Norah Jones sometimes wishes she weren’t so famous, so she’s taken to performing in small bands in disguise. She performed in a hush-hush show at Rodeo Bar last Wednesday as a backup singer and guitarist for the all-female country trio the Sloppy Joannes. Dressed in a ratty baseball cap and girlish braids, Jones kept her eyes glued to the strings of her red Fender, and one audience member’s yell of “Go, Norah Jones!” was shushed by the crowd. The week before, Jones joined the bill at the Delancey as half of a punk duo called El Madmo; the audience was told to “stick around for NoJo,” who wore a platinum-blonde wig, fishnet stockings, and an eighties-style glittery eye mask. Though the group’s sound was hardly abrasive, Jones’s lyrics did reveal a degree of punkishness, with lines like “I think he’s real cute / Gives me his skin flute.”

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• Archive: “Intelligencer”
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