Forever mellow

Article
"OK," Norah Jones says, "I really loved Axl Rose. I was into Motley Crüe and Guns N' Roses, and then Nirvana and Pearl Jam. I loved that music."

She's sitting in one of those overstuffed chairs that hotels specialize in -- this particular hotel being in Los Angeles -- with her feet tucked under her so she won't fidget.

"I'm very short attention span," she says.

At 28, Jones seems engagingly like a teenager -- a very well-adjusted teenager, admittedly. Partly it's the implied italics, exclamation marks and attention-deflecting laughter that pepper her conversation. Partly it's the clothes -- mall-casual more than old-time glamour, nothing at all like those posters that sprouted all over San Francisco a couple of months back when her new album, "Not Too Late," came out.

If someone were to walk in here right now, someone who didn't know much about music -- let's make it harder, someone who did -- and you told that person that this was one of the biggest pop sensations of the past 10 years, that person would think you were putting him on. Meanwhile, Jones continues with her testimonial to heavy rock, recalling how, at a tender age, she used to air-drum along to the radio.

"But I imitated Sarah Vaughan in my bathroom shower, I didn't imitate Axl Rose -- until I was much older," she says with a laugh. "I was building up to that."

Of course, we know she wasn't. Jones made her name and her fortune -- her first two albums sold more than 30 million copies and garnered eight Grammys; her third and latest premiered at No. 1 -- with songs that are smooth-edged and intimate, sad but somehow comforting, whose soft-focus, languorous beauty recalls an earlier, less complicated time. She says she's not the "melancholy, romantic" person she appears to be in the songs -- even in the songs she wrote herself, which make up just about all of "Not Too Late." She's a happy person, she insists, saying she "borrowed a lot of stuff from other people's psychology" for her songs.

"It was stuff I could relate to, of course, but no, it wasn't all my own stuff, all pouring out in one go," she says.

Drawn to sad, slow music ever since she was a little girl, she used to compile her own anthologies of sadness, "just so I could cry. When I was feeling sad, to get it all out, I would just put on my mix tape."

Bar the first four years of her life, which when she lived in New York, where she was born, Jones' childhood was spent in Grapevine, Texas, near Dallas. It was just Norah and her mother, Sue Jones, a onetime dancer from Oklahoma. The locals thought Norah was Mexican ("I did look very Mexican, actually"). As is common knowledge now, she is a half Indian, the daughter of sitar superstar Ravi Shankar. An absent father for more than half her childhood -- Jones thinks he came to Texas to visit once, but she was too young to remember -- Shankar has long since reconciled with her.

"It's all in a really good place now," says Jones, who especially delights in having a half-sister of a similar age, sitar player Anoushka Shankar.

Jones is the first to acknowledge that she doesn't know much about her Asian heritage.

"My mom tried to downplay it, I think," she says. "I think she thought that unless my dad was around, it would be mean to have his music and all of the stuff, you know what I mean?"

But she's quick to point out that "there's time for that. And I do have a strong sense of my heritage, and that's this whole Texas thing."

If asked to pick her favorite singer-songwriter, she chooses Willie Nelson.

"I come from Texas," she says, "so Willie is God."

She laughs while describing how she tried to persuade Anoushka Shankar of the country singer's genius.

"She doesn't listen to Willie Nelson, and I feel like he's my homeboy, you know? He is the root of all music for me," she says.

Jones' low-key country side band, the Little Willies, was named in homage to Nelson, with whom Jones has sung a number of times. The first time was in San Francisco, when she opened Nelson's four-night stand at the Fillmore, "just before my first album came out. That was just the thrill of my life, and one of the things that makes San Francisco so special for me."

It was her second time in the Bay Area. The first was in September 2001, to attend a wedding with her boyfriend, bandmate and co-writer, Lee Alexander.

"I just fell in love with the place," she says. "We almost moved here. It was right after 9/11, when a lot of us, as a first reaction, thought of moving out of New York. Actually, most of my band lived in the Bay Area during the dot-com thing and all knew each other, which is how I met them all. If it weren't for San Francisco, things would be very different for me."

Right now she has no intention of leaving New York, where she and Alexander have an apartment in the city and an upstate country house. In the past, Jones has seemed less than enthused about spending much time away from home, but she says she's really enjoying her current tour, which brings her to Berkeley's Greek Theatre on Saturday and Saratoga's Mountain Winery on June 25. "The fact that I finally had a break from touring, before we made the new album, was a big part of it -- that I was finally able to just settle into my normal life again," she says. "I mean, I love playing with my band, but I just felt like I was living 'Groundhog Day' every day, you know? But this tour has been a lot of fun. I feel a lot more comfortable performing, and we have a cool show, really different from last time we toured. We're switching around on instruments a lot, and there's a lot more variety, even though it's still all quiet, mellow music. I think I'm finally finding the balance between us just playing the music like we always have and having to put on a show for a lot of people in a big place when the way we play isn't really conducive to big places. This time it's more of a show"

Between concerts, she has been writing more songs.

"We haven't worked them into the set yet," she says, smiling, "but maybe by the time we get to the Greek, which is one of my favorite venues, we will."

NORAH JONES appears at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Greek Theatre at UC Berkeley