Twenty years after its release, Jewel’s album Pieces of You—featuring hits like “Who Will Save Your Soul” and “Foolish Games”—seems like a key piece of 1995-iana.
But, in 1995, when the album dropped, what TIME had to say about it was…nothing.
As the magazine noted when the singer-songwriter made the cover a few years later, the record that had by then sold more than 5 million copies had at first gone nowhere. It took years of touring for word of mouth to make the difference. By that time, she wasn’t just a star in her own right. She was the face of a trend, as female singers caught the attention of the country. As TIME put it:
This summer female pop stars are clearing out space for themselves, and the season’s usual sea of masculinity is parting. The debut CD by Alaskan pop-folkie Jewel, Pieces of You (Atlantic), has sold more than 5 million copies and is still riding high on the charts. Erykah Badu, with her poetry-slam soulfulness, has sold more than 1 million copies of her brilliant new CD Baduizm (Kedar Entertainment/Universal) and is a headliner on this summer’s neo-soul Smokin’ Grooves Tour. And Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan has masterminded the summer’s most talked-about musical event: Lilith Fair, a traveling show featuring a rotating lineup of 61 female singer-songwriters, including Cassandra Wilson, Tracy Chapman, Fiona Apple, Paula Cole, Jewel and McLachlan herself. There’s a different melody in the air: macho is out; empathy is in. “People want to be given hope,” says Atlantic Records senior vice president Ron Shapiro, “and these female artists are giving young people a life preserver.”
Read the full 1997 Jewel cover story, here in the TIME Vault: Jewel and the Gang
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