Jewel Kilcher (real name!) is Crispian Mills' worst nightmare - a
rag-to-riches fairy tale made flesh. As a child, living in a log cabin in
Homer, she owned nothing but the clothes on her back and the frozen cow
dung beneath her fingernails. At 16 she moved to San Diego and lived in
her car while gigging herself half to death between Mcjobs, battling
kidney infections and ill health all the way. At 17 she'd gathered a
hardy fanbase thanks to strenuous residencies at the Innerchange Coffee
House, had upgraded her accommodation to a van and occasionally resorted
to taking showers in a local brothel to keep clean.
At 19, Mr Atlantic Records arrived with the cheque book from the stars
and whisked her off to Neil Young's studio to record her debut album,
'Pieces Of You'. At 21 she released it into a market obsessed with Eddie
Vedder's short width and sold approximately 13 copies. And now, at 23,
she has two US Top Ten singles ('Who Will Save Your Soul' and 'You Were
Meant For Me') and a chart-shagging re-released debut album under her
hand-knit cardigan, a proper house in San Diego and a ginormous tourbus
that seems less likely by the day to turn into a pumpkin.
Thus, she is the only millionaire megastar on Earth who has no trouble
imagining no possessions, ta very much. So surely she can tell us if
money really is the root of all misery and true happiness lies in having
no microwave and living in an old sack.
"I think to say things like that is very over-simplistic," Jewel states.
"I don't think that people in India are ultimately happy. They have a
much more spiritual faith than a lot of Westerners but at the same time
they're sick and poor and unable to feed themselves, and that's not cool.
I think it's easy for Westerners to be over-idealistic and go, 'They're
happy because they have spiritual peace!' I think it's bullshit."
You never found any spiritual purity in having no running water then?
"Nope," she grins, "but being raised in what was natural and beautiful
gave me a sense of what was sacred. That can give you faith in something
bigger."
AROOGA! AROOGA! Sensitive Singer Songwriter With Head Up Own Arse alert!
Yup, like many of the other sincere folky types who have been catapulted
to stardom since America decided that women with acoustic guitars was
more exciting than all-in pro-celebrity chainsaw wrestling, Jewel is
fluent in the Language Of Folk. That's the
imagine-if-God-was-a-bus-driver-and-if-my-spiritually-is-freed-through-this-harmonica-solo-then-that's-a-bonus
parlance that has made it possible for all folk singers to
avoid having a personality for the last 40 years.
Consider her views on drugs ("I'm very selfish with my thoughts. I hate
them being taken away"), the ramshackle, barely produced vibe of her
album ("I don't care if it's pretty or perfect, I'm more concerned about
being honest to my art and myself") and the suggestion that her new
material should include a techno element to cream off a few Prodigy fans
("Not so much techno, more textural, more of a landscaping instead of
such sparseness"). Add the intensely personal lyrics sung with the odd
teary choke, the penchant for poetry and the whole
girl-next-door-who-says-f----occasionally-because-she's-dead-liberated
image and surely even Jewel herself must realise that she's edging
dangerously close to becoming a walking cliché.
Jewel grimaces at your correspondent as if he'd just served up her pet
terrapin in a quiche.
"I don't think anyone can look at themselves who's a thoughful,
intelligent person and think that they are a cliche," she retorts,
"whether you're angry, pissed, calling names or saying, 'I love you' - if
you say it in a cliched manner then, yeah, but we reinvent ourselves
constantly and I don't consider myself outside of that.
"I think the job of a good poet or a good writer is to put the spirit
back into the word. That's what a cliché is, when the spirit has been
extracted out and it's just a hollow word, it doesn't mean anything to
you, doesn't move you. I think any good writer's job is to put movement
back into words."
Er, 'spose. But whatever the bugger she's on about, what really lifts
Jewel out of the realm of hackneyed folk cliche is - without getting too
Paul Weller on your ass - the passion and soul-baring honesty with which
she sings her delicate country pop songs. Alanis may have the warble,
Liz Phair may have the balls (Errr... - Biology Ed), Tori Amos may have
the nutter factor and Joan Osborne may have the um, interesting hair, but
Jewel has the vulnerabilty, backed with a melodic clout that could stop
an encroaching Chinese Army in its tracks.
True, it may not be very evident on her album which, aside from the
jaunty pop agonies of new single 'You Were Meant For Me' and 'I'm
Sensitive', is largely bedroom juvenalia, seemingly recorded in a steam
kettle. But when she deigns to play an instrument powered by Satan's
spunk ('electricity' to non-residents of Homer) and stops pretending to
be a more conservative Tracy Chapman, she can rattle venues to the
foundations with sheer poignancy and passion.
And then there are the more overtly fictional songs, 'Adrian' or
'Painters', in which Jewel unreins her imagination and brightens our
lives with stories of... well, death, disease and all-round lung failure
on the whole. Cheers.
"At that time of my life," she explains mechanically, sipping a mineral
water to smooth the cogs, "at 19, I was very concerned with how I was
gonna fit in in the world, where a woman finds her place and in finding
their place how women interact, how none of us are really taught to
understand our emotions or how to relate to the world or figure out what
makes us happy. I was struggling with a lot of those ideas, a lot of
religious ideas, a lot of socio-political ideas, just because it was
really relevant to my age then."
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