What, exactly, is a guilty pleasure?

Is it something you genuinely think is good even though it’s not considered “cool” to like it? If that’s the case, John Mayer and Counting Crows are guilty pleasures. But I don’t look at those acts that way — not at all.

Is it something you liked once upon a time and now you’re a little embarassed to admit you liked it, but not embarassed enough to get rid of it? That makes a little more sense to me, although I did a major CD purge a few years back and probably cleared out any candidates for that category.

So looking at my current collection, I’d define a guilty pleasure as something even I don’t really think is any good but somehow I enjoy listening to it anyway. And I have just the CD in mind.

I’ve always found Jewel a bit silly. Her earnest, folksy ‘save the world by planting a tree next to a homeless man’ stuff never worked for me, and I won’t even get started on the poetry. Or the yodeling. I couldn’t hear her without rolling my eyes.

Then, in the summer of 2003, she remade herself as a Britney-esque pop princess on an album called 0304. Now, for a gorgeous blonde with big tits, Jewel is oddly unsexy. So to see her prancing around in a wet t-shirt in the album’s first video was a little disturbing. And her granola-munching fans went nuts, furious about this new direction.

But I love this album. It’s the best stuff she’s ever written or performed. She never quite sounds like she means any of the lustful club-hopper things she’s saying, and somehow that adds to the charm. 0304 is the delightful sound of Jewel not taking herself so damn seriously.

I’ve chosen to highlight track 11, ‘Yes U Can’ (check out the Prince-ly spelling), but really they’re all interchangeable.