And now for my next trick...

Norah Jones has a new record out next week. Sadly, it is yet another case of difficult-second-album syndrome, says Andy Gill

By this time next week, Norah Jones will probably be nestling atop the album charts with Feels like Home, the follow-up to her multi-platinum, Grammy-grabbing Come Away with Me. Jones's success took the industry by surprise. She seemed to come from nowhere, with a style so resolutely ignorant of pop's passing trends that it simply failed to register on most observers' radars. I still hold to my initial impression: it is pale magnolia music for wine bars.

It is largely a reaction to the increasingly infantilised state of modern pop and rock. There are now at least two entire generations (that which came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, and that which came of age in the 1980s) for whom pop music remains a consuming interest but who find little to interest them coming from today's corporate pop machine.

For many of these musically disenfranchised older listeners, jazz, blues, and folk offer alternative means of indulging their hunger for a popular music which doesn't treat them like kids. Norah Jones has become the queen bee of this new constituency, her reputation secured by word of mouth (and, truth be told, a massive marketing campaign). You can tick all the boxes: pleasing on both eye and ear; great roots credibility, courtesy of absentee father Ravi Shankar; veneer of sophistication bestowed by jazz ; and an inoffensive, unassuming manner that places no undue demands on listeners' affections. How could anybody dislike Norah?

Which is part of the problem when it comes to delivering that all-important, and often terminal, follow-up album. When an act tries so hard not to offend, they risk denuding their work of the more interesting, questionable elements that might actually attract listeners. Feels like Home is an album so wary of challenge it seems scared of waking its audience up.

The "difficult" second album has become an acknowledged part of rock'n'roll lore, a rite of passage singers and bands must go through in order to establish themselves as proper artists. Any fool, runs the logic, can luck into a momentary success, but developing that breakthrough into a career takes something more. In some cases, that fateful first brush with the zeitgeist doesn't actually come until the second or third album: when A&R legend John Hammond insisted on persevering with Bob Dylan after his debut album sold poorly, the singer became known around Columbia Records as "Hammond's Folly".

That, of course, was in the era when artists were given time to establish themselves over the course of three or four albums. Much of that time, however, would be spent touring and doing promotional work in support of the last album, so the sophomore effort was bulked out with either ropey cover versions, or, particularly in the psychedelic era, lengthy "Jazz Odyssey"-style jams such as "Revelation", which took up an entire side of Love's Da Capo, or the "Grape Jam" offered as a bonus second disc with Moby Grape's Wow. And still they got to make another album!

That kind of dispensation, how-ever, disappeared from the music industry long ago. Take the poor old Pop Stars winners Hear'Say: their first album went straight to No 1, but the follow-up - I'm sorry, its title escapes me, as it probably does you - dis- appeared without trace, followed shortly after by the group themselves.

Many gloated over Hear'Say's downfall, claiming they weren't a "real" band anyway. But the same sudden collapse can just as easily afflict "proper" bands, particularly since, unlike Hear'Say, they're expected to come up with their own material. The Stone Roses were on top of the world, ma, after their debut album heralded the Madchester "baggy" scene. But they soon became embroiled in litigation - and, let's be fair, lorry-loads of drugs - and lingered far too long over the follow-up. The modestly-titled Second Coming appeared almost five years later. They never got to make a third album.

Most second albums are disappointments, inevitably found wanting when set alongside their well-crafted predecessors. Rare as hen's teeth are the follow-ups that improve upon the debuts. Perhaps the most notable example is that of Dylan's old backing-band buddies The Band. When their critically-acclaimed debut Music from Big Pink appeared in 1968, they hadn't even settled on a band-name, just listing the musicians' names on the back cover; by the following year, they had become The Band by default, and released an album of that title which raised the bar for popular music. At some point in the preceding 12 months, guitarist Robbie Robertson had matured into a first-rate songwriter, and the group seemed to have tapped into some timeless spirit of American history and culture, vividly evoked through an expanded palette of horns, mandolins, fiddles and the like.

It's tough to think of a recent comparable example of a follow-up actually improving upon a debut - The Coral's delightful Magic & Medicine from last year is all that comes readily to mind. And we won't be adding to that list with Jones's Feels like Home, which despite advance reports that it would be livelier and more up-tempo than her debut, actually seems even less animated, if that's possible. Ironically, The Band's Levon Helm and Garth Hudson appear on the album; but the overall impact is pillow-soft and enervated, with lots of gentle hand percussion and lazy jazz noodling behind Jones's dry, smoky vocals. Overt excitement seems to have been forbidden: Tom Waits's "The Long Way Home" is taken at a strolling country & western pace, and even Dolly Parton's appearance on the mild hillbilly-styled number "Creepin' In" only raises the tempo to a polite canter.

The result is an album full of music to nod off to. The 13 tracks are lullabies for grown-ups, soft caresses of languid cabaret jazz and blues from which all disturbing characteristics have been ruthlessly excised. That may be exactly what the record label - and her fans, I guess - wanted, but that desire in itself speaks volumes about the way we use music as a lifestyle accessory. Certainly, it seems odd that the blues, that most visceral and cathartic of musical forms, should find its greatest appeal in such a deracinated and emotionally constrained manner. So although Feels like Home will probably end up as the year's biggest-selling album, there's little about it that might cause it to lodge quite as firmly in the public's heart as Come Away with Me. And even less that might persuade them to come back for a third helping of the same.

'Feels like Home' is out on Blue Note on Tuesday