Al Weisel

 

Jewel

By Al Weisel

US Magazine, July 1996, p. 71

 

Jewel Kilcher had to grow up fast. This is evident when, talking about her childhood, she self-consciously drops references to great thinkers during the conversation. "When I was in ninth grade, I realized after reading Kant and Pascal that I was not only smart, but curious," she says, knitting her eyebrows earnestly. "But Socrates isn't my god anymore. Pure reason is not based on the world."

 

Pure reason wasn't exactly based on her childhood, either. When Jewel (who goes by her first name only) was 8, her parents divorced and she moved with her father to Homer, Alaska, where they lived on an 800-acre homestead without electricity or running water. Taking her mother's place as her father's singing partner, Jewel performed folk songs in seedy bars all across the last frontier. It was during this time that Jewel was exposed to "drunk men in clubs hitting on women and how women would give themselves away," she says. Practicing five hours a day and spending her nights in bars didn't give Jewel much time to play with other kids. "I was with adults all the time," she says. "I was used to people talking to me like an adult. Kid talk was very difficult for me."

 

Even now, with her gold-selling debut album, Pieces of You, climbing the charts, Jewel, 27, still seems like a little girl trying hard to impress the adults. But if she sometimes exudes the confidence of a veteran in the music business and other times the innocence of a child, it's easy to see why. Her career has been as accelerated as her childhood.

 

When she was 18 and living in Southern California, Jewel was fired from a secretarial job because, she says, "I wouldn't sleep with the boss," so she started singing in a local coffee shop. She was living in her green Datsun station wagon at the time because she couldn't afford rent, but it wasn't long before she was discovered and signed by Atlantic Records.

 

Now, it seems, everything has fallen into place for Jewel. She was recently chosen to play Dorothy in a TNT presentation of The Wizard of Oz and asked by Melissa Etheridge to perform with her on VH1 Duets: and she's opened for Bob Dylan, who even let her tweak his nose. "I like to touch people's noses," she says nonchalantly, as if it's the most normal thing in the world. Everything about Jewel is just a little bit skewed, like the crooked tooth that transforms her fresh-faced blonde looks into something a little quirkier and more interesting. When she sings, her voice doesn't just follow the melody in a straight line but dips and soars all around it like an acrobat falling through the air, then somersaulting, then flying upward. Sometimes she'll even interrupt herself midsong, stopping her nonplussed band to regale the audience with one of her loopy ruminations - about how she used to think people's brains were balls of hair ("Senility means you're going bald") or how she wondered if looking at the moon too much would make her face "moon worn." At such times one is almost tempted to place one's fingers on her lips, like Dianne Wiest in Bullets Over Broadway, and exclaim, "Don't speak!" But while Jewel's universe may be slightly parallel to our own, it's still a fascinating place to visit.

 

Sometimes though, reality has a way of crashing into her world. She's a little freaked out when a teen-age fan obsequiously goes up to her, like a supplicant approaching a maharishi to be healed of his loneliness and adolescent pain, and asks her to dedicate a song to a boy he's pining for. Then there was Jewel's brief fling with Sean Penn, who decided to marry the mother of his children, Robin Wright, shortly after he and Jewel broke up. Penn, who directed the second video from her album, called Jewel after seeing her on Late Night With Conan O'Brien and took her to the Venice Film Festival with him. It was an experience that forced her to confront the price of fame. "We couldn't walk around because there were paparazzi everywhere," she remembers. "I just said, 'Jewel, what are you getting into?' Everywhere we walked, people stared. It gave me second thoughts." But Jewel doesn't like talking about it much. It's a subject that makes her bristle and snap shut like the lock on a teenager's diary. "Sean and I are really good friends," she says. "But I hate people focusing on it."

 

Although she's relatively mum on that subject, she's honest almost to a fault about other matters. "I don't think my album's that great," she confesses. " I think it's honest. It's a coffee-shop album." So what accounts for the record's healthy sales? "I just toured my ass off," she says. "My sales are purely from touring."

 

Singing songs like "I'm Sensitive" as the opening act for groups like the Ramones wasn't easy. "I wanted to kill myself after some shows," she says. Although she compares singing in a studio to "faking an orgasm," Jewel says that when she records her second album, she'll "be better at it this time." On her next effort, she promises, we'll see some "growth." Perhaps now she can take her time.■.

 

Al Weisel is the co-author, with Larry Frascella, of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, being published in October 2005.

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