Posted by Andrew Unterberger on 02/21/2012 at 5:11 PM News

The Popdust Files: danger mouse, little broken hearts, Norah Jones, upcoming albums

It’s official: We’re ready to have Norah Jones back in our lives. It’s been a decade since Come Away With Me sold an absolutely insane amount of copies and briefly made Norah’s light, mellow jazz-pop publicly unavoidable, and she’s gotten progressively less present in our lives since, to the point that we had no idea she had even put out two albums in the last five years. Now she’s gearing up for a May 2012 release of her new album Little Broken Hearts, the track listing and cover of which have now hit the internet, and we’re feeling it’s time to crack open a nice bottle of red, go out to our office podium, and crank a new Norah album ever so gently.

We’re particularly excited about one of the names attached to it: Danger Mouse, producer behind Gnarls Barkley, Broken Bells, and certain Gorillaz and Black Keys efforts. He seems like just the guy to put a couple modern touches on Norah’s classic sound, without distracting too much from what made her so accessible in the first place. Norah and Danger (heh) had previously worked together on a couple tracks on the latter’s 2011 album Rome, and apparently the partnership was fruitful enough to spawn an entire LP’s worth of collaboration. They play just about all the instruments on Hearts between the two of them; Jones doing piano, keyboards, bass and guitar, and Danger Mouse on drums, bass, guitar, keyboards and string arrangements.

Sounds good to us. Tracklist below, as well as a taste of what collaboration between the two has sounded like in the past:

1. “Good Morning”
2. “Say Goodbye”
3. “Little Broken Hearts”
4. “She’s 22″
5. “Take It Back”
6. “After The Fall”
7. “4 Broken Hearts”
8. “Travelin’ On”
9. “Out On The Road”
10. “Happy Pills”
11. “Miriam”
12. “All A Dream”

[FMBQ]