Jesse Harris

Nobody ever said pop music was fair. Case in point: While some losers of the most recent song of the year Grammy race are on tour filling sports arenas, the winner, who wrote the cornerstone song on an album that's sold more than 6 million copies in the U.S., found himself second-billed Thursday at the Knitting Factory Hollywood, strumming in front of maybe 60 people. Counting the bartenders.

Nobody ever said pop music was fair. Case in point: While some losers of the most recent song of the year Grammy race are on tour filling sports arenas, the winner, who wrote the cornerstone song on an album that's sold more than 6 million copies in the U.S., found himself second-billed Thursday at the Knitting Factory Hollywood, strumming in front of maybe 60 people. Counting the bartenders.

There was never any doubt that the piano player was the leader of the band in David Benoit's opening set Thursday at Catalina Bar & Grill. With a battery of microphones stuck into the guts of the club's big Yamaha grand and the sound cranked up to place Benoit's busy piano lines in the vanguard of his entire quintet, his playing dominated most of the music.

Every one of them words rang true And glowed like burnin' coal Pourin' off of every page Like it was written in my soul from me to you. * Bob Dylan's words sum up how participants in a concert Tuesday in New York feel about the man who sang them in "Tangled Up in Blue" and the album they came from, 1975's "Blood on the Tracks."

Proof that subtlety still exists Subtlety is not dead; it merely feels that way if you listen to too much radio. Bands such as the Long Beach-based quintet Fielding stoke the fires, making nuanced rock with melodic guilelessness and winsome sophistication. Think Travis at the British band's lushest, or the Get Up Kids, if the Midwesterners got out more. "From classic rock to punk to folk to Britpop ...

On March 3, 2002, the debut album by an obscure chanteuse from Texas named Norah Jones debuted on the nation's pop chart at No. 139 with modest sales of 9,700 copies. Now, after her Grammy sweep on Sunday, Jones' "Come Away With Me" is poised to claim No. 1 on the chart by selling more than 500,000 copies in a single week. The CBS telecast of the 45th annual Grammys, where the honey-voiced Jones won five awards, including best album, has spurred a wave of curious consumers to scoop up her CD.

It's hard to feel sorry for Norah Jones: At 31, she's already sold more records than most artists will over a lifetime, and despite her soccer-mom appeal, she's retained a kind of cool-musician cachet, collaborating in recent years with Bright Eyes, Beck and the Beastie Boys. In an unsteady music industry, hers is a success story with both commercial and creative dimensions. Still, on Friday night at the Orpheum Theatre, where Jones played a sold-out date on her current U.S. tour, your heart went out to the singer a little bit when her promise to "go back in time" to her early work earned a more enthusiastic reaction than did the new songs that preceded it. Jones opened the show with a long stretch of material from last year's "The Fall" — moody, groove-based tunes such as "Chasing Pirates" and "Even Though," in which she projected a soulfulness and a devotion to rhythm largely absent from her first three albums.

If you're hanging out in truck stops around the country in the next couple of months, keep an eye out for who's sitting in the next booth. It could well be Korn frontman Jonathan Davis. But give the dude some space -- he'll be working. With pre-production and music writing underway for Korn's next album, Davis is hitting the road with a couple of compadres to look for inspiration for lyrics. "I'm going to take off on a tour bus and start writing," he says.

There's an old saying in boxing that a good big man can always beat a good little man, and the parallel in pop music is that a good singer-songwriter can connect more consistently than simply a good singer. In contrast to the pre-rock era, when singers just sang and writers just wrote, the tendency of today's most gifted songwriters is to follow the path of Bob Dylan and the Beatles and record their own material.

Here's the rundown on guests and topics for the weekend's public-affairs programs: Today "To the Contrary": Author Deborah Tannen, 1 p.m. (28). "John McLaughlin's One on One": death, 1:30 p.m. (28). "Evans & Novak": The Rev. Jesse Jackson, 2:30 p.m., repeats Sunday 7 a.m. CNN. "Tony Brown's Journal": Brazil, 2:30 p.m. (28). "Reliable Sources":, William Ginsburg, attorney for Monica Lewinsky, 3:30 p.m., repeats Sunday 7:30 a.m. CNN. "Capital Gang": Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.), 4 p.m., 7:30 p.m.

If Madeleine Peyroux had left the naming of her current album to her record label's marketing team, they might have come up with something like "File Under Norah Jones." It wouldn't have been the most sensitive of moves, but it would have certainly cut to the chase in trying to attract a wider audience. On the Rounder album "Careless Love," Peyroux exhibits much of the same exquisite taste and understated command that has helped Jones sell nearly 15 million albums in the U.S.