A new Norah Jones record is a Groundhog Day experience: In track 1, she sounds as if she’s just getting out of bed; in track 2, she’s getting out of bed again; and on we go. But there’s no subtext of sex or sullenness. She just seems to like being sleepy.

With her cottony voice and mildly interpersonal lyrics, she’s a particular kind of sensualist: not an exciting one, but a comfortable one. If her mega-successful 2002 first album (10 million sales) seemed flukey, and her second (4 million) a wary effort to hew close to the debut, it’s easier now to see what she’s working with. This third album, produced by her bassist Lee Alexander, with songs written by Alexander and Jones, again dips into folk, blues, soul and country; again, the results are a mutant virus of gorgeous and bland, grainy and slick.

Jones projects a single mood, a remote idealization of semi-Southern blitheness, free of tremor and stress, even when she’s alluding to a soldier leaving behind his girlfriend in “Wish I Could.” The vibe of this cuddly-wuddly pajama party isn’t anything she’s gotten from her heroes, Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, Al Green or Bonnie Raitt; it’s not risk or joy or self-actualization or perseverance. It’s safety, which is just as powerful.

“Sinkin’ Soon,” with singing from M. Ward (a fellow traveler in drowsiness, but a more transcendent one) and a junkyard trombone solo, sounds like bantam-league Tom Waits; “Not My Friend” is subject to a wimpy lullaby melody; and “My Dear Country” nearly has an opinion about the president, but retreats.

Jones is so consistent that it’s hard to split hairs, but she comes best in the title track — simple and pretty, with a spoonful of her underrated, murmuring piano — and in “Wake Me Up,” a nearly weightless tune about, yes, wanting to drift off to sleep. They don’t call her Snorah for nothing.

DOWNLOAD: “Wake Me Up”