way I sounded on them, and there was a ton of guitar.” And: “With two guitar players, at times it was just not balanced for what I wanted.”
So Blue Note paid for the album sessions a second time, and what the second payment bought was less. Arif Mardin took the chair, in his 70s, with Aretha and the Bee Gees behind him. He let Jones bring back the band from her own demos and kept the songs near to how she had first played them. Three of the Street recordings stayed. Everything else came down and went back up with “air” around it.
The album that has sold 27 million copies still has the shelved one inside it, on three tracks. Bill Frisell had played on a whole album with her. He is credited on one song of the album you likely own.
It entered the chart at 139. Eleven months later it was the number one album in America, and it stayed on that chart for 165 weeks. Cuscuna, from inside the label: “It ended up selling 10 million copies on its own steam. It was very bizarre.”
The character of this record is the space around a quiet voice, and Blue Note paid a second album budget to get it. That space is the thing I listen for when I put two pressings side by side, and in my experience it is the first thing a transfer gives up. You rarely catch it going. You just end up with a copy that sounds smaller, and you cannot say why.
Then came the 2022 anniversary, and a great many new objects. Almost none of them will tell you where they came from.
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The chain
One master feeds almost everything. Ted Jensen cut it at Sterling Sound in 2002 from the analog mix tapes, and for a decade every commercial edition descended from that transfer.
Session. Mid-2001 to early 2002 · Sorcerer Sound, New York City, and Allaire Studios, Shokan, New York
Producers. Arif Mardin · Craig Street on three tracks · Jay Newland and Norah Jones on additional and original production
Engineers. Jay Newland · S. Husky Höskulds on the Street tracks
Mixed. Arif Mardin and Jay Newland at Sear Sound, New York City
Original master. Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound, from the analog mix tapes Release. February 26, 2002 · Blue Note
How often it has been re-cut. Sony hybrid SACD in 2003, one year after release · Classic Records 45 RPM Clarity box in 2009 · the Analogue Productions Cohearent cycle in 2012
The 2012 re-cut. Analogue Productions had Kevin Gray cut a fresh chain at Cohearent Audio from the original source recordings, pressed at Quality Record Pressings and authored to DSD. That single chain yields four objects: the vinyl, the SACD stereo layer, the SACD 5.1 layer and the CD layer on the same disc.
Also in the wild. More than 100 international reissues carrying the Jensen digital master with no local re-cut, plus the entire 2022 anniversary cycle.
What only the anniversary carries. The shelved Craig Street album · 13 Allaire recordings · unreleased for twenty years · Super Deluxe only, and the third disc of the 3CD set
If Craig had been given the opportunity to help me make the finished record, maybe another session with maybe less reverb or whatever, I think we would have made a great record.
— Norah Jones, NPR, 2022
The map holds every branch. The 2022 single LP was pressed at two different plants under one catalog number. The German Pallas copies carry a hand-etched Sterling signature in the runout and credit Joe Nino-Hernes for the lacquer cut. The other run carries Universal master-file numbers and plant batch codes, and names no cutting engineer anywhere. Discogs states the difference outright on the second listing: similar to the first, but not a Pallas pressing. Nothing on the sleeve tells you which one is in the shrink.
The musicianship
The band on the finished record is largely the band from her demos. Protecting it is what the restart was for.
Personnel.
Norah Jones · vocals · piano · Wurlitzer electric piano on one track
Lee Alexander · bass on every track
Jesse Harris · acoustic and electric guitar · wrote “Don’t Know Why”
Adam Levy · acoustic and electric guitar
Kevin Breit · acoustic, electric and National resonator guitar
Brian Blade · drums and percussion · Dan Rieser · drums · Kenny Wollesen · drums on the closer
Bill Frisell · electric guitar on the closer
Sam Yahel · Hammond B-3 · Rob Burger · accordion and pump organ · Jenny Scheinman · violin · Tony Scherr · slide and acoustic guitar · Adam Rogers · guitar
Arif Mardin · string arrangement on one track
No horns anywhere on the credits, and no section doing volume. Most of the time the loudest thing is a voice at conversational level with a piano under it. That is the condition a mastering chain either keeps or loses.
The verdict
The rubric. The reference is the 2012 Analogue Productions chain, cut by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio from the original source recordings and pressed at Quality Record Pressings. It is the only chain documented end to end, and the only one that has ever measured above the rest of the catalog.
The best-sounding version of this album costs $21.44, and it is a compact disc.
Best CD pick is the Analogue Productions hybrid SACD. Its CD layer comes off the same Kevin Gray master as the vinyl, it plays in any ordinary CD transport, and it is $21.44 right now, marked down from $32.99.
Best overall is the Analogue Productions 180g vinyl, the current cycle of that same Kevin Gray cut. It is $75.00 at Acoustic Sounds and the stock is now limited, which it was not ten weeks ago. It is the better object. It is also 3 and a half times the price of the disc carrying the identical master.
The continuing-catalog path is the original 2002 Blue Note CD, the Ted Jensen master. It is not the reference and it is not trying to be. It is also about $2 used, and 27 million copies means you are never more than a few days from one.
Best digital download is the Analogue Productions DSD64 file, the same Cohearent chain again, which Acoustic Sounds has listed as unavailable since at least May. The in-print substitute is the Qobuz 24/192 at $31.59, which carries the Jensen chain rather than the Cohearent one.
Caution on the 2003 Sony hybrid SACD if you are buying it for the stereo layer. That layer is a 16/44.1 upsample rather than native DSD, documented independently at three separate places, and it is not what the format promises.
Catches. Beyond the two-plant problem, two more anniversary objects have no reliable engineer credit. The Japanese single-layer SACD names none at all. The HighResAudio download names Bernie Grundman, who cut the 2009 Classic Records edition and had nothing to do with 2022. And the Pallas run of the 2022 LP, the Target exclusive and the 4-LP box are the same pressing in different packaging.
The dynamic range case
Twenty years of this album measure DR11 to DR12. The 2002 CD, the hi-res files, the 2022 anniversary editions, all of them sit in that band. The 2012 Cohearent chain measures DR14, and it does so on all four of its objects: the vinyl, both SACD layers and the CD layer. Nothing else in the catalog has matched it. No remaster here was ruined. One cut held more of the room, on a record whose room was the point.
The endnote
I went to the same music school as Norah Jones. She started the year after I left, so we never overlapped, and that is the entire extent of my claim on this record. What I have instead is the paperwork, which turns out to be the story. Blue Note paid twice to put air around a voice, and that air is why the audiophile houses have never left this record alone. A quiet, close recording with room around one voice will tell you more about a system than almost anything else you can put on. It is also why so many objects exist, and why they now stand between a buyer and the record they mean to buy. The one edition with a chain you can read end to end was cut in 2012, for no anniversary and no occasion. I find one like it in most catalogs I work through. Those are the ones I go looking for.
Up next: The Dark Side of the Moon. Fifty years of pressings, and the two answers do not agree with each other.
Reference Checks, a Twelve Bar Studio production, is an evidence-led publication on the recording versions worth a serious listener’s time. The reviewer’s listening chain is calibration context, named in the About page and absent from every verdict. Research uses AI tooling; verification and editorial are human. See Editorial Process