#ThrowbackThursday: “Who Will Save Your Soul” by Jewel

By Sean Smith

If you tuned into NBC last night and caught some of the Christmas in Rockefeller Center special, you probably woke up this morning feeling a bit more in the holiday spirit. If you didn’t catch the annual NBC special, you missed out on some good musical performances from the likes of Mariah Carey, Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, the Goo Goo Dolls, and Jewel.

Jewel’s performance was not only to celebrate the start of the holiday season, but also to help promote her latest holiday album Let It Snow as well as to market her new gig as a judge on the fourth season of NBC’s a capella singing competition, The Sing-off, which will premier this Monday on the peacock network right after The Voice.

Jewel first came onto the music scene back in 1995 with her debut album Pieces of You. To this day, this record ranks as one of my all-time favorite albums. The reason is simple. Every track on the album seems to be filled with a brutal honesty and realness in both the lyrics and performance. In a word, the album is authentic. It’s authentic because Jewel wrote all but two of the tracks on the album on her own. While this album had a number of notable singles on it such as “You Were Meant For Me” and “Foolish Games,” today I want to take a moment to remember the very first single released off of that album “Who Will Save Your Soul.”

Jewel shared the story of how she came about writing “Who Will Save Your Soul” during an appearance earlier this year on the Howard Stern Show. She recalled how she wrote the song when she was just 16 years old. She told Stern that she wrote the song while taking a cross country trip from Michigan down to Mexico. Not having enough money to make the trip, she played her guitar on the street and would take the money that she would make in a city to buy an Amtrak ticket to another city and then do the same thing in the next city. The lyrics come from her observation of people she would see while singing on the street and created it as a musical social commentary  about what she saw in society. The song would go on to become the first hit single from her debut album and would eventually reach the #11 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

So in honor of Jewel’s appearance on NBC’s christmas special last night, and her upcoming debut as a judge on the fourth season of NBC’s The Sing-off, this week’s #ThrowbackThursday offering here on Clizbeats is “Who Will Save Your Soul” by Jewel. Enjoy!

Jewel

“Who Will Save Your Soul”

Pieces of You

Atlantic Records