Jus' like that!

Hey presto! Jewel's a star: she's sold millions of records, she's "had" Sean Penn and she used to live in a van. Still, it's not all been fun. "I've spent a lot of my life being very confused and very lonely," she tells John Aizlewood.

"Fuck You !" Jewel Kilcher, 23, native of Homer, Alaska, seller of four million copies of her album Pieces Of You, is flipping a cheery V-Sign to the punter who has asked, before she's played a note, whether her breasts are real. His 40 fellow Glaswegians, mostly record shop owners, bussed in at record company expense in the hope they'll plug Jewel a tad more keenly, chuckle along. Here, at Maxaluna, on Sauchiehall Street, with a backdrop of Peter Wyngarde, she takes her guitar off her back, unzips its bag and plays half an hour of songs interspersed with yodels and anecdotes about meeting Bob Dylan. Not one bold Scotsperson dare go within 10 feet of her. As she finishes (no encores), to complete the package, Jewel places the guitar back in its case, zips it up, puts it on her back, marches off to a waiting Rolls Royce and shoots back to her Hilton Hotel, with Nedra Carroll, her "mom" and chaperone in tow. "It's not hard to come to Europe where nobody knows me,"she coos. "People ask how I go from playing big halls and being famous to places where they treat you like shit. Neither seems real or very different". Yule Kilcher, Jewel's paternal grandfather, emigrated from Switzerland to Alaska in time to help draft the state charter. His son, Atz, married Nedra and the pair made albums as a folk duo. Jewel and her two brothers were raised as mormons on a homestead with no running water or television. When Jewel was 8, her parents divorced. She found herself with Atz, who liked a drink. Soon, it was off to "mom" in Anchorage. After Jewel secured a "vocal scholarship" at Interlochen Fine Arts Academy, Michigan, Nedra re-located to San Diego. Jewel joined her, living in a VW van. Nedra, one of life's chaperones, lived in the van next door. "It was horrifying," Jewel clucks. "I was young, my hands were small. I didn't have an understanding of how to make an impact on my world, how to get beyond waitressing in coffee shops."

Broke and low on self-esteem ("I never thought I was a good songwriter, or even that I was a songwriter. I was never that self- assuming of myself"), whatever a vocal scholarship was, it was time to put it to good use. Soon Jewel was singing her heart out at the Innerchange coffee house. "I was tired of surviving, putting all my time, my creativity into worrying about rent. It's a shitty, degrading thing to waste yourself on." She took hold of her own life. "I've spent a lot of my life being very confused and very lonely and separated from any belief I could live a life that was worth living,"she whispers. "I see how many people do that and it gets to me, it always has. The situations I was put in, instead of hardening me and making me cynical, gave me greater compassion. Take suicide-it's not caused by one thing, it's an accumulation of little cruelties we inflict on each other, so we go through life hoping nothing happens to us. Not many people feel like taking control, which is unfortunate. I care a lot about that and that's what got me out of the situation I was in." This meant a slacker life. "I sang one night a week and spent the rest doing what I wanted,"she smiles. "Surfing. Writing a lot. I love scientific literature, studying the effects of voice on the human body. That's where I found my freedom." In 1994, she signed to Atlantic Records and Pieces Of You was mostly recorded In Neil Young's Broken Arrow studio in Woodside, California. "I wanted the album to be a time capsule, to represent me honestly. I'm not embarrassed by its openess. It has courage and integrity. I though it would only sell 30,000, so it wasn't like I was taking a big risk, like I was going to be this open in front of millions of people. When I wrote it, I was a teenager, struggling with how to live in the world without involving myself in extremes. How to be spiritual and not have to be a hippy or some new ager. We're at a time where we're learning spiritualy, without having to live on mountain-top communes. "When I was 18, life was unbearable, so it made me ask, What do I enjoy doing ? Are dreams hobbies ? Is 'dream' too cliche ? Can I believe in dreams ? It made sense to move from 'I feel fucked up' to 'What are we going to do about it ?' "Several things could have filled my void, but I was just a little better at songwriting than marble carving. Selling four million albums three years later is like a beat-up car winning the Indy 500. It wasn't built for this. It's competing with things that are slick, really cool and high- tech. This is just girl and guitar. I didn't think it was possible, to tell you the truth." Virtually chorus-free, the Tori Amos-like Pieces Of You was received badly. "As I predicted, nothing happened," she remembers. "The radio stations said it was unlistenable and over their dead bodies would they play it. It was fine for me-I didn't think I'd exist within what was popular." Atlantic smartly sent the cheap-to-maintain Jewel and her trusty guitar across America. She headlined coffee houses and supported anyone:Pete Murphy, Jeff Buckley, The Ramones, even The Beach Boys. She secured herself a cult following and 14 months after its release, Pieces Of You began to take off. Now, it's been 70 weeks in the American chart and-hooray-she's a star. It's said she's a great beauty of the age. "It's funny how many of us feel moral depravity, don't you think ?" she muses. "Through osmosisis, I got a big dose of, like, moral depravity. I've struggled with that, but I try not to play on my sexuality. I love words and turns of phrase-to me, that's sexy. It's easy to believe others are beautiful and much harder to believe you are. I don't know many women who look in the mirror and think they're beautiful. They think, Oh I was beautiful in that picture but I must be an ugly cow today. But at the same time, you are aware of yourself." It's a curse then ? "Yes, but it's hard in my position,"she whines. "I can't care about people perceiving me, I can't exist like that. I can't create when I worry about people thinking I'm just a pretty face. I have driven myself nuts. It's tremendous, the burden." Wisely, the first things she did as a star were, a)wear a see-through dress at this year's Grammies ( "It was such a big deal," she puzzles, all Phoebe from Friends. "Like, you can't be spiritual and sexy ? "), and b)cop-off with high-profile actor Sean Penn. "It's so insignificant to my music," she snaps (though Penn directs the video to current single, You Were Meant For Me),"that, I kind of, like don't want to talk about it. I find it so silly. I don't have much patience for it. It's disappointing that people continue to focus on it, to talk about it." Shw will not, we may assume, be covering any Madonna songs in the near future.

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