Jewel

Jewel is a lady of undeniable success. Eleven years have passed since her splendid debut album ‘Pieces of You' during which she has sold over 25million records worldwide. Poetry books, painting, acting are all part of her many skills but its back to music for now with her sixth and latest LP release ‘Goodbye Alice in the Wonderland'.
It seems reading the inner sleeve, that she put her heart and soul into this record, it being a deeply auto-biographical album, carefully sequenced “like a novel, with a beginning, middle and an end.”
However, for me, it's a great disappointment. The songs are arranged in the most banal of forms, with the American tendency to ‘countrify' everything with plush and magnified arrangements but with no character. Producer Rob Cavallo had his ‘Goo Goo Dolls' hat on not his ‘Green Day (among his credits) tee shirt. With undoubted talent, she comes off more' Lena Marlin' than ‘Rickie Lee Jones' and there is no quirkiness or surprises à la' Mitchell'.
There are so many good women singer songwriters from ‘Edie Brickel' to ‘Martha Wainwright' who have given the music industry a good shaking with there infusion of talent, charm and bite but Jewel has lost her crown and settled for cheap imitation.
Maybe ‘Live' the lyrics she believes in may come alive and pace and tempo of the music can change as the mood takes her but this country blandness of typical MOR American radio is too distracting for me.
Go back and listen to the first album where Alice lived happy and joyous in Wonderland.