The real Jewel's story is stranger than fiction, of course: She grew up in Homer, Alaska, and worked on her parents' farm until they split, after which she sang in bars with her father and was taught a love of poetry by her mother. She was educated at a hoity-toity high school in Michigan, then began adult life as a beach bum in San Diego, where she lived in a van and started writing songs, at least one of which—"Who Will Save Your Soul"—has a chorus that will likely be stuck in your brain till you're 80. The album on which that song appeared, Pieces of You, was released early in 1995, and a lot has happened to Jewel since then. Pieces caught the public's imagination a full year after its release, eventually racking up millions in sales. And Jewel herself has become a sort of poster child for self-expression and overexposure, wearing a much-ballyhooed see-through dress to an industry awards show and releasing a critically drubbed (yet best-selling) book of poetry.
But in some ways, not that much has changed for Jewel as a writer since she was 19. On Spirit, she still writes about the fragility of the psyche, the beauty of nature, and the power of the individual. Some of it comes off as musings ripped from a schoolgirl's notebook: The album's lead track, for example, contains the ungainly image "your heart like grape gum on the ground" (she gets an "A" for alliteration though), as well as the puzzling couplet, "When you're drowning in deep water/ And you wake up making love to a wall." Meanwhile, "Innocence Maintained," an impassioned plea against hatred, describes a character as having "a hole inside his soul a manicure could not fill." As Shakespeare once said, "Huh?"
Still, Spirit makes plain why Jewel's well-intentioned yet sometimes facile lyrics strike a chord with her audience while her poetry lies flat on the page. On songs like "Hands," "Down So Long," and "Kiss the Flame," her words are borne aloft by sparkling melodies and her soaring voice, making even the most cynical observer take an unreassuring platitude like, "If I could tell the world just one thing/ It would be that we're all OK," somewhat in stride. If there's nothing as immediately arresting here as "Who Will Save Your Soul"—after a few listenings the songs tend to blend together in a smoothly produced slow- to mid-tempo mass—Spirit will act as a sort of mellow balm for bruised psyches or as a primer for raising your own inner child. And, hey, maybe Jewel is right and we are all OK. Just once more, let's give her the benefit of the doubt.
— Daniel Durchholz (Wall Of Sound)
f Jewel Kilcher didn't exist, you'd think the producers of Northern Exposure would have been able to create her. After all, couldn't the bucolic, yet startlingly erudite town of Sicily, Alaska, have used a gorgeous young ingenue who by day tended horses and by night wrote poetry that spoke plainly but straight from the heart and held down a steady singing gig at the Brick, where her songs commented wryly on the town's quotidian disasters? And she yodels to boot. Ah, Hollywood. Another missed opportunity.