THE NORAH THING.(songwriter Jessie Harris's hit single from Norah Jones's album)

Jesse Harris is an unsigned thirty-three-year-old musician who was recently nominated for a Grammy award for writing "Don't Know Why," the hit single from Norah Jones's album "Come Away with Me." (The album, which Jesse wrote about a third of and also plays guitar on, was nominated for eight Grammys altogether.) Two weeks ago, when "Come Away with Me" moved into the top spot on the Billboard chart, Jesse became, in a sense, the No. 1 songwriter in the country.

He learned this the other night, several hours after getting home to Brooklyn from a weeklong trip to Brazil with some of the members of his current band, the Ferdinandos, which is named after an Italian restaurant in Carroll Gardens. That night, he played an open-mike night at a bar in Williamsburg, and, over the next seven days, he had three rehearsals with two different bands, two studio sessions, one sound check, two gigs, one memorable Italian meal, and a radio interview at a public station in the Bronx that frequently plays his music and wanted to talk to him about "the whole Norah thing." So many artists want to co-write with him now that Sony--which publishes his music but doesn't distribute the four records he's made with the Ferdinandos or the two with an earlier band, Once Blue--is beginning to turn people away.

The pace of Jesse's old, pre-Norah-thing life was more like: wake up, eat breakfast, play guitar for a couple of hours, maybe do some temp work typing scripts for "As the World Turns." (His mother used to be a writer for the show and has played the character Dr. Susan Stewart since 1968.) Occasionally, he taught guitar to private-school boys on the Upper West Side. (Jesse graduated from Riverdale in 1987.) He'd spend about eight minutes a day answering e-mail and shipping Ferdinandos CDs that had been ordered from his Web site; now it takes him at least an hour--"and that's only because I try to be extremely brief."

Jesse met Norah Jones five years ago, when he went to hear his friend Kenny Wollesen (now the drummer in the Ferdinandos) play at the University of North Texas, in Denton, where Norah was a freshman. "Norah had this big ...