The Music of JEWEL (Spirit)

[R*Philippines]

"She has the whiff of longevity, too, a built-to-last quality
that suggests her talent will still be shining brightly long after
the likes of Alanis Morissette and Fiona Apple have faded."
by: Nigel Williamson
Spirit Review
Uncut - January 1999

The ice queen cometh...
JEWEL
SPIRIT
Rating: 5 stars 'A classic'
Follow-up to eight million-selling Pieces Of You from Alaskan singer-songwriter
Jewel Kilcher's story sounds like the imaginative fiction of some over-excited pop publicist - born on a homestead in Alaska without running water and electricity, lived in a camper van in Southern California, played the coffee houses, signed a record deal, sold eight million copies of her debut album in America, lived happily ever after. The plot could not be more improbable.
Remarkably, it is all more or less true, and the story gets even better. Spirit, her second album, should firmly establish Jewel, now 24, as the most sparkling of all female singer-songwriters since Joni Mitchell forged the template some 30 years ago. It is a huge advance on Pieces Of You, her 1994 debut, written while still in her teens. That effort was beguiling, sensitive and full of naive promise - but nothing more. Spirit, made in just five weeks and with the songs apparently selected from more than 200 in her prolific portfolio, marks her full flowering as a writer of lyrical subtlety and melodic invention with an astonishingly mature head on her young shoulders, generously dispensing lessons in life and insights into the human condition.
She has the whiff of longevity, too, a built-to-last quality that suggests her talent will still be shining brightly long after the likes of Alanis Morissette and Fiona Apple have faded. Just as the enduring Mitchell has made one of the albums of 1998 with Taming The Tiger, you somehow know Jewel will still be making quality albums in the year 2020.
Should that concern us when we are talking about three-minute disposable pop songs? The answer is surely yes. In her time Melanie rivalled Mitchell for popularity, but she never shared her gift for changing our perceptions of the world. That power belongs only to those rare poets who can transcend the ephemeral - Dylan, Cohen, Nyro, Newman. Prepare to admit Jewel into that ?lite company.
This is also one of those albums on which your favourite song changes with every listen."Deep Water" is an achingly beautiful acoustic strum with a classic Jewel treatise about realising our full potential. "What's Simple Is True" has a floating kd lang quality, while "Hands" is perhaps the key track, a piano ballad with shades of Natalie Merchant and a message about confronting one's inner fear. "Innocence Maintained" has a bouncy pop hook but a darker theme of sin and redemption, while "Barcelona" has a soaring "Let me fly" chorus which crashes back to earth dramatically on a minor chord. "Life Uncommon" is a hymn to setting ourselves free, "Do You" sounds like one of Sheryl Crow's more intriguing song-stories, and the album finishes on a perfect 10 with the prayer-like "Absence Of Fear".
I have spent weeks attempting to work out why this album is so special. I still don't really know. Yet somehow Jewel seems to possess an extraordinary serenity and understanding of our place in the greater scheme of things, a philosophical acceptance that we inhabit a tiny crack of consciousness in an infinite universe of unknowing with only a flickering moment out of countless eternity to make our presence count. And we had better not waste it, she seems to say.
Perhaps it was all those long nights in the cabin with no electricity and only the stars for company which produced this visionary form of Alaskan Zen.
No guru, no method, no teacher - but, despite her tender years, Jewel seems to have crammed the wisdom of a lifetime into these exquisitely inspiring songs.

[ItBeThatWay27]

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