"In Alaska everyone carries a knife." Jewel suddenly snaps awake and forgets she's waiting for a black-suited bell-hop to deliver sugar for her tea. Without even realising it, Jewel touches her hand to her belt, as if looking for the knife she carried back when she was 15. The story of a hitchhiking Jewel whipping a blade out of her boot with the words "Would you fuck with me?" fits the myth surrounding this slight, blonde-haired 24-year-old who three years back gigged her way across the States until Pieces Of You, her 'failed' first album, finally went double, triple, quadruple platinum.

Only, the myth behind Jewel is rooted in fact. She really did get herself adopted by an American Indian family. She did go to school in '40s dresses and pillbox hats. She did waitress in crap bars in Southern California and eat left-over food off other people's plates. She did pack it all in to live in a beat-up 1979 Volkswagen van and got a gig earning $5 a day singing in a San Diego coffee bar. Oh, yeah, and she went out with Sean Penn, but it was a long time ago and she expects us to have got over it. Jewel's also provided songs for the likes of Clueless and Batman & Robin, and written a book of poetry called Nights (sic) Without Armor that's just gone into its 15th reprint.

"It never dawned on me to feel homeless," Jewel says, absent-mindedly pulling her shirt over her tummy. "I could have kept getting waitressing jobs, but if you're waitressing, you're always tired and bitter. My friends were all on food stamps and welfare and it was always 'them' we were against, the rich people, the Government... I realised there isn't a 'them', just a me and that's all I can have responsibility for."

We're in London's fashionable Metropolitan hotel. The only thing is, in the room where Jewel's 'doing press' for her new album Spirit, someone's forgotten the sugar. There's fresh pineapple, elegant pastries, pots of tea and coffee, but no sugar. "Dial 999," Jewel laughs. She clears a table - crowded tables make her claustrophobic. I want to ask if it's a throwback to her waitressing days. but it doesn't seem appropriate.

Jewel grew up in a log cabin Alaska, without electricity, television or running water. The family raised cows, caught salmon and made ice cream from blueberries, milk and snow. "It's just a real place with real people and that's always been my roots. It instilled in me a strong work ethic." At eight her parents separated, and for the next few years it seems that if Jewel wasn't playing bars with her father, a hard-drinking Vietnam vet, she was practising her singing. She learnt fast, mainly how to handle men in the audience whose idea of a chat-up line was, "You're going to be so good to fuck when you're older".

School wasn't too brilliant either. "I didn't know I was dyslexic, I just felt like everything was harder for me. It wasn't until I was around 14 that I realised I could actually think. I thought I was a girl, I thought my role in life was to be sexy."

After a year in Hawaii, Jewel lived with her mother in Alaska's capital Anchorage. At 16 she won a music scholarship to a Fine Arts Academy in Michigan, then followed her mother to San Diego. After a series of waitressing jobs, Jewel moved into her Volkswagen van. Five months later, at 19, she got a recording contract, singing songs about stuff other people only dare to think.

"It scares me not to be open," says Jewel, gazing out of the window at the rain. "I'd feel strange if I had a secret - I'd feel like people were always going to find something out about me. I just try to beat everybody to the punch."

Jewel starts to talk about missing the open spaces of Alaska, staring out of the window all the while. "I'm getting better at coping with living in cities," she says finally. "I'm learning; I really enjoy cities now..."

You just know it's the first thing she's said that's not true.