You can probably guess by now that my favorite music comes from the 90s 🙂 And both Jewel and Joan Osborne became famous with their first major label albums in 1995.
Jewel’s debut album was titled ‘Pieces of You’ and had such songs as the opening one ‘Who Will Save Your Soul?’ where she asks: ‘Who will save your souls after those lies that you told, boy? / And who will save your souls if you won’t save your own?’. Or her title song ‘Pieces of You’ in which she sings about ‘an ugly and pretty girl’, as well as ‘a fagot and a Jew’, at the end of each stanza asking revealingly: ‘Do you hate her (him) ’cause she’s (he’s) pieces of you?’.
Her song ‘Little Sister’ is also very powerful when she signs about: ‘a nation that starves for salvation / But clothing is the closest approximation / To God and He only knows that drugs / Are all we know of love. / Every day we starve while we eat white bread / And beer instead of a handshake or hug / We spill the pills and sweep them under the rug’. And in ‘Daddy’ she sings: ‘You know sometimes I want to bash in your teeth, Daddy / I’m gonna use your tongue as a stamp / I’m gonna rip your heart out the way that you did mine, Daddy / Go ahead and psychoanalyze that’. These are just a few jewels from her first album.
Joan Osborne’s ‘Relish’ was her second full-length album but first major label one that made her famous worldwide. In the hit song ‘One of Us’ she sings: ‘If God had a name, what would it be? / And would you call it to his face / If you were faced with Him in all His glory? / What would you ask if you had just one question?’. And then: ‘If God had a face, what would it look like? / And would you want to see / If seeing meant that you would have to believe / In things like Heaven and in Jesus and the saints / And all the prophets?’.
In ‘Dracula Moon’ she is asking a very current question: ‘What if the cure is worse than the disease?’ and then rightly remarks that: ‘Love comes down any way it wants to / Doesn’t ask for your permission / Open up your arms or it will break you in two.’ Finally, in ‘Spider Web’ she warns us: ‘The world is made of spider webs / the threads are stuck to me and you / Careful what you’re wishing for / ’cause when you gain, you just might lose / You just might lose your spider web’.
And they also both sing beautiful songs about love on their albums. I hope you’ll find time to come back and listen to them again, or for the first time, because they are worth your time.
