When researching for my interview with Norah Jones, I almost missed a fairly crucial detail. I was so convinced that her equally famous father, sitar legend Ravi Shankar, had died in early 2012 [Ed note: Ravi passed away from a short illness Dec. 11, 2012], that I’d prepared three or four questions in case she was in a candid frame of mind and felt like talking about how that had affected her. (Yes, journalists are the worst.)

We mentioned him only briefly, as he and daughter (Jones' half-sister) Anoushka had both been nominated for separate Grammy awards for best world music album the week before. Jones, whose relationship with her father really only began when she was an adult, was on tour in Argentina when we spoke and said she hadn't heard the good news, shrugging it off: “I'm kind of in no-man's land at the moment!”

The day after the nominations were announced, Shankar had undergone heart-valve surgery at a hospital in California, and was suffering respiratory difficulties by the time of our interview a couple of days later. If that news had reached her and there was worry in the back of her mind, she didn't show it; she spoke cheerfully about Argentina (“It's hot — Texas hot!”), her strong working relationship with Brian ‘Danger Mouse’ Burton, and how journalists are the worst. Shankar died the next day.

The loss is obviously a sad one for both Jones and the music world as a whole, but the Texas-raised, New York-based singer seems to be getting better at working through pain in her music. Her last two albums, 2009's ‘The Fall’ and last year's ‘Little Broken Hearts’, both dealt with the fallout from difficult breakups, and as a pair seem to represent the beginning of a second age of Norah Jones.

The first age began in 2002, when she debuted on iconic jazz label Blue Note Records with the enticingly subdued ‘Come Away With Me’. It went on to sell ten million copies, and she followed it with two more albums in a similar vein. During those years she collaborated with OutKast, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, Ryan Adams, and a litany of other stars who couldn't get enough of her smoky voice, eventually heading in a more indie-rock direction with ‘The Fall’, writing with Adams and Will Sheff (Okkervil River).

For ‘Little Broken Hearts’, she limited her collaborators to just one — producer Brian Burton, who she'd befriended while working on the Danger Mouse/ Daniele Luppi album ‘Rome’.

“He has an amazing ear for melody, and he's a great songwriter,” Jones says. “I was looking for somebody to work with, and I was trying to do something different and interesting. And I didn't have any songs after my last album, and I wasn't writing a lot, and he wanted to go in and write together [starting from scratch], which I had never really tried.”

As the album took shape, becoming focused on a story of betrayal and breaking up that took some inspiration from Jones' last relationship, she and Burton exchanged influences and ideas “He likes twangy guitars, and I like twangy guitars, but we like them in very different ways... I like country music, but he likes Morricone twangy guitars!”

The album that emerged was a different beast again from ‘The Fall’, with Burton's signature sparkling-analogue pop production nuzzling up against Jones' torch-singer tones and newfound adventurousness in her subject matter.
“I don't think anybody was trying to push anybody in a weird direction so much as we were both really open,” she says. “And I was in his [studio] space, so of course I was looking for stuff that he did that I don't do in my own space. And that was really nice just to get somebody else's take on things.”

The cover of ‘...Hearts’ is based on the poster for Russ Meyer's ‘Mudhoney’ — one of several Meyer posters hanging in Burton's studio. It's tempting to assume that the album's dark tone might have been influenced in part by the choice of this aesthetic, but Jones seems to have been feeling a little stabby after the latest breakup. 'Miriam' is a simple, lovely lullaby that slowly reveals itself as a murder fantasy.

“I'd worked through most of it, it's just…” Jones thinks for a moment. “Y'know, we all go through this stuff. It's nothing new. So it makes for good material sometimes. And it's fun to write with Brian — he writes pretty dark stuff too, so it kinda added to the darkness.”

It's hard to phrase a question about’ The Departure’ or ‘The New Sound’, to compare the Danger Mouse album to the one that was in every cafe, car and cocktail lounge a decade ago, without sounding a bit patronising.

“Tell me about it!” laughs Jones, not without an edge. “But it doesn't matter. People sensationalise things too. Is it that different? Yeah, it's a little different. But is it crazy different? Well, no, it's not a black metal record. Is it a nice change? Yeah, great! Ok! You either like it or you don't, and you either like me or you don't. I don't know. I've stopped analysing it.”

The sweet-voiced Jones is, in fact, what a fellow Texan might call a straight shooter. When I ask if she ever reads her press, she turns the question back on me bluntly: “No, I think it's destructive. Are you going to tell me about it now? Are you one of those people?”

It's not easy to clamber out from under the shadow of an ubiquitous smash-hit record, and Jones has managed it, for the most part. ‘Come Away With Me’ is an unassuming record that happens to make for lovely background noise, and it was abused as such. There's a sense among some critics and audiences that no matter how many times she works with Mike Patton, Q-Tip, Charlie Hunter or Dolly Parton, Jones will still be that nice singer your mum likes. That perception is likely to dog her for her whole career, and she's had a decade to work this out and decide how to handle it.

“I'm smart enough to know that what really matters is that I love what I do,” she says firmly. “And I connect with my audience — they come to the shows, and I feel great.”

Norah Jones might exist in your mind as soft-spoken and starry-eyed — and maybe she used to be — but she's an industry veteran now, smart and downright steely.

“You just have to be confident in what you're doing, and not let stupid things distract you and tear you down,” she says simply. “And I've always made music from the heart, and I've always done what I do because I enjoy it. And I've never done it for a quick buck, or to get on top of something silly. I've always done that, and I always will.”

Norah Jones plays Brisbane Convention Centre Tuesday February 19. ‘Little Broken Hearts’ is out now.