Songfacts®:

• This is the lead single from Norah Jones' fourth album, The Fall. The song marks a new direction for Jones. She explained: "For this record, I just had a sound in my head. I wanted the grooves to be more present and heavy. And I also just wanted to do something different."
  
  She added that the new sound began to present itself on this song, which was one of the first numbers that Jones wrote for the project. "About a year ago, I did some demos in my home studio," she said. "I had some friends come in and we figured out a cool arrangement for 'Chasing Pirates,' with a cool drum part. It went somewhere I didn't expect it to go, and that became a direction to look in."
• Al Green/Erykah Badu sideman James Poyser plays the Wurlitzer on this track.
• Jones told Rolling Stone that unlike previous albums, she wrote the songs for The Fall including this one on an acoustic guitar instead of a piano. "It just felt more natural for me to play it on these songs," Jones explained: "I knew I wanted to play with grooves more than I have on previous albums. Some of these new songs lent themselves to having driving rhythms underneath."