Sunday Conversation: Norah Jones On Her ‘Playing Along’ Podcast, Willie Nelson, Motley Crue And More

How do you stand out in the incredibly crowded and competitive podcast space? If you're a Grammy-winning icon like Norah Jones you turn to what she calls her, "Secret weapon." Namely singing every show.

On Jones totally enjoyable and fascinating new show, Norah Jones Is Playing Along, she is joined each episode by a different musical guest. In addition to a deep conversation Jones and her guests, some of whom are longtime friends — like Mavis Staples and Brian Blade — and some she has never met in person — like Logic and Marc Rebillet — play both her songs and their works.

So you get to hear Jones play songs she has never performed anywhere else. And get stories like on the Blade episode, where he talks about how he first met Joni Mitchell, who he played with for years.

So if you even casually like music, the show is a blast. And for music heads like myself it is can't miss listening. I spoke with Jones about the show, new music, her role as an interviewer and her dream guests for Playing Along.

Steve Baltin: I will say as a podcast host, I both envied and hated your podcast.

Norah Jones: Uh-oh. [laughter]

Baltin: I did 124 episodes of My Turning Point, which is a show I did that you were on. I'm like, "How the hell are we supposed to compete with Norah Jones singing live with Brian Blades on her podcast?"

Jones: That's my secret weapon. That's all I got to offer in the podcast world is actually playing music. I've had so much fun doing it. And actually the talking part, I wasn't ever nervous about that because I knew it would be more conversational but it's definitely more talking than I had planned on in the beginning. But it's always so fun to just hang out with people, play music and be casual and just talk. I feel like I've gotten deeper in some of these episodes with these people than I would have normally maybe at a dinner or something.

Baltin: Harry Chapin had this one line that I love. "And we talk because talking tells us things about what we really are thinking about."

Jones: Yeah, it tells us things. You formulate your own opinions on something that you didn't even realize you had until you're speaking it out loud sometimes. Yeah, it's a really nice thing. And I've just had so much fun, way too much fun doing it.

Baltin: You say way too much fun. What is too much fun?

Jones: The podcast is music. So, definitely not something I want to put too much pressure on. It's for fun. I hope we break even and continue to have exciting two hour sessions with people I admire and the funniest thing is like some of these are people I've never met. And that's kind of weird but also I think I thrive on being thrown into the fire like that. It comes from playing jazz, when I was young and I'm not a big rehearser either. What you hear is what we did. There's a couple instances where we did a second take if we fell apart on a song but really very few.

Baltin: Which are the ones that you didn't know beforehand?

Jones: I did not know Marc Rebillet. I knew of him, of course, I wanted him to do it, I asked him but I'd never met him. And we were kind of an odd pairing but also not at all. He's like my brother, it was so fun. And he's also from Texas and he went to my high school, which helped us sort of connect. But I had never met Logic, Bobby Hall, though we had communicated over text message for a while and become friendly and become friends actually through a mutual friend but I had never met him. And some of them are people who I've known for a long time and love collaborating with.

Baltin: Yeah. I love Brian. I interviewed him for the Joni 75 show here in L.A. He has so many great stories.

Jones: I've known Brian for so long but like, I learned so much about him in this two hours and I'd been on tour with him all summer. Sometimes you just don't learn the origin stories of things when you're hanging out with somebody. That kind of thing doesn't always come up. So just getting to hear how he met Joni, which was kind of random and not how I would have imagined it. Yeah. He's the best.

Baltin: Now that she's back in the public eye, what are the odds of you getting Joni on the show?

Jones: Oh, that'd be a dream come true. But the fun thing about this podcast is that there's literally a never ending wish list. And once we start talking about who we're going to go out to next, it gets really confusing because there's like 200 people on a list and there could be 500 more, 'cause there's tons of brilliant musicians out there. Some known, some not known. I'm excited to dive into like anybody, as long as it makes sense and it feels comfortable. That's really the only caveat but some things don't make sense on paper but make sense in the room.

Baltin: Was it through jazz that you learned to appreciate the spirit of collaboration so much?

Jones: It's probably where I got my say yes to anything and jump right in and it's not that big a deal spirit. But the truth is, I feel like after my first record went bananas, I got asked to do a lot of stuff by a lot of my heroes and a lot of people who I would have never crossed paths with. Like a lot of people that on paper you'd be like, "Oh wow, that's an odd combo." I got to sing with Mike Patton and Andre 3000 and the Foo Fighters as well as Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton and Ray Charles. I said yes to all that because it was exciting and it ended up paving my collaboration style. It sort of opened me up and that was probably the most fun I had in that era. Just playing music with people, playing music with a band who can sort of answer what I'm saying and then I answer them. I prefer the interaction to something that's over rehearsed and too precise. That's just my style. That's what I prefer.

Baltin: You mentioned working with Foo Fighters. Dave Grohl has been a friend forever. Taylor Hawkins was a good friend. Both of them loved to work with or love to work with other musicians. Willie, of course, has worked and smoked with every person who's ever lived. So, are there those artists that you've gotten to be around that inspired your openness to collaboration?

Jones: Some of my favorite artists were like that. Willie, Ray Charles, certainly any jazz artist that I have ever loved. Of course, that's the spirit of that music, right? But yeah I think that that's what feeds us. I think that's kind of what inspires me. Every little left turn you make, you learn something new from the new person and that new stop you take. And that all adds to your pot of what's inspiring. If I just had to make music by myself, I think I'd get a little less inspired. Sometimes it's fun but certainly if that was the only thing I did, that might be hard for me.

Baltin: As you're playing these songs that you probably would never play otherwise and you're working with people in different ways, is it inspiring you and invigorating you musically as well?

Jones: Absolutely. I think every time I learn someone's songs for this, it goes into the bank of ideas and you borrow from people who do things different from you and then it becomes your own thing and you turn it into something different. That's sort of the spirit of music, right? And rolling along and taking what you're hearing and turning it into your own thing. To me, that's the beauty of it — it's inspiring and fun and also just making these connections personally, friendships. That's something that becomes more important as you get older and more special maybe to sit down with somebody like this. It's kind of a strange way to interact with someone actually without food in front of you or alcohol, though I'm open to that. But it is like you're a little bit naked, so you have to jump in and get comfy. And I found that most of these episodes, like, especially the ones where we didn't know each other, Bobby Hall, Logic and I, we were both a little nervous in the beginning and we didn't really know what was going to happen. But then it just became like this beautiful connection of two new friends getting to know each other and playing music. And that was a really amazing thing.

Baltin: People always ask me what's this person like. At the end of the day, it's really sometimes you connect with people and sometimes you don't.

Jones: Yeah. And sometimes they're having a bad day. You're obviously more fun than some interviewers but I feel like when people are doing a bunch of interviews, either their head is in the game or it's not. They're either in the moment with the person acting like you're both just two regular people talking, or that sometimes isn't the case. Sometimes you feel defensive or in a different zone. I like to think of myself as peers with these people, hopefully that's the goal.

Baltin: The reality is two musicians talk to each other differently than they're going to talk to a journalist.

Jones: Exactly. That's the whole thing. Did you ever listen to Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz? It's definitely inspiration for this show, though it's very different but she had a show on NPR for at least 20 years, maybe 30 years. I'm not sure but I got to be on it twice towards the end of her life. She was a jazz piano player and she had different jazz piano players on and they would play tunes together, two piano style and talk. And I think later on she had Willie Nelson on and some non-piano non-jazz people, some singers but for the most part it was jazz focused and it was definitely a big inspiration for this.

Baltin: Is there an idea of how long you want to keep this going? Or is it just open-ended?

Jones: It's open-ended like anything in my life until it's not fun anymore. It's just a matter of getting enough listeners to feel like it's worth doing and even if we don't, it's kind of still worth doing if it's fun.

Baltin: Obviously have almost all the artists in the world at your resources. So do you feel like you have that freedom of championing new artists or getting Taylor Swift?

Jones: I definitely think that in my dream world, the artist selection is all over the map in terms of success versus unknown artists. But for now, yeah, I would like to be able to finance it. I don't mind financing it myself at all for a while but I would love to break even, basically. That's the goal and you gotta have listeners for that. My door is open. I think we're trying to reach out to people for the next batch and it's exciting to imagine collaborating with pretty much every person on the list and I don't know what's going to happen.

Baltin: Is there's one person from each wish list — people you know and artists you don't — each that would be perfect to have on the show?

Jones: Obviously somebody that would be a dream guest who I have known a long time but I don't know well, I've only hung out with a few times 20 years ago is Dolly Parton. And everybody loves her and of course she's a dream, tippy top of the list and she's got plenty of things to do but of course somebody like that and especially her would be a dream guest. Also playing music with her was one of the thrills of my whole life. I got to do it once in the studio, once on an awards show and once live on stage and she's just one of the best singers on the planet, best songwriters, best everything. It would just be a thrill to hang out and play music and imagine how many great stories she has. She's a hilarious, brilliant human

Baltin: What about the one that you've never met?

Jones: Oh, there's like a hundred million. When we started doing this, I wasn't sure how far out of my comfort zone I would go. And when we did the Logic episode, it was just so much fun and I felt comfortable, even though we were both out of our comfort zones. That was kind of the best part but yeah, I'm open to pushing it very far out of my zone.

Baltin: There are eight episodes up right now. How frequently will you have new episodes? Is it seasonal, or do you just have a bunch of episodes in the can coming out soon?

Jones: We have four more episodes coming out and we're doing them every two weeks, so we've done 12 episodes for this season. I don't know if it's gonna technically be seasonal or what but that's what we have right now and we're working on the next batch.

Baltin: Are you sharing the musical performances at all?

Jones: We're isolating one song from each episode. So we videoed all these episodes but we're not doing like a video podcast, because it's just too much to think about. So there's just like a little behind the scenes video of one song from each episode if you're curious. And also you can find that one song on streaming platforms, because that seemed like a fun way to remind people about the podcast and it is a music podcast. So it is really nice to just have one of the best songs from the episode kind of floating out there.

Baltin: I have to ask as a fan, what's coming up in 2023?

Jones: Oh, I got a really fun summer tour in Europe. I haven't been to Europe in a long time. I had so much fun touring last summer in the States. I missed it. I love playing music. Brian was with me on tour. He'll be with me on tour again on the drums and so I'm doing some touring and recording some podcasts. I might be working on a record and I don't know beyond that, picking up my kids from school, that kind of stuff.

Baltin: What were your favorite podcasts during the time that you were prepping for this?

Jones: I really just wanted to laugh during the pandemic, so I listened a lot to the Conan podcast, which just made me laugh out loud a lot. And I listened to Tara Brach. She's a really great meditation teacher and speaker. That was good for centering, I had my self-help podcast and then my laughter podcast, which is another form of self-help. There's a few more. I like Mike Birbiglia's podcast. It's just comedians talking to each other.

Baltin: The last three days I've been obsessed with the Motley Crue song, "Don't Go Away Mad" and I have no idea why.

Jones: I love that song. I listen to a lot of Motley Crue, especially when I'm working out.

Baltin: What one Motley Crue song would you cover and what band member would you want to play with?

Jones: Probably "Shout at the Devil." That would be really fun. Obviously, Vince Neil would be fun but Tommy Lee would be fun. I don't know. I'm super open, man.

Baltin: That's not what I would have ever guessed. But at the very least, you should just do a social media cover of "Shout at the Devil."

Jones: I thought about it actually recently. You don't want to be too calculated with stuff but you just want to do stuff that you enjoy. And that would definitely be a fun one.