Sex, showbiz and walking away from it all: How Jewel saved her own soul -
Independent (Ireland) This one's paywalled, so it's pasted below.
Celebrating the 25th anniversary of her hit album ‘Pieces of You’, the Alaskan-born singer looks back on the tumultuous years at the height of her fame – and why she quit the limelight.
Growing up in rural Alaska, Jewel Kilcher could often accompany her singer father to bars and sing alongside him. It would become, as she now calls it, an adult education in more ways than one.
“Men would put a dime in my hand and say, ‘call me when you’re 16. You’ll be great to f*** when you’re older,” she laughs drily. “I learned to be so careful with my energy. By the time I got to the [music] industry, I was completely like ‘I’m talented and you will take me seriously, or I’ll just go somewhere else’. I didn’t need to be famous any more than I needed my dignity.”
With an old head on preternaturally young shoulders, Jewel would write most of the songs for her debut, Pieces of You, when she was around 15 or 16. The album, which was released 25 years ago, was soaked in lore. Jewel had spent much of the year previously sleeping in her car in the streets of San Diego. But what sounds like a romantically dogged pursuit of one’s musical dreams was much more sinister in reality.
She was broke, she says now, because she didn’t want to have sex with the man who was then her boss. “So he wouldn’t give me my pay cheque and I wasn’t able to pay rent,” she recalls. “It’s a really scary thing to sleep in your car, and then have your car stolen. But if I hadn’t invested in my dignity, I wouldn’t have had this need, or even the time, to write songs.
“I was thrown into a sink-or-swim situation. I mean, I grew up thinking, ‘maybe I could get a gig’, not ‘how do I be famous?’. And soon, that became, ‘how do you survive?’, I’m proud of the songs for that reason — it was my trying to be the best version of myself, and that takes a lot of courage.”
Now aged 46, Jewel has watched the Me Too movement unfold with a particular interest. “I think talking about it is important, but I don’t think it was a complete movement, in that there has to be a shift of anger and outcry,” she observes. “When it doesn’t transform into education and healing, it can just go deeper into the cracks. Plus, cancel culture followed right on its heels, and made people afraid to behave in a certain way, but never gave them new ways to behave.
“When you’re connected to yourself, you won’t leverage yourself for someone else,” Jewel continues. “If you’re disconnected, you don’t often get those warning signs — like, something is creepy but you can’t put your finger on it. I made sure I never went into an empty bathroom, but it’s kind of what you had to do.”
Pieces of You wasn’t just a way out of a peripatetic life for Jewel: it would become one of the best-selling debut albums of all time, going platinum 12 times over in the US alone (to date, Jewel has sold over 30 million albums, and won four Grammys).
Yet it wasn’t a straightforward trajectory for the album. Initially, it had a muted reception and failed to chart. Yet in 1997, Jewel soon came to the attention of Bob Dylan, who then invited her to tour the world with him as his opening act. Neil Young later took an interest in the young singer-songwriter, and both stars, effectively in the role of mentor, helped give the album widespread exposure.
“Dylan asked why I write these lyrics, and he really encouraged me to stay the course,” Jewel recalls. “He taught me the difference between being a singer-songwriter and a pop artist.”
Jewel, still homeless at the time, eventually became the subject of a major label scrum. A bidding war broke out — one label offered her $1m — and she eventually signed with Atlantic.
“I learned that you owe that money back. If my record wasn’t successful within a year, I would have been dropped, I would have ended up homeless again,” she says. “I would have had to make a record that was guaranteed to be a hit, which I didn’t know how to do.”
Even at the height of grunge, audiences immediately connected with Jewel’s gentle, homespun folk music. US radio gave her a resounding thumbs-up, and then MTV — an arbiter of musical cool back in the 1990s — soon followed.
Listening to the album now, Jewel says, is an interesting experience. “We did a live show at the [coffeehouse] Inner Change [in 1994] and hearing that is mortifying for me. It’s like your most awkward high school photo. I was just talking non-stop during it,” she laughs.
Jewel — who has also acted on TV and in movies, earning critical acclaim for a supporting role in Ang Lee’s Western film Ride with the Devil in 1999 — is re-learning the songs for a live online show today, in which she will play the album in its entirety.
“I think the thing that stands out for me is that there was a lot of inventive storytelling,” she reflects of the album. “My guitar playing was not there yet, but my strength was definitely my lyrics. The words were pouring out of me. What you lack in skill and technique, you make up with passion and courage. But in those days, you don’t know the rules, and that was a good thing.”
Though there was a lot of music in Jewel’s family home, the Kilchers didn’t own a TV. Instead, the youngster devoured literature.
“Greek classics, poets, Tolstoy, Steinbeck, even Dostoyevsky,” she recalls. “I was writing about romance and chemistry, but I’d never been in a relationship. I just felt comfortable painting those pictures after having read such great writing and storytelling for so long.”
Pieces Of You made Jewel a household name in the US, and in 1995, she began a relationship with actor Sean Penn, but fame did not sit easily with her.
“It was just at a height where I couldn’t handle it, and it wasn’t enjoyable,” she recalls. “No one can really understand the soul-mangling machinery around fame.
“I remember going into a bathroom once and some girls followed me in, and I just had to go pee,” she says, laughing slightly at the bizarre memory. “They were giggling, like, ‘I can’t believe I get to hear Jewel pee’. I was like, ‘what’s going on? This is too much fame’. So I killed my moment.”
On more than one occasion, Jewel notes, “I want to be my best work of art”. Every decision has to feed into an investment into herself. The flames of her stellar career eventually died down a bit; this was very much by design. It also gave her a chance to pursue acting, poetry, and non-profit work, in addition to raising Kase, her now nine-year-old son. His father is pro rodeo cowboy Ty Murray, who Jewel was married to from 2008 to 2014.
“My number one job is to be happy and a whole person, and I basically had to create an actionable business plan around my own humanity,” she surmises. “I know people think I blew my moment by taking five years off, but that’s thinking about it through the lens of fame,” she adds. “Through the lens of my humanity, I’m doing great.”
Jewel is now gearing up for the online anniversary concert of the album that changed her life. The gig will be recorded, in an old mining theatre, featuring art installations by Jewel herself. Lockdown means that many artists are missing opportunities to tour in front of a live audience, but Jewel is very much trying to find the positives amid the pandemic.
“I’m actually really excited about this show,” she enthuses. “As an artist I like limitations, and I’m all about figuring things out, and getting around things with creativity. This whole thing, I’m hoping, won’t look like a Zoom call. It will be an artwork.”
‘Pieces of You’ is available in a special edition, four-disc box set, featuring unreleased recordings. For streaming tickets to see Friday’s online concert, see jeweljk.com
