On October 13, 2009, EMI’s Blue Note Records will release “Chasing Pirates,” the lead single from Norah Jones’s upcoming album The Fall.

The track will be made available digitally at all online digital retailers. The singer-songwriter’s highly anticipated fourth studio album, ‘The Fall’, will be released in North America on November 17, and on November 16 internationally. In the UK, the single will be released on November 15.

“Chasing Pirates” – which is currently featured on Rolling Stone’s “Hot List” – immediately announces a new direction for Jones.

“For this record, I just had a sound in my head,” Norah says. “I wanted the grooves to be more present and heavy. And I also just wanted to do something different.”

That new sound began to present itself on one of the first songs Jones wrote for the project.

“About a year ago, I did some demos in my home studio,” she says. “I had some friends come in and we figured out a cool arrangement for ‘Chasing Pirates,’ with a cool drum part. It went somewhere I didn’t expect it to go, and that became a direction to look in.”

Stream Chasing Pirates

“Norah Jones could have kept recording iterations of Come Away With Me for decades,” Newsweek wrote recently on their Pop Vox blog. “Clearly, that’s not what she’s doing. The gradual shifts away from that oversize debut have worked so far, and The Fall is an even bigger step away, and a step up in what is still the beginning of a big career.

“The first single, ‘Chasing Pirates,’ is a head-bobbing, compact little song whose catchy hook could put Jones on radio stations that may have spun her only rarely before. She sings, ‘I don’t know how to slow it down/My mind’s racing from chasing pirates,’ and as wistful as the lyric sounds, what Jones has done with the new record is indeed another departure. Only this time she’s heading down a louder, dusted-up rock path.”

The Fall finds Jones experimenting with a new set of collaborators, including Jacquire King, a noted producer and engineer who has worked with Kings of Leon, Tom Waits, and Modest Mouse among others.

Norah Jones enlisted several songwriting collaborators, including Ryan Adams and Okkervil River’s Will Sheff, as well as her frequent partner Jesse Harris. King also helped Jones put together a new group of musicians to perform on the album, including drummers Joey Waronker (Beck, R.E.M.) and James Gadson (Bill Withers), keyboardist James Poyser (Erykah Badu, Al Green), and guitarists Marc Ribot (Tom Waits, Elvis Costello) and Smokey Hormel (Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer).

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Photo credit: Autumn de Wilde

Norah Jones Official Website