Fans will recognize the soaring hook of " Perfectly Clear" as a country-tinged retelling of "Foolish Games". The steady strut of acoustic riffs and more natural vocals turn "Two Become One" into a potential hit, despite the corny hook. Sure, there is some fiddle and slide guitar here too, but is much milder and feels far more natural. When the twang and heavy-handed production get out of the way, songs like "I Do" show that Jewel may be able to pull off her transition to country star, if she is serious about it. The album is cluttered with sleepy country ballads that sound trapped in the eighties, as on the sappy piano led "Anyone But You". The lyrics stumble out of her mouth also on cheesy old school country ballad "Till It Feels Like Cheating", with clumsy lines like, "I got a bottle of wine / Some stolen time / A key to a room where you can be all night".
The tale of a woman taking things into her own hands falls apart more because of the disjointed vocal phrasing than anything else, though. Her poor-man's retelling of "Goodbye Earl", "Rosey And Mick" is the first time she breaks into her occasional 'rustic' lisp. Quite a bit of the album sounds as though she is forcing this shift, rather than just letting her vocal charms carry things. As if the 'look at me, I've gone country' sound of the glossy music were not bad enough, when she breaks into her fake twang with, "Well from now on I'm gonna be / The kind of woman I'd want my daughter to be", it is hard not to giggle and even harder not to shut the album off for good. It smacks of an artist trying too hard to establish herself within a genre, which is too bad, as the empowering message of the song is one of album's best. The album kicks off by throwing the country-kitchen sink at you with "Stronger Woman", so chock-full of country cliché production that it sounds like a honky-tonk bar exploded and someone recorded the audio as backing for this song. A change to a third genre in just six albums is tough enough for fans to swallow, but expecting them to buy into the vocal goofiness here is embarrassing and turns the album into somewhat of a joke. Inexplicably, she feels the need to incorporate either faux twang that makes you want to roll your eyes or an annoying lisp that makes it sound as if she is auditioning for a Dolly Parton biopic. While there is some of that here, there is something else that creeps up to destroy many a song. Jewel has always had a uniquely fragile quality to her heartfelt vocals that gave her songs a soul that should make her move to country music a sure-fire success.
Her early albums never tread too far from country, but it would be a lot easier to take this shift more seriously had, her failed attempt to become a pop star, 0304 not happened.
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