Precious Talent
Jewel-encrusted and glitzy she ain't. True to her hippie upbringing in Alaska, she prefers reading to shopping. Dominic Lutyens communes with folk phenomenon Jewel as she tours the UK - and unearths four other achingly sincere North American singer songwriters.
It's a phase many little girls go through: stamping their feet until they get that latest Barbie doll (horse riding Barbie, scuba-diving Barbie, whatever). Not Jewel. The daughter of hippie folk singer parents, she lived in the
remote town of Homer, Alaska, in a log cabin with no running water (let alone a power shower). If she had craved a plastic dolly - though it was never her style - she would have plumped for lumberjack or farmgirl Barbie, surrounded as she was by loggers and livestock. Times were tough then, admits the 23-year-old folk phenomenon today. She had no mates and was constantly slung out of school for yodelling - a party trick her dad, of Swiss decent, taught her. "my childhood felt like a joke I never got the punchline to," she says.
Yet personal misfortunes are always grist to a folk singer's mill, Jewel's being no exception. So, no, looking back she wouldn't swap her spartan, hippie girlhood for all the herbal tea in San Francisco. "Being raised in
what was natural and beautiful gave me a sense of the sacred. That can give you faith in something bigger," she says coming over all folkstress-spiritual, her words instantly opening up vistas of glittering snowbound landscapes with icicles pointing sharply groundwards and fir trees skyward.
Aged six, she and her parents sung for their supper by entertaining tourists in nearby city Anchorage. Later, when her parents divorced she moved in with her father, who took her round the venues he played at - and taught her to yodel. "I learnt to be a professional musician at a very early age," she recalls. "My dad gave me very good training." Then as a teenager, she migrated south, to San Diego, in balmy California - her home to this day. Too poor to afford to pay rent, she lived in a van. Legend has it, she survived on peanut butter and carrots, washed her hair in the bathroom of a local K-mart and hung out on the beach, writing songs, surfing, talking to people...when she left school, she waitressed in grotty dinner before deciding to learn the guitar and make a real go of singing. Did her parents worry about her? "No my mum was very brave. She said it was better to be dead than not to follow your passions."
Jewel is big on passion. Her debut album, 'Pieces of you' - which has sold a staggering six million copies in the US since it was released by Atlantic, the label who launched her - is intensely personal, full of lump-in-your-throat lyrics. The title track is a defiant, live-and-let-live attack on bigots who put down women, gays and Jews. Then there's her hippie rallying cry for all thing authentic and organic. "Each day we starve while we eat white bread," she warbles on 'little sister'. Small wonder that years after leaving Homer, she carried around a box of Alaskan soil.
Jewel (her surname is Kilcher) even looks the part. An earthier version of Phoebe out of 'Friends', her flaxen hair is tidy but not too tidy. She's proud of her crooked teeth. It's hardly surprising to her that one journalist who interviewed her discovered that she had never heard of Joan Collins.
And she loathes small talk. I ask her what it was like recording a single recently with Red Hot Chili Pepper Flea (small fry, as it happens, compared with the kind of megastars she normally strums with, such as Bob Dylan, Neil Young and veteran country singer Johnny Cash). "Your after soundbites, aren't you?" she replies, her tone suddenly-hard. Later, though, she thaw out of frost-maiden mode, enthusing about the time she shared the stage with Dylan the younger - Bob's son, Jakob, an up-and-coming singer. And about the prospect of her UK tour ("I love travelling"). She even manages a girlish giggle when I wonder if she'll be treating British fans to a full throttled-yodel: "Sure. People really like that."
Jewel was nominated for two Grammy awards this year- Best new artist and best female pop vocalist. She wrote the soundtrack for Sean Penn's film, 'The Crossing Guard', and a song for the 'The Craft". She's even played at the white house at Bill Clinton's personal request. But, consistent with her watertight folkstress persona, she's no glory-hunter.
"I don't seem to be able to experience my own fame," she says. Feet planted firmly on the ground, she had no idea 'Pieces of You' would be a hit. "It was an accident. I didn't think I was a songwriter or that my songs were good. It was an exploration for me: a young woman realising herself emotionally, morally, intellectually. I was asking lots of questions like: Who am I? Where do I fit in the world? Should I compromise my dreams? I was surprised at how well it did."
Does this mean she has little time for the frivolous luxuries fame brings. Or as a reaction against her poverty-stricken childhood, has discovered the delights of glitzy shopping malls? "No. I'm a simple person," she insists.
"I've never had the need for a new car. But it's great not to worry about whether you can afford to go out to dinner or a movie."
Her greatest luxuries are long walks and reading. (Jewel likes us to know she's well read: her lyrics are studded with references to literary giants, like Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.) Rather suprisingly, she says she's taken to working her way through an authors entire output chronologically. Not very spontaneous-sounding that, for a folk singer, admittedly but there you go.
Her passion for reading goes back to her lonely childhood, as does her writing: "I wrote essays and poetry from 14 onwards. I discovered that I could understand the word better when it was in ink." Something tells me that even if Santa had brought her Farmgirl Barbie, Jewel would have buried her under a pile of notebooks in that log cabin in Alaska.
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