She comes from Alaska, but her teeth are English. Her first album sold
millions in America and next week she visits Shepherds Bush. Peter
Silverton meets Jewel.
FOR a 23-year-old blonde who has sold 7.5 million copies of her debut
album to her fellow Americans, who played Dorothy in a television
production of The Wizard of Oz, and who "met with" both Woody Allen and
Steven Spielberg before landing the female lead in Ang Lee's forthcoming
Western, Woe to Live On, there is something idiosyncratically un-American
about Jewel: her teeth. In clear view as she sits on the carpet of a
Kensington hotel room chewing an apple, her teeth are uneven and lacking
in lustre, strangers to modern orthodontic imperatives. Americans have an
adjective for teeth like Jewel's: English.
But then she doesn't think of herself as an American, never has. She's an
Alaskan. "It's a different country to the States," she says, chewing. Her
accent is light and, to an English ear at least, clear, unmarked by the
regional murkiness you'd expect in an isolated state such as Alaska. "It
has a different culture. People look at me very oddly in the States, but
at home I fit right in. Alaska breeds a different kind of person. The
closeness to the elements creates an innate spirituality."
To reach Jewel's home-town, you go to Alaska, get in a car, head west and
drive till you can drive no more. She grew up in a log cabin without
plumbing or TV, in Homer, a town of 4,000 weather-worn souls 250 miles
west of Anchorage - which is literally where the road runs out. From there
on, it's snowcat or walk it. Even the road from Anchorage is not without
excitement. In winter they cut it through the snow and at times the snow
is banked up 20ft high on either side. "But you can drive it," says Jewel.
"If you're a good driver."
These days, in the words of Details magazine, she's "the wonder from the
tundra, a guitar-strumming siren, a multi-platinum Pollyanna". (Because of
the romantic oddness of Jewel's life story, book and film analogies figure
big in her cuttings file.) But her life has been far more exotic than
those magazine wordplays. She is the daughter of a Swiss immigrant father
- Atz Kilcher, born in Basel, a Vietnam vet turned social worker and
alcoholic - and a former beauty pageant contestant, Nedra, a native
Alaskan who now manages Jewel (like Madonna, she dropped her surname on
the way to success).
Nedra and Atz were both Mormons. "That didn't set me apart from other
children," says Jewel, scratching her head through her shoulder-length
blonde hair (actually, it's an upfront pop-star mix of bottled blonde on
top of original dishwater blonde). "It's a very undamaging religion.
Strong on country and family." Sometimes Mormons are strong on more than
one family at a time, I joke. She doesn't laugh.
Her parents also worked as a folk duo, recording a couple of albums and
working the tourist hotel circuit. When Jewel was six, she and her two
brothers were brought in on the act. Jewel adored it. Atz, being Swiss,
also taught her to yodel - a skill she regularly demonstrates in concert
but has yet to commit to disc. "People demand it in shows," she says.
"But it would be trite on record."
Then, when she was eight, her parents divorced. She went with Dad. Dad
went to the bottle. "For a child," she told Interview magazine, "divorce
is like being torn out of the only air you've ever known. My pen became,
to a large degree, my oxygen supply." Charged with that need, she started
to take her music very seriously while simultaneously embarking on years
of picaresque adventures.
There was a sojourn in Hawaii, an adoption by a Native American family
and a scholarship to an arts school in Michigan. There was her father
unwittingly letting her be photographed by a man who turned out to be a
child pornographer, and bursting into tears of pride when she started
dating a black boy. There was a move to San Diego, a surfing phase, a
kidney infection. There was a long period spent living in a van (her
mother lived in her own van nearby, though not next to Jewel's as is
often recorded). "People romanticise it a bit," she says, without irony.
There was also a time spent canning salmon and a period when she was
marble-carving: "It taught me more about singing than I thought it did at
the time." She is also a dyslexic - though one, she mentions in passing,
who reads scientific journals. And when she sings, she sees "tunes as
shapes", and in colours. Her big American hit, "Who Will Save Your Soul",
appears to her as "a little step with a squiggle at the end". Ella
Fitzgerald's voice "has a lot of blue and purple - with a squiggle". Joni
Mitchell is "all yellow".
Nor does the rich complexity of Jewel's history and psyche stop there.
When her success at singing in local coffee houses eventually led, in
1993, to her recording a debut - and so far only - album, Pieces of You,
she worked with some industry legends. "You remind me of a little girl
called Janis," said the keyboard player Spooner Oldham, a chain-smoking
pencil of a man who played with Joplin and also tended Aretha Franklin's
debut on the Atlantic label. Drummer Kenny Buttrey had played with Elvis
and Dylan. And bass guitarist Tim Drummond played with Neil Young. But
when the record came out it was widely ignored. Radio stations, she says,
were in love with the grunge of bands such as Nirvana: they weren't
interested in the plangent, acoustic music of Jewel. "She was the hardest
artist to break and took the longest to break in this company's history,"
said Atlantic general manager Ron Shapiro. "The key to marketing her was
to have her out there relentlessly." She toured America till there was
nowhere left to tour.
Along the way she picked up influential supporters: Neil Young, whose
contacts provided the producer and band for the album; Bob Dylan, who let
her tweak his nose - it's a hobby of Jewel's, tweaking noses (Bob's big
one felt "squidgy"); Sean Penn (they had a thing together for a while,
then he went back to the mother of his children, though not before putting
a Jewel song on the soundtrack of The Crossing Guard and giving her some
advice about acting which she still cherishes: "The less you think about
it, Jewel, the better you are").
It was a long slog. It took her two years to sell 100,000 albums. Now
she's selling that many a week. "Unbelievable," she says. Yet she has
never been fêted by the critics. "Every generation still needs its symbol
of delicate-flowerhood, wandering wide-eyed through life," wrote one.
Jewel was not amused: "That journalist was waiting for someone to apply
that analogy to," she says, seemingly unaware of the air of achieved
innocence that she carries with her. Fans at her US shows carry signs that
say, maintaining our innocence!
On her record sleeve is a poem entitled "Me". It begins, "I have blonde
hair/I pluck my eyebrows", details various misdemeanours - cheating on
boyfriends, for example - and boasts a little: "I have firm breasts". But
it's also a hymn of anticipated regret, full of the knowledge that things
won't always be as they are now, that decay is inevitable. Is it
autobiographical? "Unreservedly," says Jewel.
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