Atlantic / Wea
2006
Goodbye Alice In Wonderland
About This Album
The last time listeners encountered Jewel, the famously sensitive singer/songwriter had just performed an extreme makeover on herself, refashioning herself as a dance-pop diva on 2003's 0304. Artistically, it worked against all odds, and it did pretty well on the charts too, debuting at number two on the Billboard Hot 100, but her fans didn't necessarily warm to it, and three years later, Jewel is running away from the album she proclaimed as her "first record I enjoy listening to" ("It's fun!"), and back to safe territory with 2006's Goodbye Alice in Wonderland. Like 0304, this album comes with an explanation/apology from its auteur: "Goodbye Alice in Wonderland is the story of my life and is the most autobiographical album I have made since Pieces of You...By the end of the 13th song, if you have listened closely, you will have heard the story of the sirens song that seduced me, of a path I both followed and led, of bizarre twists and turns that opened my eyes, forcing me to find solutions so that discovering the truth would not lead to a loss of hope." And, yes, the album is indeed a song cycle, tracing her crisis of the soul in the wake of her dance-pop move, which might make Goodbye Alice in Wonderland sound pompous and self-absorbed, which it kind of is on one level; after all, albums that find an artist examining the fallout of a commercial success that they were a willing participant in are kind of narcissistic.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9)

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