Jewe on the set of her video for "Satisfied." Photo courtesy of The Valory Music Co.
When her parents divorced, she spent more than a half-dozen years with her father touring as a duet act, starting at the age of eight. "We sang in biker bars and lumberjack joints. If the cops were ever called, I’d hide in the bathroom till they were gone," she says. At fifteen, she went her own way, performing solo for the first time and earning a vocal scholarship to Interlochen, a private arts school in Michigan where she also majored in visual art. It was here she learned guitar and began writing songs, inspired by a love of reading at a young age. "Reading made me feel connected to the world," she explains. "The writers I returned to again and again were the ones that were brutally honest, willing to show themselves as heroic at times, grotesque at others. Anais Nin, Charles Bukowski, these were heroes to me."
Heartfelt songwriting became not only an emotional outlet, but a means of survival. During spring break one year she took a train and hitchhiked in Mexico, earning money as a street-corner minstrel. "I made up lyrics everywhere I went and eventually it turned into a very long song about what I saw around me," she recalls. "I made it back to school two weeks later with an unformed song called ‘Who Will Save Your Soul’." She was 16 at the time and had no idea that song would, a mere three years later, become the first single from her first album, offering not just a day’s meal ticket, but meteoric success.
Moving to San Diego, a series of unfortunate events led to living in her car and, after it was stolen, borrowing $1,000 from a friend to buy a van to live in. She got her first regular gig at a coffeehouse in Pacific Beach, where fans soon multiplied like rabbits, building a local cult following. Label A&R guys started coming as well, and Jewel was signed to Atlantic Records close to her 19th birthday. Her first record, a deeply introspective, live, voice-and-acoustic-guitar, modern folk collection called Pieces of You, sold about 3000 copies, nearly all in San Diego, in the nine months after its February 1995 debut. So, Jewel hit the road with a vengeance, playing four shows a day in 40 cities. A folk singer at the height of grunge, she was encouraged by two acts she opened for: Bob Dylan, who actively listened to her songs and discussed lyrics with her, and Neil Young, who gave the nervous solo artist a piece of advice at Madison Square Garden: "It’s just another hash-house on the road to success. Show ‘em no respect!"
Hard work and heartfelt songwriting, not to mention an exquisitely expressive voice, paid off. After a year on the road, "Who Will Save Your Soul" became a major hit. And, with the release of two other hit singles, "You Were Meant for Me" and "Foolish Games," album sales went through the roof, as Blender magazine writes: "With considerably less fuss, [Pieces of You] went on to exceed the sales of Nirvana’s Nevermind, moving a phenomenal 11 million units."
Hailed by The Times of London as the most sparkling female singer-songwriter since Joni Mitchell, Jewel’s subsequent albums steadily built her reputation and fan base. In November 1998 came Spirit, a collection of inspirational ballads aided by sparse, supportive instrumentation. The next November she offered up Joy: A Holiday Collection, blending well-loved Christmas carols with traditional spirituals and other songs, followed in Fall 2001 by the best-selling album This Way. In June 2003, her fifth work, 0304, premiered at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart, marking both the highest-debuting and highest-charting album of her career to date. Describing it as a modern take on 40s dance hall music, Jewel brought dance beats, synthesizer flavors and layered vocal overdubs to the album, which included the top five hit single "Intuition."
