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  • Come Away With Me

    Come Away With Me

    2002  ·  Blue Note Records  ·  Album

    The album that made late-night feel like a place worth staying.

    Come Away With Me arrived in 2002 and promptly sold ten million copies, which is the kind of success that can make a record seem more ordinary than it is. Set against it now, the album holds up not as a phenomenon but as a quietly achieved thing: a collection of songs that know exactly how much room to take up. Norah Jones’s voice is warm without being cloying, and she plays piano with a restraint that gives the arrangements space to breathe. The production by Arif Mardin is tasteful in the original sense — it serves the songs rather than decorating them. There are no wasted moments on this record. Every track earns its place.

    Put it on when dinner is finished and nobody has moved from the table yet. It suits the end of an evening better than the beginning — the point when the candles have burned down and the conversation has moved past the things you were saving to say. It works at low volume, on a Sunday when the apartment is quiet, or in the background of something that deserves a soundtrack. The title track and the closing number bracket the album with something close to a complete emotional statement. Not every debut pulls that off.

    VERDICT  ·  The album that made an ordinary evening feel worth having.

    POUR  ·  A bourbon, neat and unhurried. Or whatever is already poured.

    Planning an evening around this? The Vinyl and Nothing Else →

    Find the Record

    Come Away With Me on vinyl. One of those pressings that still holds up. A good room deserves a good copy.

    See on Amazon →
  • Lost in Translation

    Lost in Translation

    2003  ·  R  ·  Film

    A film about the particular loneliness of being somewhere beautiful with the wrong people — or almost the right one.

    Sofia Coppola’s third feature is one of the quieter achievements in American cinema — a film that holds loneliness and tenderness in the same frame without choosing between them. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson play two Americans adrift in Tokyo: an aging actor there for a whisky campaign, a young woman accompanying her largely absent husband. What passes between them is not quite romance and not quite friendship — it is something more honest than either, the recognition of a shared displacement that neither can quite name. The film does not hurry. It lets the city breathe around its characters and trusts that the audience will sit with the silences.

    Watch it late, or on a night when sleep is not coming easily. It rewards the kind of attention that is slightly tired and slightly open — when the defenses are down and a film can reach places that daylight watching won’t allow. It is particularly good when you have recently been somewhere unfamiliar and alone, or when you are with someone you haven’t quite figured out yet. The ending is unresolved in exactly the right way. Some films earn their ambiguity. This one does.

    VERDICT  ·  A film that knows what it’s about without saying it aloud.

    POUR  ·  A whisky highball, light on the ice. Or whatever the minibar offers at 4am.

    Planning an evening around this? The Foreign Film Night →