Monday, November 24, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

CONCERT REVIEW: Jewel flashes vocal power, multifaceted style

Singer's fans treated to subtlety, intimacy

Jewel smiles during Saturday night's performance. Photo by SAMANTHA CLEMENS / REVIEW-JOURNAL

I don't know what to make of Jewel.

I've interviewed her twice. She seemed thoughtful but not easy. That's a compliment. The first time I saw her perform was last year at the Hard Rock. I thought she was bad because her voice seemed tiny, so I left.

But in retrospect, I'm not sure whether she seemed bad that night because (A) she had a busted collarbone, which could have shortened her breath, or (B) I was sitting in the back by the bar noise, which could have drowned out her little speakers, or (C) I was having a bad day.

I don't care what the answer is because on Saturday, she was excellent at the Aladdin Theatre. She brought no band. She played acoustic guitar, alone. She talked a lot and was a quietly funny storyteller. And being very close to her, I could tell that she had a powerful singing voice, powerful in volume and dynamics, powerful in tonal quality and powerful in passion.

Maybe it was disquieting at times when Jewel sang in her baby-doll, female falsetto. But I liked that discomfort. It served as a middle-finger essay on how ridiculously childlike most Americans preferred their women sex symbols to be in 2003, yet it seemed to be a style in which Jewel wanted to sing. In other words, she was gifted with the tendency simultaneously to represent America's pedo-perversity and to comment on it.

Jewel was also fascinated with the words "hand" and "heart." She sang "hand" at least 15 times in two hours. She sang "heart" at least 27 times. This obsession was easy to stereotype: She played guitar with her hands; she sang from her singer-songwriter heart.

Regarding hands, she sang (I think): "Don't try to understand me; your hands already knew too much, anyway." And "I miss your hands on my skin; this bed's too big without you." And "I'm left here with my hands all awkward." And "You could hurt me using your hands." And the song "Hands" went: "My hands are small, I know, but they are not yours; they are my own. ... And I am never broken."

Her heart was "God's heart." It was "bleeding," "in your hands," "in your teeth," "too weak in the knees" and "beyond advice." Jewel advised, "Follow your heart; your intuition, it will lead you in the right direction." She scoffed, "Sorry if my heart-breaking ruined your day." And she scorned, "I'll never trust my pink, fleshy heart."

Jewel (her last name is Kilcher, and she's at the literarily productive age of 29) is an honest lyricist. But her bigger strength is emoting, living and breathing every snip of a lyric.

In "Save Your Soul," she nailed a huge range of styles, speeds and volumes by talking, yelling, jazz-scatting, whispering, using that baby-doll thing and sort of speaking in tongues.

Her story songs featured serious and comic lines, such as "Jesus died for my sins; I promise it won't happen again" and "I'm starting to sneeze ... do you wanna do me? Do you wanna catch a cold with me?"

The 1,800 fans gave her the quiet that her subtleties required. If radio-only listeners had paid the expensive $100 charge to see Jewel sing her pop hit "Intuition," I'm not sure they would have had the contextual capacity, with their "Entertainment Tonight on MTV" conditioning, to sit still for a heartfelt night of uncheeky, hushed performances along the lines of "love equals pain."

But maybe they would have liked Jewel's charming, one-sided conversations about writing songs, meeting Bob Dylan and holding an AK-47 during a drug bust in Mexico. (She told me she makes stuff up in concert, so who knows what was her reality?)

I did believe her when she said it's nice to be famous and sing bitterly about ex-lovers. More than this, I adored her slow, poetically told joke about how her concert did not come with a big video screen, which would have revealed how fake her eyelashes were:

"I was worried all the women out there would see these long, luscious, glamorous, even somewhat model-esque lashes and think they're real and go home and commit suicide. I didn't want that weight on my shoulders. I actually couldn't get them off."

I still don't know who Jewel is, but I prefer to regard her as a wispy intellectual who snuck into the mainstream and secretly mocked it -- fake lashes, short skirt and all.