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Published on Sunday, Jun 08, 2008
PERFECTLY CLEAR
Jewel
Valory Music Co./Big Machine
That Perfectly Clear, Jewel's strong seventh album, is her ''country'' record is of course ludicrous; she's been country for years. She describes her father as a ''poetic cowboy.'' Her longtime boyfriend is the rodeo champion Ty Murray. She is a host of Nashville Star, country music's American Idol. And it is just a short, mournful-fiddle-assisted hop from the coffeehouse folk with which she made her name to Nashville's more contemplative wing.
And so the ways in which Perfectly Clear is more country than her 1995 debut album Pieces of You are small, more a function of gestures and nods than of wholesale conversion. Jewel wrote or helped write every song here save one, and the producer John Rich (of Big & Rich) has done little to hammer down her well-worn eccentricities: wordiness; imperfect rhymes; a sharp, assured voice that collapses for effect.
The title track shows just how far Jewel, 34, hasn't come. ''The doorway frames you,'' she sings, ''a picture-perfect silhouette/blue sky of regret/enough to hang you.'' It could have been on her debut album. (To be fair, it was written when she was 18.) Two Become One also appeared, in different form, on her 2003 album 0304. (The dance-floor flirtation on that album was Jewel's true genre experiment.)
Still, her brand of country is gentle; making her a genre star will require adrenalizing it. And while the most blatant attempts at shoring up Jewel's credibility should be the least successful, the opposite is true. On Loved by You (Cowboy Waltz), she yodels, compellingly (it's a skill she often displays live). Anyone but You boldly revisits country's early-'70s pop moment, in the manner of Lee Ann Womack's recent There's More Where That Came From; Jewel is lovely on it, her voice breathy and bittersweet.
And Till It Feels Like Cheating recalls the blues-inflected sound of Julie Roberts. (One of the song's writers, Lisa Carver, wrote Roberts' excellent post-breakup dissection, Wake Up Older.) It's the best song here, and the likeliest hit. But it is no coincidence that it is the one Jewel did not write — and that it sounds the least like Jewel.
— Jon Caramanica
New York Times
PERFECTLY CLEAR
Jewel
Valory Music Co./Big Machine
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