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jewel purpose
She's 24 years old, she's sold 15 million album, and she's just clinched the starring role in Ang Lee's new film. But the future didn't always look quite so sparkling for Alaskan-born singer/songwriter Jewel, who overcame a childhood of poverty, divorce and illness before her gem of a debut album led to 24-carat success. "It wasn't supposed to
happen. I simply hoped to make an honest record about where I was at the time," she tells Chris Warren, our man on the early morning telephone to Tokyo.
It's at times like this you have to take a moment to praise the Lord you're alive. Right now I'm doing just that, stretched out on a sofa the size of Villa Park in the sun-drenched, palm-strewn lobby/bar of the Nagoya Tokyu Hotel, Tokyo. Crisp, starched members of staff flutter around me like fresh hatched gnats of the opening night of a new pond. With trays.
Smiling, waiting for me to name a whim they can fulfil. I think...I'd like some toast. "No probrem."
Between thanking my lucky stars, I'm sipping Sappuro, my teeth put on edge by the frosted ice. Dusted on the rim for no other reason than that's the kind of trimming posh, lucky, glamorous people like me deserve. Can this get any better? The answer to that laughably rhetorical question is announced with a curt 'ting!', as the reason I'm here sashays out
of the lift and, turning every head in the bar, makes a beeline for me.
Jewel Kilcher, deop-dead angelic 24-year-old, 15-million-album-selling, Alaskan-born songwriting chanteuse. Her of the achingly beautiful, melancholic odes to hope, loss and life, star of the next Ang Lee movie 'Ride With The Devil', best selling poet ('A Night Without Armor' is now in its 15th edition), wit, philanthropist, and bona fide beauty. You heard of her? She's on the cover of this magazine. I'm sitting next to her. She clip-clops in $1,000 slingbacks across a marble floor just to come and sit next to me. 'Course I'm nervous, so I blurt out "I've just got a list of questions, I'll reel them off, I appreciate the time you've...". "Now hush," she says, all Lauren Bacall, "I've got all the time in the world."
And, as a flood of saliva big enough for salmon to leap up gushes from my slacker jaw, she says: "You can ask me whatever you like," "Erm...So Jewel, what with gigs, albums, being a star and all that, how the devil do you find time to do a milk round as well?"
Back on this planet, I'm slumped over my desk. It's 7am, I'm hungover and having great difficulties trying to be alive, let alone awake. Compounding my AM hell is a receptionist 8,000 miles away who doesn't quite understand that I only have a ten-minute interview with Jewel and her attempts to spell my name ("WA", "UU", "Er, doubleu, Double U. Double U, Ex,
Why Zee", "UUXYZ?") is cutting into Jewel time. Reception puts me on hold. 'Home On The Range' played on a Casiotone. Classy. Big friendly American, "Hell...oooo!
So what time is it where you are, Jewel? "It's about 3.15pm. I'm laying on a chintzy hotel bed with a formica headboard, wearing my sneakers and sunglasses strumming my guitar - I have a window that only opens three inches. So I don't commit suicide, I guess."
I put forward the motion that she could slam the window on her hand repeatedly until...I begin to wish I hadn't started saying that. "But then I wouldn't be able to play guitar," she exclaims, whacking out a tinny, K-dang! chord.
Jewel's halfway through a gruelling and seemingly endless world tour promoting her new album 'Spirit' (East West) and she's "veeeeeerrrry, very tired". She's also breezy, chatty, funny and appears far from knackered - but still, it's probably not good etiquette to start an interview with suicide suggestions. "At this part of the tour I've just quit waking up."
There's one more date in Japan and then some time off before more touring, which includes seven dates in England. Doesn't she get fed up with all the touring? "Do you have any facial hair?" she responds, strangely. I inform her that I'm welcome at all branches of Ikea and, because I'm at the end of an 8,000 mile-long wire, I look like a young Elvis. I
have nine minutes left. What the hell.
"No, actually, I love touring, playing shows. I mean, work is work so you get some days when...but I like this work, I think it's fun. I get a little homesick, I think all of us do on the road."
At least this time around she has a band to keep her company. Her last major tour was in support of her remarkable, uber-unit-shifting debut album 'Pieces Of You', a predominantly acoustic affair whose terse confessionals gently tore into your heart. The album had already sold just over a million when a single, 'You Were Meant For Me', was released. And
sold by the aircraft hangar full. Jewel went from coffee shop balladeer to stadium filler before you could say 'Top Of The Pops'. She was 18. "I was pretty tickled because I wrote it with a really good friend of mine and we were both really, really broke when we wrote the damn song - we're getting the royalty cheques now and it's a really, really cool thing on that end. There's plenty of one-hit wonders, though, so I didn't get too excited. Touring for that was harder. I'm really glad that this record ('Spirit') supports a band. One of the hardest things about 'Pieces Of You' was playing
this little folk record in stadiums."
Not long after, 'Pieces' became an eight-times platinum certified debut album. When you sell that many records, they give you a certificate. "'Pieces Of You' just wasn't supposed to happen," she says incredulous. "I simply hoped to make an honest record about where I was at the time."
The world had fallen hook and line for the slinky singer/songwriter and her stories aimed at uplifting the downtrodden, many of them based on her extraordinary, impoverished upbringing in Homer (no electricity, no telephones. Doh!)., Alaska. "Journalists tend to make a big deal about how I grew up, but you rarely regard your own life as exceptional,
don't you think? I'm definitely aware that my childhood was unusual - compared to the rest of America - though in terms of Alaska, it wasn't out of the ordinary."
Jewel was also sick with kidney problems for a large part of her childhood, a period that shaped her in later life. "I think that illness and poverty can try to rob people of a certain dignity. I think it bites your heart, especially at a young age. It's definitely shaped the way I view the world." Has it made you a stronger person? "No, it's made me a snivelling idiot." And on that bombshell...
Jewel was awarded a scholarship at the prestigious Interlochen Fine Arts Academy in Michigan. On graduating, she moved to San Diego ("butt poor") and started to play gigs in coffee houses, her musical apprenticeship in Homer paying off. "I started playing music in bar rooms doing covers and originals with my dad when I was a kid. My dad taught me a lot of the professional side of music - musicianship, doing gigs, work ethic, all those kind of things. My mum, influenced me by turning me on to artists like Edith Piaf, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald."
It was in San Diego that she was signed up by Atlantic Records, who heard huge potential in her fragile bittersweet odes, an eclectic mix of country, rock and blues with intelligent, searching lyrics that lacked the blend of piousness and self-pity hollered by the likes of Alanis Morrisette. "We're all basically the same - we all yearn for love," she says, "and the more I've travelled the world, the more I've seen how lonely everbody feels and what tremendous longing everybody has to be loved."
The first thing Jewel did with her advance was move out of her temporary home (a car) and buy a flat which she shared with her brother and mother Nedra, estranged by divorce when Jewel was a tot. Nedra - who's also her manager and best mate, and sings backing vocals on the new album - has proved to be a huge influence on Jewel. "We were always quite close, even through the divorce. Separation is always hard, but it's not like we didn't see each other; we'd spend time and go on holiday. I started living with her when I was 15. There was a pretty big period of adjustment; I'd gone through a lot, but it wasn't hard. I wouldn't be able to create as I do if not for her vision and attention to my personal
growth."
Nedra and Jewel are both committed to making positive use of their successes via the Higher Ground For Humanity, an organisation that provides support for charities all over the world. Despite the cheesecake name, Higher Ground is expanding fast and offering much-needed help for vital charities often overlooked by funding bodies. "It's set up as
an umbrella organisation, so instead of being a charity we support other people's non-profit schemes. We can potentially support a limitless amount of different things throughout the world instead of just being one cause, and the organisations that exist under the umbrella then begin to co-exist amd cooperate. Because there's so much competition for funds that you get to a point where people are fiercely competing against each other, to the point of them not getting any. Right now we have about eight projects going in many different areas. One is a clean water project which is helping to clean up water in developing countries, that's just getting underway. Another one is a charity that helps people come to terms with the loss of their child."
Higher Ground is something Jewel is justly proud of, but there's an album and a film to discuss, and the clock's ticking away. 'Spirit' marks Jewel's first new recordings in five years and finds her eager to move forward both her sound (artists on the album include The Chilli Pepper's Flea and Dwight Yoakim) and her lyrical scope, this time around celebrating
human spirit. "I'm not telling people to become a specific anything," she explains. "I'm encouraging them to know themselves, keep their faith and follow whichever path is right for them. It's what I've encouraged in myself."
It's quite an American theme, though, isn't it? An obsession with spirituality, the constant search for something to believe in. "I find that American people try really hard - which is something I find humorous, I guess - I think your spirit is just natural. In America, you have people doing crystals, you have different religions, you have people licking their fingers sticking them in the air and hoping to be struck by spirituality like lightning - it's very funny. People go off the deep end in America."
How spiritual is the level-headed Jewel, then? "I don't really think about spirituality, to tell you the truth. I think that it's just inherent in people, something you inherit because you have a soul. Apparently. It's something that animates us until we die. It's a theological debate after that. In the meantime it's just part of your life, like your sex drive or mental capacity. What people call spirit or soul is a constantly changing thing."
Constantly changing seems to be a good way to describe the extraordinary talent who flits from genre to genre with huge success. She has a starring role in Ang ('The Ice Storm', 'Sense and Sensibilty') Lee's latest film 'Ride With The Devil', in which she plays an 18-year-old bride caught up in the American Civil War. For Jewel, it's just another channel to understanding herself. "My writing and music are a study of emotion and evolution. Acting is the study of the subconscious and trying to portray things that I didn't even understand or know about. I had to be very open and vulnerable to do that. It was difficult, because there were times when I was way out of my comfort zone - confused,
uncertain, fearful. But I like getting to the core, my own included."
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