Norah Jones, Drunken Angel (Lucinda Williams cover), live in San Francisco, August 3, 2024 (4K)

Norah Jones and Alynda Segarra of Hurray For The Riff Raff play a cover of the Lucinda Williams "Drunken Angel" live in concert before a sold-out crowd at The Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco, California on August 3, 2024. Drunken Angel originally appeared on Lucinda Williams' fifth studio album, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road (1998). Norah Jones and Alynda Segarra covered the song together on the Norah Jones Is Playing Along Podcast in September 2023. Norah Jones is a Grammy Award winning singer, songwriter, and pianist from New York City. Alynda Segarra is a singer-songwriter from New York City who created the musical project Hurray For The Riff Raff in 2008. This was one of the final nights of the Visions Tour 2024. Joining them onstage were Josh Lattanzi (bass), Brian Blade (drums), Sasha Dobson (backing vocals / guitar), and Sami Stevens (backing vocals / keyboards).

==================
Norah Jones official bio
by Don Was, President, Blue Note Records

A while back I set out to learn more about what differentiates a truly great artist from the rest of the pack and charted the narrative development of Bruce Springsteen’s songs during his career. Over decades, he had traveled on a Hero’s Journey straight from the pages of Joseph Campbell’s books and ultimately returned home with the knowledge that having someone to talk to and a little of that human touch is the greatest treasure that one can pursue. By eloquently chronicling his experiences, he had left a trail of musical breadcrumbs that his listeners could follow to help make sense of their own lives. It’s a noble deed and is one reason for his enduring relevance.

I feel the same way about Norah Jones. On her 2020 album, Pick Me Up Off the Floor, she sang about how she wept, about loss and being lost, about going up in flames and being heartbroken. I wanted to reach into the speakers and give her a big hug because it was clear that she was experiencing some of the midlife stuff that Carl Jung had written extensively about. We all go through it and we’re all woefully unprepared to deal with it.

When I first heard the songs on Norah’s new album, Visions, it was evident that she had weathered the storm and emerged with an enlightened perspective. She’s singing about being awake, wanting to dance, finally feeling free, being on her way to making it right and acceptance of what life brings. She’s seeing light at the end of a tunnel that had engulfed her four years previously and is offering guidance, comfort, and joy to others who may find themselves standing at similar crossroads.

It’s both difficult and uncomfortable to dig deep and share your inner emotional life with the world - even harder to eloquently shroud those feelings in layers of poetry and innovative musical texture. It’s a staggeringly generous use of popular music. Norah Jones’ Visions attains that artistic ideal with nobility and grace.

====================
Alynda Segarra official bio:

Alynda Segarra is 36, or a little less than halfway through the average American lifespan. In that comparatively brief time, though, the Hurray for the Riff Raff founder has been something of a modern Huck Finn, an itinerant traveller whose adventures prompt art that reminds us there are always other ways to live.

Born in the Bronx and of Puerto Rican heritage, Segarra was raised there by a blue-collar aunt and uncle, as their father navigated Vietnam trauma and their mother neglected them to work for the likes of Rudy Giuliani. They were radicalized before they were a teenager, baptized in the anti-war movement and galvanized in New York’s punk haunts and queer spaces. At 17, Segarra split, becoming the kid in a communal squat before shuttling to California, where they began crisscrossing the country by hopping trains. They eventually found home—spiritual, emotional, physical—in New Orleans, forming a hobo band and realizing that music was not only a way to share what they’d learned and seen but to learn and see more. Hurray for the Riff Raff steadily rose from house shows to a major label, where Segarra became a pan-everything fixture of the modern folk movement.

During the last dozen years, these manifold tales of Segarra’s voyages have shaped an oral folklore of sorts, with the teenage vagabonding or subsequent trainhopping becoming what some may hear about Hurray for the Riff Raff before hearing the music itself. Segarra has dropped tidbits in songs, too, but they always worried that their experiences were too radical, that memories of dumpster diving or riding through New Orleans with a dildo dangling on an antenna were too much. But on latest album The Past Is Still Alive, Segarra finally tells the story themselves, speckling stirring reflections on love, loss, and the end or evolution of the United States with foundational scenes from their own life.