Still, that record, 2004’s Feels Like Home, which marked its 20th anniversary on Feb. 10, is a canny example of eating one’s cake and having it too. There are traces of Come Away sprinkled here and there, but what makes Home a more satisfying collection is how it splits the difference between the coffeehouse jazz that endeared her to millions and Jones’ messier, more fascinating impulses.
Two decades later, Feels Like Home stands as a high water mark in Jones’ eclectic catalog — the proof, after her splashy debut, that she was indeed an artist of consequence and one whose career prospects would be limited only by her imagination.
The alum of Dallas' Booker T. Washington High School for the Visual and Performing Arts could have made any kind of record she chose when following up her masterful first effort. And, indeed, grappling with the onslaught of attention would do a number on anyone’s head, making it all the more remarkable Jones was able to find her footing and deliver an album far better than it had any right to be.
“[Fame] was definitely all a big adjustment, a big shock,” Jones told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in September 2004. “I was kind of in a state of shock for a whole year. But now I’ve been able to step back from it a little bit and make everybody leave me alone enough where I can enjoy myself.”
Those expecting a reductive regurgitation of what came before were doubtless a bit frustrated, even as those who yearned to see Jones push in a bold new direction were likewise stymied. (That said, prior commercial triumph paved the way for more of the same here: Home moved a still-astonishing 1,022,000 copies in its first week — and wound up being the second best-selling album of the entire year.)
Jones wrote or co-wrote six of Home’s 13 songs, including its luminous lead-off track, and first single, “Sunrise,” which would earn Jones her seventh Grammy for best female pop vocal performance at the 47th annual Grammy Awards.
“Sunrise” is a lightly rustic shuffle, laying a sultry vocal atop pizzicato strings and lively bass. A little bit jazz, a little bit country, a little bit folk — more so than her debut, Home cements the sonic template the singer-songwriter has continued to follow for the duration of her career.
Home also underlined Jones’ ease at enlisting incredible musicians to collaborate: The Band’s Garth Hudson and Levon Helm turn up, as do Brian Blade and Daru Oda. Famed producer-arranger Arif Mardin co-produced with Jones.
Like so many artists bred in Texas, Jones acknowledges the boundaries between genres even as she blithely ignores them. Tucking a Townes Van Zandt cover (“Be Here to Love Me”) onto the same collection as a sprightly take on a Tom Waits tune (“The Long Way Home”), while leaving room for a gorgeous Dolly Parton collaboration (“Creepin’ In”), then finishing it all off with a nod to Duke Ellington (“Don’t Miss You at All”) illustrates the breadth of Jones’ influences and the depth of her ability to make it all effortlessly hang together.
Critics, as can be their wont, had knives at the ready for one of the more eagerly anticipated records of the early 2000s. “Feels Like Home is nothing if not serene,” sniffed the Austin Chronicle in a contemporary review. “And more than a little numb, which given Jones’ runaway celebrity, isn’t surprising.”
“Feels Like Home is so inoffensive you have trouble remembering whether you put it on,” snarked The Guardian. “You suspect that this is the appeal for the millions of people who buy this kind of thing.”
Her sultry, irresistible light soprano can waft like smoke or cut like steel, depending on what’s needed — that flexibility is equally reflected in her compositions, which can toggle between tender and tough.
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In the years since, Jones’ skill at traversing the seams of the American songbook and carving out an idiosyncratic identity as an artist of considerable taste and technique has gotten somewhat lost in the shuffle. The elastic nature of her style and sound is such that revering the now 44-year-old musician as just a jazz artist undermines the freewheeling synthesis of the many different genres marking her catalog.
She’s moved easily from darker registers (2007’s Not Too Late; 2009’s The Fall; 2012’s Little Broken Hearts) back to sunnier sounds (2016’s Day Breaks), while also finding time to stretch herself in collaborative projects with Danger Mouse, Daniele Luppi and Jack White (2011’s one-off Rome), Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis (2011’s Here We Go Again: Celebrating the Genius of Ray Charles) and Billie Jo Armstrong (2013’s criminally underrated Everly Brothers tribute LP Foreverly).
In those records, as on her own, Jones displays a chameleonic ability to bend her formidable talents to the song at hand. Her sultry, irresistible light soprano can waft like smoke or cut like steel, depending on what’s needed — that flexibility is equally reflected in her compositions, which can toggle between tender and tough.
Jones is readying her ninth studio album, Visions, for release next month, reportedly a more upbeat collection (although time will tell just how much — or how little — jazz finds its way into the mix). Her career has endured in large part because she’s effectively ignored the marketplace and charted her own course.
Following her muse rather than chasing the high of her first record has appeared, from the outside at least, to be more artistically satisfying and has allowed her to mature gracefully, a vivid reminder of the value in understanding the evanescence of fame and the permanence of trusting in your own talent.
