The hotel lobby on Manhattan’s Lower East Side is buzzing with activity. There are effeminate men in sunglasses and ski hats, bored, long-legged models in knee-high boots punching BlackBerrys and, outside the glass doors, a posse of paparazzi. They are waiting for someone recognisable to emerge. We slip past. The petite woman in a red flannel shirt and a black leather jacket and I are invisible.

“It’s Fashion Week,” says Norah Jones, the world’s top-selling female jazz singer, with more than 36m albums sold. “And I guess there are some important people here.” It’s hard to tell if she is being ironic, but her modesty isn’t feigned.

Jones is relieved to be ignored. She has never been an attention-seeker. She is stunning in an understated way; even with professionally applied make-up, her big brown eyes, dark wavy hair and lustrous skin allow her the freedom to ghost past the cameras.

We head downtown to lunch, and she is noticeably at ease once we’ve left the sterile hotel lounge and the glare of the photoshoot she has just completed. “It was cool,” she says, placid and even-handed, a tone she maintains throughout. Voluble, she’s not. As we walk, her eyes fix on the giant, shiny new buildings around her; she marvels at the construction transforming the gritty urban landscape. She’s lived in the neighbourhood for many years, but is considering a move out of Manhattan, across the East River to Brooklyn. There’s a sense that she, too, is evolving after her breakthrough success eight years ago.

Several times during our time together she says “now that I’m older” — although she’s only 30. The statement is laden with the consequences of having achieved spectacular success at 22, an age when most people are just beginning to work out who they are and what they want. Jones was too busy working, thrust into a whirlwind journey with high-stakes recognition — and feeling, at times, like an imposter.

How did she handle the inevitable aftermath? She’s grown up a lot. Being off the road, making choices on her own, in charge of her own time. It has been another kind of journey: an interior one. She has been searching for how to feel valued beyond the public adoration. There are hints of a mini existential crisis: working out where she fits in and how she matters.

There have also been endings — or, as she puts it, “transitions”. Break-ups with her band and her longtime boyfriend prompted her to take stock and led her, of all places, to church, which she attends regularly. It was not divine intervention she was looking for but perspective.

What’s most distinctive about Jones is that she seems so normal. Normal enough to slip by paparazzi unnoticed, or to walk down the street without sunglasses or security. Normal enough to remain modest, considering her father is Ravi Shankar, “the greatest Indian musician on the planet”, who has performed with Yehudi Menuhin and the Beatles.

Considering that at the age of 20 she dropped out of university in Texas with no real agenda other than to move to New York and become a jazz singer — and in little more than two years, in 2003, saw her debut album, Come Away with Me, win her eight Grammy awards; and considering her next release is likely to push her total album sales above 40m, one wonders why it didn’t swell her head, why it didn’t degenerate into the sex, drugs and notoriety of the Amy Winehouse sisterhood. She became a household name, turning a respected fringe genre of music mainstream; you couldn’t go into Starbucks or sit in a dentist’s chair without hearing her sultry vocals. It was the kind of success X Factor winners would kill for — stardom without being mortgaged to management companies.

And yet the success made her uncomfortable. When asked what it was that surprised her most about it she says: “That it happened at all.” She had always been musically confident, but the rest of it threw her. “I felt like I was in an alien world.” The furniture of fame, the interviews, the smiling for the cameras, the marketing of the brand, the machinery of what to wear and how to respond. “I just wasn’t savvy with how to handle it.”

Shrewdness is not a quality one associates with Jones, but it’s clear she’s learnt not just where her limits are but how to enforce them: “I know what I have to do to get the record out there and what I can’t do, what I won’t do.” When she says this her tone and manner are soft, but there is a steely determination and firmness.

What made Jones so popular? She was the antithesis of the manufactured pop star — perhaps that was the point — a serious musician with serious talent. Her popularity paved the way for the re-emergence of jazz-focused female vocalists such as Amy Winehouse, though the singers couldn’t be more different. “I’ve heard her, of course. I bought her record and I thought it was great.” She pauses. “It’s sad her life has overshadowed the music. She has a great voice.”

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