Perhaps this is mostly a sign that there isn't enough productive irresolution in my personal life, but easily the two most harrowing apprehensions I've been living under, for the last few months, have revolved around the impatient wait for the new albums by Alanis Morissette and Jewel. The sources of my avuncular protectiveness aren't difficult to determine: they were my joint nominees for 1995's best new artists, they benefited and suffered from opposite extremes of commercial success and critical scorn, and they seem to be intense and thoughtful women who were, at least at the time, too young for me to feel that it was appropriate to be attracted to them. They arrived at notoriety, however, in very different stages of preparedness. Alanis had a television childhood and two frizzy teenage dance-pop albums behind her, albeit under the somewhat less-withering Canadian spotlights, before her breakthrough, and had veteran producer Glen Ballard to assist with the transition. Jewel, on the other hand, had a comfortably anonymous upbringing in Alaska, was living in her van and recording demos in a San Diego coffee shop, and made an awkward, erratic first album whose delayed success still seems patently implausible to me. They shared an approach to lyric-writing, I think, that tended to mix startling wisdom and breathtaking naïveté with a blithe and hazard-fraught unselfconsciousness, and Jagged Little Pill and Pieces of You fit into the same basic genre, as a marketing department would look at the world, but their fundamental characters were, it seems to me, quite different. Jagged Little Pill traded on Alanis' intensity, confidence and focus; it seemed very obvious, listening to it, that this wasn't her first experience performing. Jewel could show the same assurance, some moments, but then in other moments seem frighteningly unguarded, like she'd completely forgotten anybody was listening. Shortly after Pieces of You came out, and long before sales took off, I saw her play a short in-store show, just her and her guitar, to an audience of no more than ten people, clustered around her microphone so tightly that she could have left it unplugged. She was astonishing. Two overpowering feelings battled for my emotional attention as I watched her. The first was the sudden surety that as a singer, she could do anything. Her delivery swooped from elfin whispers to wall-straining howls without hesitation or warning, blazing through enough alternatives in between that I was inclined to believe that the styles she was leaving out had only been omitted for reasons of time. Her album had examples of frailty, expansiveness, reserve, twang, and a dozen other things, but only in person was it clear how thoroughly she could embody all of these modes, in addition to simply producing them. The second knee-weakening wave came with the realization (which would probably have been paralyzing fear, if I had known she wouldn't have the safety of obscurity for long) that she had no idea what she was getting into. Newbury Comics, where she was playing, has been the site of two of the most memorably surreal performances I've seen. One was Scott Miller, of the Loud Family, rocking back and forth with his eyes closed, singing a song based too heavily on self-doubt to deliver any other way, oblivious to the two small boys attempting to examine superhero comic books on the shelves just behind him, timing their lunges to his forward oscillations the way you try to hit your miniature-golf shot past Godzilla's sweeping tail. The other was Jewel, standing in front of a rack of Bush and Nine Inch Nails CDs, wearing clothes with the approximate fashion aplomb of clumsily-mended Toughskins, yodeling. I am pretty sure that the walls of Newbury Comics had not heard yodeling before that, and have not since; I would be only slightly more surprised to wander in one day and find Zamfir, Master of the Pan Flute, arguing his qualifications over in the corner with the supply of ironic lava lamps.

The question I can never answer to my own satisfaction, however, about any album around which I've built up my own labyrinthine scaffolding of prejudices and demands, is whether I would been more tolerant of it if I had come upon it completely in isolation. When a record plays into my intricately fabricated contexts, in exactly the way I intended it to, the joy is profound, and enough so to justify the practice, but it has victims, too, and necessary casualties are still regrettable. Spirit is a beautiful and intelligent record, and should have made me very happy, but I can't bring myself to disregard my wishes for what it could have been. My contrast study for it, this week, is High Relief, the self-released debut by Seattle singer, keyboardist and songwriter Susan Court. The two albums are comparably graceful, and High Relief is, if anything, even more diligently restrained and meticulously produced than Spirit. But I know nothing about Susan Court, and so expect nothing (or, put more accurately, don't expect), and so instead of dwelling, morbidly, on all the thorns High Relief doesn't bristle with, I recalibrate my scale to suit the material, and thus am able to detect and revel in its own eccentricities.