Interview Ross Fortune PhotographyPerou
"Fuck everyone! You gotta go with your instincts.' Jewel Kilcher is a
modern American phenomenon, and she knows it. With chic blonde hair and
green Alaska eyes, hers is an uncommon beauty heightened by an elegantly
bent nose and defiantly crooked tooth. Twenty-three years old, she is both
precocious pop icon and post-New Age earth babe. Six million album sales
and counting are proof of her stardom. A compelling cache of subtle,
slow-burning, stark and sensitive songs attest to her talent.
In Lowell, Massachusetts, first home and final resting place of Jack
Kerouac, she is performing to an audience of just three. But still there
is no holding back, no concession to the empty 2,000-seat auditorium. She
gives everything in a moving and inspired performance.
When the soundcheck's finally through, she moseys centre-stage and bawls
into an echoey microphone: 'Okay, so who's the guy here for the interview?'
The denim and leather-clad figure acknowledges my sheepishly raised hand
with a muted yowl, leaps from the stage, and strides down the long, carpeted
aisle towards me. One job done. Another to be got out of the way, quick.
She wants to go horse-riding.
Jewel is a remarkable person - especially for one so young - and an unusual,
if not unlikely, star. She has unshakeable self-belief, gritty
determination and the stubborn strength of character to do what she
wants herway. 'I'm not in this to try and be adored,' she
declares softly, 'I'm in it because I want to live every day doing
something that I love.'
The album, 'Pieces Of You', written when she was still a teenager, initially
elicited a muted response on its release two-and-a-half years ago. 'I
thought I had made a really uncommercial record,' she admits. 'When the
album came out everything was still kind of grunge-orientated, but I think
the musical climate has changed in America, not only in the industry, but
also with the fans. You can only feel terrible for so long before you
start saying "What can I do about it?"'
If the mood of America has conveniently shifted to fit the mood of her fresh
and resonant, melodic acoustic music, another significant factor in her rise
from homeless unknown to millionaire pop-star has been the staggering
workload she imposed on herself. 'I've done an average of over 500 shows a
year, for four years. It was usual for me to do two or three in a day, for
a while I was doing four of five.' Smirking at my evident bewilderment,
she explains: 'I used to do 40 cities every 30 days, drive myself in a
rental car, do high-school shows in the morning, radio and instores, things
like that during the day, open for a goth band at night, and do a
coffee-shop show of my own at midnight.'
Such intense dedication has paid off handsomely, and Jewel now approaches
the end of 1997 with a growing collection of industry awards, a
multi-platinum album, two Top Ten singles (each four months on the
Billboard charts) and songs on a number of soundtracks, including
the recent 'Batman and Robin'. 'It just feels like a popularity contest
I've won this year...' she admits, 'but I don't get that much satisfaction
out of awards, or out of six million record sales. It's not a lack of
gratitude for it, or out of a lack of enjoyment of it, it's just that I think
I'd be very foolhardy to believe in it too much.'
Displaying a maturity beyond her years, Jewel's 'story' - as already
featured in innumerable articles - is one that she is tired of telling.
Born and raised in Alaska by her immigrant Swiss grandmother, with no
electricity or running water, her parents - Mormon mother and hard-drinking
father - split up when she was eight. A dyslexic misfit, she later lived in
a car, washed in public restrooms, spent her days surfing and nights
singing in coffee shops. After being 'discovered' and signed to Atlantic
Records she carried a Tupperware container of Alaskan soil around to remind
her of her roots, and had a subsequently much-publicised relationship with
Sean Penn. Her uncanny ability to yodel, neanwhile, is in danger of turning
into something of an impressive but tedious novelty.
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