It?s unbelievable that your young mind had to process that.
I was between the ages of eight and fifteen and I would watch how needy some women were for a compliment, and I would watch how the men would talk about them afterward. I learned very early on that my sex and sexuality do not make me valuable. I never confused my worth or my sexuality with my will to be attractive, and so that caused me to pretty much go the other way. By the time I was eighteen, I was working in San Diego and my boss took me aside and told me that if I didn?t sleep with him, he wouldn?t pay me. I was so well versed at that time to saying no, and I was good at it because I was funny, disarming, and wouldn?t hurt their ego, but when I went in for my paycheck the next day, he withheld it. I was then kicked out of my apartment because I couldn?t pay my rent again. That was a big price to pay for not sleeping with somebody, but I knew I was doing the right thing. I?m from Alaska where I lived in barns that didn?t have electricity, so though I knew that living in my car in San Diego would suck, I could do it because I haven?t seen women get their character and humanity back after they compromised it. The women around me that were going down that road never came back, and I was insistent on understanding my value?even if I didn't know my value, I wasn't willing to let someone else define it at a low cost. My number one job was not to become a statistic.
When I was discovered, it took me a while to sign with a label. You take somebody with my background, baggage, and trauma, and God forbid I get famous, that?s a recipe for disaster! I was the best candidate for the tragic sad movie about a celebrity who apparently had it all before they self-imploded. I had to ask myself, what is my goal, what do I actually want? I had to spend time soul-searching, even though these labels needed an answer or would walk. I almost didn?t take a deal because I didn?t think I could figure out a solution to how to handle fame if it came my way. I'd rather be happy than go down that road. The solution for me was getting very clear about my goal which was to learn how to be happy. That was my mission in life. I wanted to see if happiness was a learnable skill. I did not want to die, and I didn?t want to be unhappy. I had to have metrics around that, I had to be accountable to it, I had to be able to audit myself.
My number two job was to learn to be a musician, and I knew I wanted to be an artist more than famous. The stubborn part of me was able to be loyal to those guiding principles and I made every decision loyally and called them my North Star decisions.
AS IF: It?s fascinating that happiness can be a learnable skill. I want you to talk about that because I think for so many people happiness is a state of being?you?re either happy or you?re not. Tell me about how people can learn how to be happy.
Misery is an equal opportunist; it doesn?t care if you?re rich or famous. Misery is a side effect of a system, as is happiness. If you grew up in a system that led to misery, you have to learn a new system and how to make new choices. You have to develop different behaviors and habits that lead to the side effect of happiness. As anybody sad knows, you can?t just get happy, and for me, that meant I had to look at how I perceived myself and the assumptions I made about myself. For example, my mom left us when I was eight, and my father would hit me. Those two things combined proved to me that I must not have value; that was my takeaway from that scenario, and that?s how I made sense of what was happening in my environment. When I learned to re-examine the assumptions I made about myself, I learned that my parents? behavior wasn?t about me, and asked myself can something else be true? I also had to look at my behavior and how it was driving my life because it was not leading to a happy one. To change our behaviors, we have to understand our motivations. Look, getting better takes work, it?s like learning a new language, but it?s possible.
You are a mental health activist and advocate, co-founder of Inspiring Children Foundation, and co-founder of the mental health app, Innerworld. I want to talk about mental health because many people think of it as a disorder that can be treated with prescriptions, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, manic depression, etc. However, many mental health sufferers cannot be balanced with prescription drugs because the cause is not a misfiring of chemicals in the brain, but trauma we have experienced, so pills will not help. I like what you are saying because you are prescribing a different point of view. Can you tell me about the Inspiring Children Foundation and Innerworld?
Of course, Innerworld is a tech startup, and Inspire Children Foundation is a nonprofit. I started with the nonprofit about twenty-two years ago to see if the skills that I had learned would help other people in similar situations to me, and I was focusing on at-risk youth. I was very interested in seeing if I could find solutions that worked without therapy. Please let me state that I?m not against therapy, I think therapy is great, but it isn?t available to everybody. Therapy costs a lot of money, which means it is only available to those with funds, and that means obtaining happiness is elite, it can only be available for the people who can afford it. That?s unacceptable to me. It was unacceptable to me that I moved out at fifteen and there were no resources to help me, and there wasn?t a way for me to figure out how I could get access to help. So, the foundation was mine and my co-founder's desire to create a system that worked for lower-income people with complex trauma, PTSD, and suicidal ideation. I am very proud that after twenty-two years we have one of the highest success rates in the world helping kids with the above-mentioned issues. We do it by focusing on behavioral tools like CBT and DBT skills (CBT focuses on how your thoughts, feelings, and behavior influence each other. While DBT works on those things, emphasis is given more towards regulating emotions, being mindful, and learning to accept pain.) Listen, life triggers you at any given moment, so we don?t do one-on-one therapy with our kids, instead, we create dynamic relationships and intergenerational environments. We created a supportive, instructional, high-achieving environment. We also have a tennis academy, we?re the number two tennis academy in the country, and we have included tennis because it?s such a great psychological game. Kids are also encouraged to start their own businesses, and in real-time we teach skills and support them in a healing environment that helps them learn, say, what to do when a panic attack hits. We have some of the highest success rates?95% of our kids earn college scholarships. No boarding school can claim that number, and I'm proud of that. 58% of our kids in our previous three graduating classes earned Ivy League-level scholarships proving that when you heal, you become higher functioning, more capable, enduring, and grittier. And this is something that I worry about with the way wellness and self-care are dealt with in today?s society, which tends to make the individual more precious and fragile, while it should do the opposite and make us more resilient, capable, and tolerant to events around us.
As for Innerworld, we wanted to look at a group-based model as we do at the Foundation. Talk therapy works for some people and not others. There?s a high variability in success rates and outcomes, and there isn?t always tracking outcomes in one-on-one talk therapy. We wanted to create a system that took out inconsistencies of some of the traditional therapeutic modalities and delivered a more consistent positive mental health outcome. So, we developed Innerworld, a virtual mental health platform that is accessible 24 hours a day seven days a week.
There are two phases to it. You can go in and find a safe social environment. So, let?s say it?s 2 am and your dog dies, and you are bereft and need help, you can log into Innerworld where there is a trained guide there at all times. You can explain to the trained guide what happened and the guide might say, have you ever heard of the grief cycle? And you might say, I have no idea what you?re talking about. And then they can show you immediately a well-documented graphic tool called the Grief Cycle which shows the different stages of grief. It can be reassuring in a moment to understand what phase of grief you are going through. Then the guide might say, tomorrow we have classes on grief at 1 pm if you would like to join, and the next day you can join a class specifically around learning skill sets to deal with grief. From social anxiety and agoraphobia to PTSD, the stress of long-term caring for a relative with a long-term illness, etc., we have all sorts of classes where you?re going to learn a behavioral tool and how to practice it in an anonymous group.
I want to talk about your art experience at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. In this exhibition, you?ve taken your background in music, mental health advocacy, and your skills as a fine artist to present ?The Portal: An Art Experience by Jewel?. Walk us through this experience and how you conceived it.
When I was younger, I studied voice and visual art. I was smitten with visual art, but my music career took off, which was lucky. In the last couple of years, I have been really wanting to incorporate visual art back into my life as well as how I tell stories through music and how I interact with the world. I?ve been to a lot of museums, and when I visited the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, I was immediately moved by their ethos and what they stand for. It was built by Alice Walton and around her belief that people should be able to have access to world-class art, even in the middle of the country. She started working on this museum after she bought a piece of art in New York from the New York Public Library, and when she won the bid on it, the press had a fit announcing that she can?t take the art to where nobody will get to see it. She responded that there are people in places besides New York who appreciate and deserve to see great art. The rebellious spirit of democratizing art aligns with my ethos and with who I am, so Crystal Bridges was the only museum I reached out to with my idea.
My installation will happen every night for three months starting May 4th. Visitors will be greeted by a hologram I made that explains what I call the three spheres, which is my philosophy that we all travel through three realms of existence every day, often without realizing it. We travel through our inner sphere, which is our thoughts and feelings, we travel through the outer sphere, which is our physical world, and the third sphere is that which is unseen. For some people that may mean the spiritual, the religious, or even the intergalactic. I define the unseen sphere as anything that gives you a sense of awe and inspiration, it?s a personal definition. Personal wellness is a side effect of these three spheres being in alignment. Our mental health suffers when our three spheres conflict. Visitors are greeted by this hologram before being taken to the contemporary wing showcasing 10 works of contemporary art I selected by other artists, and a painting and sculpture I created. Beside each painting is a video where I explain how the piece correlates to the three spheres. You?ll be given a booklet to write out your own answers and feelings. I?ve woven behavioral health with art to help us talk about how we relate to each of our spheres. The very last piece of art incorporates all three spheres into one. And so, I ask you to identify one thing that helps all three spheres come into harmony for you, and one thing that causes them to come into conflict. There's a sentence in your booklet that says I sacrifice my attachment to ?X?, and I dedicate it to ?Y?, and this sentence has a profound effect on my life and healing. So, if I were to fill that out right now, I?d say I sacrifice my attachment to perfectionism, and I dedicate it to being present. I created a QR code in the booklet that leads you to a meditation so that when you get home after the museum experience you can sit with this meditation every day. Once visitors finish inside the museum, they?ll go outside and witness a 200-piece drone show performing to music I created and that's the end of the experience. There?s an option of a dinner component that visitors can book. Every meal and drink have been curated around the idea of the three spheres, and I developed conversation cards that are on the table that pose questions you can ask others at the table.
You were once quoted saying, sculpture taught me about songwriting, especially abstract sculpture. Tell me about your creative process and how one art form informs the other.
When I was sixteen, I studied sculpture and writing songs at the same time, and it was hard for me to understand melodic structure because when you?re writing a song there?s just? nothing (laughs)! It?s very hard to carve something out of nothing and give it a strong form that sounds relatable, and sculpture taught me how to do that because it?s the same thing, except it?s physical?you have a chunk of marble and you?re trying to make an abstract form that seems relatable but isn?t relying on a shape you?ve seen or known. It?s telling its own story and I found that fascinating. Before humans developed language we related to shapes around us. We knew the sun was a circle, and we knew the moon is sometimes a circle, we knew that when we dropped a stone in the pond the water created circles. We had a relationship with circles before it had a name, and I find that interesting. I think shape is powerful, it?s a primordial language we have a deep relationship with that circumnavigates a mental understanding of it. As I studied sculpture, I would ask myself how I carve something that feels formed, defined, organized, and finished. It?s a strange, random process to go through, but made my songwriting better because I finally understood that what I was doing was carving shapes out of sound.
You have a visual identity with emotional concepts, it?s interesting. I want to understand your relationship with color, your relationship with sound, and do they intertwine.
I have synesthesia. I never knew the word until recently, I thought everybody saw colors when singing until I read a book about synesthesia not long ago. When I hear certain sounds, I see shapes. If you play the c-cord I see a metal plate with sand on it that forms beautiful geometric patterns. That?s what I see when I sing. I think I hear pitch because I notice wavy patterns sinking and I can hear the way it pushes the air?I see that pattern more than I hear a note, if that makes any sense.
Tell me about the tour you are co-headlining with Melissa Etheridge.
I don?t tour every year so I?m excited. Melissa helped give me my first TV break, she?s always been pro-female and I wanted to go on tour with a woman. This tour is different because we are sharing the crew, the band, and the equipment, which is never done? we have huge expenses when we tour, so why not just split it? She's the first one that's taken me up on it in 25 years of proposing this idea.
If you could throw a dinner party for ten people both alive or from history, who would be there and what would you serve?
Do you remember Ingrid Sischy who ran Interview magazine?
Yes, of course.
She threw the most incredible dinner parties, and I would want to throw a dinner party like she did. I remember being at parties with Calvin Klein, Lou Reed, and Molly Ringwald. There were always people from different artistic fields and there was such a fun dinner conversation. I don?t know exactly who I?d invite, but it would be a cross-pollination of people. I would serve simple food with a strong emphasis on locally grown foods.
If the Earth is on the brink of destruction, and we have about five years before life on Earth expires, would you choose to stay or would you choose to be sent to Mars to colonize?
If I can?t be effective at helping the planet, I would be a Mars pioneer.
If you had to only wear one color for the entire year, what color would you wear?
Oh gosh, right now I?m into green, I like a grounding, earthy, green, emerald kind of green color.
If you were given one superpower, what would it be and why?
To infuse people with love. Injecting people with a satiated feeling of being truly, deeply loved, would be the most fun superpower to have.
