Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty
There’s always been something twangy in Jewel’s music. The singer-songwriter’s voice has a yodel-like warble, and a banjo or steel guitar could fit right into her folkier hits like “You Were Meant for Me.” But selling tens of millions of records couldn’t help her achieve one of her longtime goals: getting played on country radio. Jewel was signed to Atlantic, a pop label that didn’t have the resources to promote songs to country stations, which tend to prioritize artists on Nashville-based labels. So when her contract was up, she moved to Valory Music Co., an imprint of Nashville’s Big Machine Records, and worked with John Rich of Big & Rich to produce Perfectly Clear, an album marketed as…
