Relative Values

Jewel, songwriter and singer, and her mother and manager, Nedra Carroll. Interviews by Bridget Freer. Photograph by David Drebin Jewel Kilcher's debut album, Pieces of You, has sold 6m copies, and she was nominated for two Grammy awards earlier this year. Jewel has supported Neil Young and Bob Dylan, and has featured on the covers of Time, Rolling Stone and Interview magazines. Her new single , You Were Meant For Me, is released tomorrow and she plays London's Shepherd's Bush Empire on Friday. Jewel, 23, was born in Homer, Alaska, the second of three children. The family lived in a log cabin on a 23-acre homestead with no running water or television. Her mother Nedra Carroll, 47, the daughter of Swiss immigrants, was also brought up on a homestead in Alaska. She married Atz Kilcher, and they worked as a folk duo, producing two albums together. They separated when Jewel was eight. Nedra became Jewel's co-manager three years ago, and they now live on a ranch in San Diego.

Jewel: My earliest memory is of Nedra calling out "Jewel!" and I was thinking, "Me? Does that mean me? Am I Jewel?" I loved my name as a little girl - loved it, loved it, loved it! But as a teenager I went through that phase when I wanted to be normal and I renamed myself Sandy for about three weeks. Nedra was always so creative when we were little, she made us feel everything was possible. She used to have my brothers and me sit down every Monday and do a little poetry workshop. Those lessons were a gift. Words really turn me on - you can take them and shape them, manipulate them, put them out to give somebody a certain feeling. And I learnt that from her. We lived in a log cabin in an area of Alaska where there was a lot of manual labour and not too many luxuries. I'd get up at five in the morning, and there'd be frost on my eyelashes. I'd cook breakfast, milk the cow, walk three miles to school. We didn't eat much unless we raised it or killed it. We canned vegetables and made our own butter and cheese, drank our own milk. It was a very romantic, poetic existence. And I was very proud of it. It was hard, but it gave me strength, discipline, endurance and a love of the land.

Then when I was eight my parents divorced. For a child, divorce is like being torn out of the only air they've ever known and suddenly they are in a very strange climate. Leaving your mom on a street corner while you drive away in the back of your father's car is just brutal. My dad, at that time, was out to lunch, bless his heart. But he and I had singing in common, so I sang my little brains out to try to keep on his good side. We never knew when we were going to see my mom, but being able to stay with her in the holidays and being on the land kept me sane. I never really rebelled. I was a very practical, reasoning person and I thought the best way to get back at people was to become a success. I was always getting called into the office at school and I'd be thinking, "Think I can't make it? Oh yeah? Wanna See?" It fired me up to work harder. My mom would always say, "There's nothing so wrong you can't make it right - live brave." Like the summer when I was 16, I didn't want to live with my father any more, and I wanted to drop out of school. I wanted to move to Interlochen, a fine-arts high school. I won a scholarship, but I still needed $8000 for fees. I thought I wouldn't be able to go, but Mom said, "Well, you can sing. Do a fundraiser." She made it like a magic trick. She took a piece of paper and said, "What day do you want the concert?" So we chose a day, and then she wrote down a task for every day leading up to it. She blew my mind. I raised the $8000 and went to Interlochen for two years. Both my parents had a huge influence on me musically: my mom got me listening to some really neat artists like Nina Simone, Yma Sumac, Ella Fitzgerald, Gregorian chant and Alaskan native music. My dad was the bread and butter of my music training; we practised four of five hours a day. We sang in bars, so I had to learn how to handle myself around men; how not to believe everything everybody says; how not to take your personal problems on stage; how to make people listen when they don't really want to. But when I was about 18 I got in a panic about what to do with my life. I'd got fired from some stupid waitressing job and Mom told me I should just go off and live in my car, and not worry about rent. It seemed like a scary idea at first, but she said she'd come with me and live in her van, too. It wasn't a big deal. Being from Alaska is not like coming from California - we were used to living with very little. So I just lived in my car, worked on my songs, sang in coffee houses, and eventually I got my record deal. I had a manager, but then I wanted Nedra to be my manager too. Not only was it great to be able to pay my mom a good part of the money I was making, but also she handles business in a way that I haven't seen anybody else do. She's always looking out for my best interests; she's not going to be tempted by things like keeping me on the road too long just to make more money. In fact she held back my career a while because she knew I was under-confident as a song writer, and that I wasn't comfortable with people paying too much attention to me. She waited until I felt stronger. She's never let my career outgrow my emotional ability to handle it. This career isn't just about me: it's a dream we both share. A lot of wanting to have my mom around is that I need somebody with a similar vibration. Artists operate off of a very sweet place: they can't have things too hard around them. You're giving yourself away constantly. It's like being an astronaut out here, cut off from vital supply. And Nedra replenishes that - she helps me to stay balanced. Nedra and I are physically very similar and I'm getting more and more like her in character too. We just dig each other. I think she's really neat.

Nedra: Jewel was a very responsive child. Whenever we would sing or work with art or poetry, she was always right in it, just loving it. She also had tenacity. She was dyslexic but she came to understand that it didn't mean she couldn't do the same things as others, just that she would have to put in more practice time. She became very determined: when she was told she couldn't be in the third-grade gymnastics team because she wasn't coordinated enough, she said, "I can too!" And she practised until they took her in. And when she first signed to Atlantic, they made her perform for loads of jaded, disinterested press people. Jewel just said, "I am going to makethe first two rows listen," and she did what it took, and had them on their feet. I gave the children poetry lessons from when they were five. It was fun. When we tucked them in every night they'd each choose two songs, and we would go to their bedroom and sign them. If Jewel asks me up on stage now, she likes me to sing one of the songs I used to tuck her in with, This Little Bird - the one that Marianne Faithfull did long ago. We divorced when Jewel was eight. The hardest part was when we sat down, her father and I, to tell the children we were divorcing and they just laughed out loud and said, "You are not!" But it happened fairly quickly - their father left within a month and I lived in the house with the children for a while, but then they lived with him, and that was the hardest. But I had no means of support. So I created a business until I had enough money to support them, and they came back to me after about seven years. The period after she left high school was a tough time for Jewel. She had this series of jobs that she hated, and I could see she wanted to get to her music but that she just didn't know how to. So I suggested she lived in her van, and suddenly she didn't have to think, "I need $1000 a month to have an apartment." She was just thinking, "Gee, all I need is $5 a day and I can earn that with my singing." It connected her right to her joy - which was music. I guess my role as her co-manager is like being a professional mom. I look after artistic development and I offer a balancing of her. For instance, she's on tour right now and she's very tired and run-down, so I'll try to make sure she rests - as much as one can make a 23-year-old rest. Sometimes she'll say, "I just want someone to snuggle up with." She's quite a snuggly girl - she'll get off stage and want a hug and just to have me around in a grounding kind of way. Like the other day, there were a lot of legal matters, things happening all day, and a huge auditorium to play in the evening. She called and said, "I really need half an hour." So we rearranged the schedule. I went to her room and we hung out like girls - flicked the channels and chattered and relaxed a little. There's a lot of pressure directed at an artist like Jewel. And under pressure the personality usually buckles. Having me there is a kind of ballast. We love spending so much time together. Neither of us can believe we ended up with a life where we get to work with each other and live together too. It's really fun.

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