Story of the song: Long Way Home by Norah Jones

From The Independent archive: Robert Webb on ‘Long Way Home’ by Norah Jones

Jones, whose ‘voice always touches you’ (Getty)

Long Way Home” isn’t the most obvious track on Norah Jones’s sophomore set, Feels Like Home, but it has the best provenance. Tom Waits had sent Jones some demos of songs to suit her hushed, low-tar voice. Among them was this gentle number, penned by the gravel-throated Waits with his wife, Kathleen Brennan. He waited for a reply, but heard nothing.

“I met Tom and Kathleen at a concert he was doing,” Jones says on her website. “Tom asked me if I had listened to the demos he sent me.” She hadn’t, but told Waits that, as a fan, she’d make sure she traced them.

When they turned up, Jones was bowled over. “Long Way Home” was the one, although at first Jones was reluctant to record it. She had covered Waits in concert but found it hard to better the originals.

Although Jones claims she hadn’t listened to the demo until pressed to do so by Waits, “Long Way Home” had actually been around for a couple of years, and she would have heard the song if she’d seen Big Bad Love, Arliss Howard’s filmic take on the short stories of the Mississippi writer Larry Brown. Waits’ own version first appeared, alongside tracks by Tom Verlaine and Steve Earle, on the bluesy soundtrack to that 2001 movie. On the original, recorded at Prairie Sun studios in Cotati, California, Waits exhales his lines almost like an air brake, breathing a simple story of love and wanderlust.

Jones’s version is similarly low-key. The walking bassline ambles along like a worn-out mare, around a slow Johnny Cash chug. There’s food on the table, a roof overhead, but she’d trade it for the highway if she could: “Money’s just something you throw from the back of a train,” she sings, reading Waits to perfection.

It was recorded in upstate New York in April 2003 with the legendary producer Arif Mardin, who had done so much to launch Aretha Franklin’s career in the Sixties. Mardin’s R&B background was perfect for Jones: he’d already helped to make her debut album a success. “She doesn’t need pitch correction,” he said of her singing on Feels Like Home. “She’s always in tune, and her voice always touches you.”