It’s been five years since Jewel foisted herself upon the cultural consciousness of this great nation with her breakout album, Pieces of You. The mega-success of “Who Will Save Your Soul? and “You Were Meant for Me” soon led to a spoken-word album, a plethora of softly-lit black-and-white photo shoots and a strange nationwide awareness of the fact she slept in her car while working her way to the top. She released two follow-up records, neither of which were able to match the success of Pieces of You. Somehow, she’s managed to remain on Atlantic Records’ roster long enough to release yet another album, This Way.
The album begins innocuously enough with “Standing Still,” a fairly competent piece of pop songwriting. Jewel seems to have suppressed her usual melodramatic lyrical tendencies, and the instrumentation remains unobjectionable. The album’s third track, “Everybody Needs Someone Sometime,” also starts out well. Steady drums and guitar riff lead into Jewel’s best Lou Reed sing-speak impression. Yeah, but then guess what?it starts sucking. Oh well. It doesn’t have to be “Sweet Jane,” but for a woman so in touch with herself, she ought to be able to write a line better than, “Spivey Leeks was a drip of a man / He looked like a potato shoved in jeans”?probably not the English language’s best example of simile.
Things get worse. In “Cleveland,” Jewel sings, “stewardesses like Cosmo magazine / Vogue makes me nervous, I feel so plain.” This is an awfully bold statement from someone whose four albums’ cover art prominently features her own smiling, blond face. The subject of “Do You Want to Play?” apparently “lived beneath the disco discount store / with pictures of Randy Newman scattered all across the floor.” One can only hope that Mr. Newman recieved a fat check for this unfortunate shout-out.
Jewel’s lyrics deal in the sort of adolescent imagery that is laughable at first, but over the course of an album, simply seems par for the course. After listening to a verse like “Your mother was a wolf bite / Your daddy was a cigarette / Your brother was a rosebud / Crossbred with a car wreck / Your sister was a stockbroker / But you ain’t nothing but a turtleneck,” laughter should be the first impulse. However, an album’s worth of this dreck numbs one’s poetic and musical sense. Jewel’s mediocrity is insiduous, and that is the true tragedy of This Way?this album will make people dumber. You can only hope you’ll find it funny again in the morning.
The production, though, takes This Way from regrettable but forgettable mediocrity to life-negating crapulence. Cheeseball synth strings on “Break Me” sound like something from a Richard Marx album. She even goes Nashville on “Everybody Needs Someone Sometimes,” but not the good Tammy Wynette or Patsy Cline kind of Nashville, but rather the lousy LeAnn Rimes kind. Alas.
Overall, This Way suffers from the kind of overproduced sheen endemic to today’s major pop and rock releases. Getting rich and famous is the worst thing that could have happened to Jewel. Instead of just having to deal with her sickeningly saccharine voice and acoustic guitar, she gets a hotshot producer, and now we have to put up with drum loops, synths, accordions and innumnerable cookie-cutter electric guitar overdubs. People like Jewel should not be allowed to work with ProTools?there should be a law. Don’t get me wrong?it would still be better if she hadn’t put out any album at all, but if you have to make a lousy album, you should do it in the least conspicuous way possible. Indeed, the least offensive songs on the album are the final two tracks, which were recorded live with simple acoustic guitar accompaniment.
Look at it in term of market economics, people. Surely the resources allocated to the excessive production of this album could have better spent elsewhere. Government intervention is sorely needed here. My consumer surplus for this album was certainly negative, and I didn’t even pay for it!
Don’t buy This Way. In fact, don’t waste precious Internet bandwidth downloading it either. Save your $15, and instead buy a copy of Beau Sia’s A Night Without Armor II: The Revenge. Sia, a New York-based spoken-word artist released this parody of Jewel’s anthology three years ago. Each poem in Sia’s book shares its title with a poem in Jewel’s book. However, that’s where the similarities end. Take “The Bony Ribs of Adam.” It starts with the line, “I was never very religious,” and ends with the line, “but thank you jesus / for pleated skirts.” Now that’s entertainment.
