Mixtapes for Hookers

[I am so not finishing this list before the end of the year...]

6. Jewel, Yes U Can*

Picture it: Cranston, Rhode Island, 1996.  I am fifteen years old and nightly my parents and I sit down to painfully awkward and uncomfortably starchy dinners.  To stop me from complaining too much they let me pick out the dinner soundtrack.  I am at the height of my angst-ridden period, but unlike most other angst-ridden teenagers I don’t do drugs or explore Satan worship or wRiTe In ThE kOrN sTyLe.  No, my cathartic muse was Jewel, the Alaskan singer who once lived in a van and who had an eight-minute long song about a very bad canoe accident.  Jewel had messed-up teeth and sang that song about how she was sensitive and wanted to stay that way.  She yodeled, too, and had that other song that went “oh Jew! oh Jew!”

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