Feeling the Same Way

There is a hazy, late-morning quality to "Feeling the Same Way" — the piano has a slightly muffled warmth, the drums brush rather than strike, and the bass walks at the pace of someone taking their time getting dressed. Jones again occupies her signature atmospheric middle ground between jazz cafe and bedroom folk, but here the mood is more ambivalent, more interior. The song sits in the feeling of mutual uncertainty between two people who sense they want the same thing but haven't quite said it yet — that suspended, charged moment before a thing becomes real. Vocally, Jones is even more restrained than usual, almost conversational, which makes the emotional content feel earned rather than performed. The production by Arif Mardin gives everything a slightly vintage softness, like a photograph left in sunlight just long enough to lose its hard edges. It belongs to the early two-thousands quiet-revival moment — Norah Jones, Madeleine Peyroux, Cassandra Wilson — when American listeners were craving something that didn't announce itself. You return to this track on slow Sunday mornings when you're sitting with someone comfortable enough that you don't need to fill the silence.