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Jewel’s voice is unmistakable.
It either draws one in with ineffable appeal, or puts one off in the way of people who try a little too hard.
This reviewer puts this down to the combination of fine skills and a twist of artistic narcissism that seems to penetrate the lady’s art. Marshall McLuhan famously claimed that ‘the medium is the message’. Jewel often seems to be forcing a message into an art form that is not exactly fitted to the effort.
Yet she sometimes breaks through to persuasiveness, even with a tune that is heavily laden with message (‘Hands’).
It may be that this artist with the stunning good looks and the almost eery voice will remain a musical enigma, the twin impulses she generates creating two distinct publics, one highly devoted to her every album, the other cynical and generative of nasty-minded anti-Jewel websites.
She has styled herself a kind of troubadour of the religion of tolerant niceness. This is all good, as far as it goes. Yet it inevitably wears thin when its definition of either religion, tolerance, or niceness bumps into others that it finds incomprehensible. An artist who stays to conventional themes runs little risk of this happening. But Jewel, like the dinner guest who brings up religion, politics, or sex at the dinner table, will doubtless continue to find herself called upon to articulate her convictions. That tends to make art messy, ideological, and short-lived.
Yet just when one begins to fear the worst, she ends an album with a hauntingly gorgeous love song like ‘Absence of Fear’, its gentle piano intro setting the stage for a humble, poignant, and yearning piece. Enigma indeed.
Let’s hope Jewel’s considerable gifts trump any dire artistic turn of events and that she continues to toss off the striking hit ever year or two.
Canter Bridge 
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