I Dream of Christmas, Joe

Alright, this one sounds good. Definitely coffeeshop vibes, but I don't think that's a bad thing. It's more like... this is music for the end of your Christmas party, when you start scraping the bottom of the eggnog bowl and ties are askew and little Johnny has fallen asleep on Pop Pop's lap and the host is fitting the last of the dishes in the dishwasher and packing up leftovers to be disseminated and you start saying shit like "that was a real nice Christmas." It's an ultra-specific mood, requiring just the right touch, music-wise, and Norah Jones fucking nails it.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not really familiar with the body of work of the great Norah Jones. I, along with anyone who was born before the year 1992, am intimately familiar with "Don't Know Why." Up until this very moment, it seemed like the type of song that might be surrounded with some Starbucks-core bullshit on the Diamond-certified and Grammy-winning album that its featured on. Now I'm sitting here, 6:30 PM, pretty much the only 20 minutes this entire fucking day that Sophie isn't crying, sitting on the couch in a dimly-lit room, relaxing to the soothing sounds of Norah Jones, and thinking: I want more of this. Consider this a promise that Come Away with Me will be covered in A Year of Blind Spots before the end of 2025. I'll link back to this review when we get there, and we can all have a laugh at how much destruction and chaos the intervening time period hath wrought. 

Did you know that Norah Jones was the daughter of Ravi Shankar? I had no idea until I visited the ol' Wikipedia page in preparation for this short exercise. Not that I'm intimately familiar with her dad's work, but the dude's name pops up a decent amount in Beatles lore, as he is the sitarist who influenced George Harrison, who then in turn influenced pop music in the late '60s to include more sitar. (This makes Norah Jones cultural second-cousins-once-removed to Anton Newcombe.)

Another new factoid for you is that "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?" ends this album, which means that, in 2021 Record Club, the song was included on two of the albums that lost the vote. The other, of course, being Journey frontman Steve Perry's The Season, which I reviewed last year. I should say that I was drunker writing that post that I was willing to admit at the time. This explains why I described a 1947 Frank Loesser song as a "Steve Perry original." Gratitude in sobriety to Norah Jones for showing me the way (and, obviously, for blowing Steve Perry out of the goddamn water with her version). 

Gratitude in general for such a nice Christmas album. Norah Jones isn't reinventing the wheel here, but no one is asking her to. I think Sufjan Stevens was probably the last person to do that re: holiday music. So I'm not saying that Norah Jones' music stuns me with originality or catharsis or anything like that. I'm just saying that it fits a mood, and I happen to be in that mood right this fucking second, and so Norah Jones fits just right if you're feeling the way I'm feeling. If you like "Run, Rudolph, Run" but want a warm, cozy, almost bossa nova-esque version of it, here you go. If you want originals that sound like Bill Withers under the mistletoe, then here you go.

I still don't like holiday music, so let me cherish this moment. This might be the closest I'm gonna get.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5