Jewel: This Way : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

As she so repeatedly displays on her new album, This Way, Jewel loves the coffeehouse folk-music mode of sitting around singing 'bout the state of the world, the way Tori Amos loves Bart¢k and Janet Jackson loves dance. "They say that you're only half-alive/Till you give extra whitening a try," Jewel avers in a reference to advertising and toothpaste on "Jesus Loves You," a surging little rock tune that's all loopy commentary and sweet groove.

But out of that often cute and precious folky-poetic tradition, Jewel has delivered recordings - "Foolish Games" from her 1995 debut, Pieces of You, "Hands" and "Barcelona" from 1998's Spirit - that create their own luscious systems of personal observation, worry and hope. The apparent simplicity of folk presents wondrously complex and sexy possibilities for Jewel. She's one of the most richly idiomatic female pop singers of her generation, combining the blazing timbral containment of Karen Carpenter with the rootsy looseness of Bonnie Raitt. With This Way, Jewel continues on - elegant, earthy, engaged.

Unlike Spirit, where producer Patrick Leonard draped her essential folkiness in stylish L.A. keyboard auras, This Way finds Jewel in Nashville, working with producer-guitarist Dann Huff. The music has no particular Nashville characteristic except one: an unwavering concentration on melody and arrangements. Huff adds punch and color - Southern accents and ranging Western backdrops - to the music. Yet the arrangements of songs such as "Standing Still" and "This Way," both of which boast tunes a nation could sing, or the stark romantic ballad "Break Me," are all about Jewel - her voice, her thoughts, her stories.

She truly breaks out twice. On "I Won't Walk Away," Jewel and Huff travel to a Continental soundscape of moody strings and tinkling pianos. "Sometimes," she sings, "the world don't make sense," amid a poignant, magisterially sensible arrangement. But on "Love Me, Just Leave Me Alone," all her Seventies rock-chick leanings take flight as Huff and his band pull a Black Crowes. It's there, among "wolf bite" mothers and loser "turtleneck" guys, that she delivers quite a line indeed: "I tried," she sings, "to be unlovable." Jewel has little talent for that.