Sophomore jinx? Not for this artist

Norah Jones is feeling the love in a big way. The 25-year-old singer-songwriter, whose new CD was advertised in some store aisles as “the perfect Valentine’s Day gift,” enjoyed the best week of sales in her young career as her new disc “Feels Like Home” sold 1.02 million copies.

That seven-day sales performance ranks among the best ever (although it falls far shy of the 2.4 million mark set during a week in March 2000 by ‘N Sync and their “No Strings Attached”) and effectively defies the “sophomore jinx” that, more than superstition, refers to the very real challenges that pop up for fast-start careers.

Few artists have enjoyed a quicker ride to the top of pop than Jones, whose piano and gossamer sound connected with music fans in a fashion that no one could have predicted. Her March 2002 debut disc, “Come Away With Me,” sold 9,700 copies in its first week and was greeted with apathy at major commercial radio stations. A year later, though, the disc won five Grammys, including best album, and finished 2003 as the second-best-selling album, behind 50 Cent’s debut CD.

This week, “Come Away With Me,” goosed by the arrival of the new Jones disc, jumped back into the top 20. There at No. 18, the Jones album sits one notch behind “The Diary of Alicia Keys,” another disc by a critically acclaimed, piano-playing songwriter who took home a bouquet of Grammys with her debut album. The Keys album has sold 2.2 million copies since its release in December, another case of an honors student breezing past any sophomore concerns.

Zach Hochkeppel, director of marketing for Blue Note, the label home for Jones, said talent and patience were the keys to success for Jones, but timing didn’t hurt either.

“It was post-Grammy week, it was right before Valentine’s Day and it was the first semi-dry weekend in the Northeast in months, so it was like a perfect storm of things working in our favor,” Hochkeppel said. That storm helped the entire music market, with 17 million CDs sold -- which, excluding the holiday months of November and December, is the highest one-week total since Nielsen SoundScan’s system began tracking sales in 1991.

Kanye West, the successful rap producer now stepping into his own as a performer, debuted at No. 2 with “College Dropout,” with 441,000 sold. Melissa Etheridge had the third-strongest debut, at No. 15, with her new album “Lucky.”