Don't Know Why

The upright bass enters first, walking a slow jazz pattern that settles the room before anyone else speaks. Then the piano, unhurried, and then Norah Jones's voice — warm and smoky and slightly past the middle distance, as though she's singing to herself first and to you second. The arrangement is classic late-night jazz-pop, beautifully played and produced by the Norah Jones debut team who understood that restraint was the point. Drummer Brian Blade plays with brushes that whisper rather than insist, and every element in the mix defers to the quality of space between notes. The lyric is about the small inexplicable moments where we fail to act on what we feel — the specific regret of a night that didn't happen, of a choice unmade. It's not a dramatic lyric, which is what makes it resonate so broadly; it describes something almost everyone has felt. Jones arrived in 2002 as a genuine anomaly — deeply rooted in jazz and country and Americana, at a moment when pop radio had little patience for any of them — and this song became one of the opening arguments in the mainstream's rediscovery of acoustic sophistication. You put it on when the apartment is quiet and you want it to stay that way, when the evening deserves something that doesn't rush it toward its ending.