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THE INTERVIEW Jewel
She's sold 12 million records, topped the New York Times best-seller list with her poems, and now she's a movie star. Not bad for a 24-year-old from the Arctic wastes.
By James Bay.
From rural shacks to Lear jets and limos, Jewel Kilcher's short life reads more like a blueprint for the American Dream than the overnight success story of the latest pop poppet. Best known in the UK for her beseeching country-folk hit 'Who Will Save Your Soul', this sensitive 24-year-old Alaskan singer-songwriter already has 12 million record sales under her
belt and international legions of adoring fans hanging on her every utterance. Plus a queue of film-makers and photographers desperate to capture her good looks. Jewel's star currently blazes among the brightest in the celebrity firmament. All of which is some achievement for a girl brought up on the edge of the Arctic tundra in a log cabin with no running water.
'A lot of my childhood was simply about getting by in a semi-rural community on a day-to-day level,' Jewel recalls. 'For a long time we didn't even have electricity. It was a struggle; we had to work hard to survive. I still feel like I'm just getting up every day to do my job, only now it's singing and songwriting.'
Born to Swiss-American entertainer parents in Homer, 200 miles west of Anchorage and just a day's drive from the Arctic Ocean, Jewel had a peripatetic childhood. 'From age eight to 16 I lived in 14 different houses; from 16 to 20 I lived in 14 other houses, and from 20 to now I've been touring all over the world, so I haven't had the good old-fashioned American homestead for the majority of my life.'
After her parents divorced, such defiance of domestic normality even led to a stint living in an estate car parked in a vacant Californian lot - a penny-pinching subsistence which helped fund the teenager's seemingly remorseless
quest for salvation through a career in music. Typically, just to spike any illusions of a romantic loner existence, Jewel is quick to point out that bivouacked in the car next door was her ever-supportive mother, Nedra.
Nedra is more like a sister to Jewel - and her own life story is straight out of a Tammy Wynette song. Having endured an alcoholic husband, a protracted divorce, poverty-afflicted single motherhood and the demise of her own singing career, she is one of life's survivors. And it's those implacable genes that her daughter has so obviously inherited.
'The thing that Nedra does,' Jewel explains, 'is to make sure that everything's progressing in the right direction without overdoing the touring or promotion side. She looks out for me in a way very few parents ever really do.'
The eccentric folklore surrounding Jewel - tales of her silencing menacing hecklers with a display of Alpine yodelling, and going nowhere without a good-luck Tupperware box of Alaskan soil - sits oddly with the professional young woman currently circumnavigating the globe in support of her second album, Spirit.
Her upcoming British dates will not be Jewel's first visit to these shores: 'I toured Europe after my first album as a solo act - mostly playing small venues - so I'm looking forward to coming back with my band. There's something open-minded about audiences in Britain. I mean, in the States they just don't understand someone who comes from a working rural Alaskan background - they assume I'm the product of a weird hippie upbringing. They're a little less prejudiced in the UK.
'It's funny all this stuff that gets said about me,' she says. 'I was on stage one night and took a sip of the guitarist's beer and this girl shrieks, 'I thought you didn't drink!' - which is just not true. I don't know where it all comes from.'
But Jewel's rise to prominence has been based on just such word of mouth. Her 1994 debut album, Pieces Of You - an old-fashioned acoustic guitar underpinning lyrics apparently torn from any literate teenager's diary - eventually racked up eight million sales in the States alone, without hype.
As if all this weren't enough, Jewel recently published a slim volume of her own poetry, A Night Without Armor, which spent three months on the New York Times' best-seller list (its due out in the UK later this year). A second collection of 'journal entries, poems, essays and stories' is on the way, according to publishers, HarperCollins.
And then there's the acting. A former drama student at Michigan's Interlochen Arts Accademy, Jewel recently completed a major part in Ang (Eat Drink Man Woman) Lee's forthcoming Civil War drama Ride with the Devil where she plays a feisty Confederate farm widow, courted by Skeet Ulrich and Tobey Maguire.
'I like acting,' Jewel grins. 'I like not having to make every creative decision. It makes a nice change to let a director order me about.' She's been linked with more than one actor as well. 'Before, I was completely self-reliant,' she muses, 'but the more well-known I've become, the more men seem to be interested in me.' (Funny that.)
Such thoughts are a world away form her impoverished Alaskan youth - not that she's forgotten her chilly homeland: 'Alaska's a funny place. The rest of the States don't get it. I've been on the road for five years: that's my world now. But I miss the wide open spaces.'
She proabably doesn't miss the lack of warmth and water; these days Jewel has all the plumbing and heating she wants in the house in sunny San Diego to which she bolts when she wants to escape the limelight.
In the meantime, her simple confessional songwriting continues to garner accolades and awards from every corner. 'My life has been about overcoming obstacles to some extent,' she says. 'Of course, the biggest challenge comes when there are no challenges left. What then?'
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