I’m pretty sure with this entry, I’m caught up with my listening, and it’s probably time to swap out for a new box of CDs. That is, if I can resist just listening to Alpocalypse over and over for a while. What can I say, a boy never outgrows his “Weird” Al. In any case, in this installment, I lament a pop trend that never came to be, and finally get around to the group I spent more time listening to in my teens than any other:

♦Jewel – Spirit: The apparent similarities between this record and Sheryl Crow, which I talked about a few posts ago, are easy to see. Both records are sophomore efforts produced after both performers hit the big time with relatively small, stripped-down debuts that blew up huge. They’ve even got similar black and white portrait covers. Like Sheryl Crow, Spirit builds on some of the things that made the preceding project successful; in Jewel’s case, that means folky vocals and instrumentation, personal lyrical content on an intimate scale, and a little bit of yodelling. However, unlike the Crow record, Jewel eschews much of the raw, stripped-down production favor of a slicker, cleaner sound. It’s not that this doesn’t work, because the record is quite well produced, and still maintains the singer-songwriter vibe she’d cultivated an maintained (at least until she released the ladies razor commercial dance-pop single “Intuition” a few years later), leading to great success on the radio with singles like “Down So Long” and “Hands” (which, to this day, I can’t hear without replacing the lyrics with those of modernhumorist.com’s excellent parody“A Little Prayer (Wolverine’s Theme)”).

♦Michelle Branch – The Spirit Room: Once upon a time, around the turn of the century, I had a hope. A hope that the era of disposable blonde pop tarts in mainstream music like Britney and Xtina would be supplanted by a new movement of youthful, attractive, and (mostly) brunette female singer-songwriters. Enter acts like Vanessa Carlton, Norah Jones, and Michelle Branch (heralded, of course, by the likes of Jewel, whose blondeness we’ll forgive in this instance). Sadly, that movement was not to be, but the sparks thereof left us with a few nuggets of refreshing, confessional, and infectious pop music that isn’t all about going to da club and exploiting the virgin/whore paradox, and on the whole, more lyrically complex and compelling than Taylor Swift. The Spirit Room is a perfectly wonderful pop record, and emininetly listenable, particularly the ubiquitous single “Everywhere,” as well as “Goodbye to You”, which, while sadly not a Scandal cover, was a pretty great coming to terms with a breakup song that I kind of fell in love with when Branch played the Bronze right before Buffy and Spike hooked up in season six. As listenable as it is, though, I never particularly found myself driven to track down the rest of her output, which is probably a failing of mine than anything else.♦Darcie Miner – Down To Earth: This record continues the tradition of the last two, another teenage singer-songwriter (who’s mostly blond on the album cover), only on a more local/regional scale. Darcie opened a couple of Central PA gigs with the Badlees, and became kind of a protegé or mascot (depending on who you’re talking to). This record was produced by Badlees guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Bret Alexander back in 2000, and sounds like it, down to the mandolins and Jeff Feltenberger background vocals. This isn’t a bad thing at all; the production meshes well with the songwriting, which is very definitely Darcie, hewing closer to the life experience of a teenage girl (and all that implies) rather than Alexander’s trademark road-weary blue-collar poet with a larger than average vocabulary. Shortly after this record came out, Darcie got a sorta-major label deal, which, as they often do, fell apart, ultimately leading her toward more interesting musical directions. Her current web site doesn’t acknowledge this record, other than to say that ” it may not exactly have been the record SHE wanted to make, it still made a very strong impression.” Be that as it may, “My Angel” is a wonderfully crafted pop tune with great dynamic sense, and “No. 17” is probably something I wish I’d have been capable of writing at that age (heck, I’d like to be able to write it now). Also of note is that although I was gone from Central PA by the time this released, I still had electronic fingers in the scene, and Darcie pretty much sold this record to me personally via email correspondence, and I’m glad she did.

♦Bon Jovi – Keep The Faith: I eventually knew this little series would come around to a Bon Jovi record. Apologies in advance if this one becomes a little longer than usual. I came of Age in the 80s in the Rust Belt northeast, and for quite a large chunk of it, Bon Jovi was my soundtrack. Sure, I dabbled more than a little bit in glam and thrash (and less openly, mainstream pop music) but I kept coming back to the hard rock populism of Bon Jovi, even when it wasn’t the cool thing (except it gave me something to talk about with girls who still weren’t interested in me). The first four records, particularly Slippery When Wet and New Jersey were about as good as rock records got for me at the time, given my limited experience. They were hard and aggressive enough to address my pubescent masculinity issues, but touched on deep(er, anyway) lyrical themes, borrowing liberally from Springsteen’s slice o’ Jersey life songs, and also cranked out enough of that type of romantic ballad my sheltered little self figured girls liked and if I had them playing in the background at the right moment, well…let’s just say I was disabused of that notion pretty quickly. I idolized Sambora, who was more than just a side-man, contributing to the songwriting and filling out the sound with his background vocals on top of carrying the guitar duties with all those fancy pinched harmonics. Given that background, when this record came out when I was in college, I was excited, begging car-posessing dorm mates to drive me to the local mall to pick it up, then dropping everything for a private listening party. At the time, I enjoyed it, although it was different enough from the earlier records to alienate me a little bit, but not enough to give up my allegiance. I finally saw the band live on the tour supporting this one, and all was, at least temporarily forgiven, until a couple of years later, they forgot how to rock (seriously, someone explain to me how This Left Feels Right was ever a good idea?) and spent most of their musical energy flirting with country audiences, made up largely of the same girls who were dedicated fans in their teens, but mellowed out into rural soccer moms with little stick figure decals on the back of the SUV.

~Look, and unprecedented Second Paragraph!~

This record was heralded as a turning point toward more maturity for the band, largely because JBJ cut his hair. Some of the tunes play this out, but not to the extent one would have expected. It’s still largely the same stuff: hard rock with soaring vocals and a bit of honky-tonk piano backing it up, with experimental forays into acoustic blues (“Little Bit ‘o Soul”), the Springsteen-esque (“Dry County,” which comes to the Boss via “November Rain”-style overindulgence…great guitar solos, though) and the oddly creepy (“If I Was Your Mother”), and a few romantic ballads like “I Want You” rounding it out. If anything pre-sages the changes to come (not necessarily for the better) for the band, it’s the Tom-Waits-y “Bed of Roses,” despite the kick-ass guitar solo; it’s a decent song, and was a pretty big radio hit, though it dialed down the “rock” to such an extent that the band never quite recovered. Notably, coming back to this on CD with much better sound reproduction equipment than I had as a teenager, I noticed how narrow-band and muddy it all sounds. I wonder now if all the early stuff sounds that way and I just never noticed because I was listening to hissing cassettes on crappy speakers for all those years?