The StraitsTimes interviews Jewel

Gem Of A Personality 

Though bored with her rags-to-riches story, international star
Jewel tells it once more for her fans here.

A winning combination of a sense of fun and a lack of vanity
keeps Jewel high in the popularity stakes.

By TEE HUN CHING

THE first thing that strikes you about Alaskan babe Jewel is her
bubbly warmth, which is as thick as the frost that blankets her
hometown. 

"Hi there," comes the greeting, and the fresh-faced lass accedes
gamely to the request to have her pictures taken, even though she
does not have makeup save for a hint of mascara. 

The photo-call had been scheduled for later in the afternoon, "but
it's okay, we can do this", she says in her lilting voice, and she
flashes her slightly misaligned set of pearlies when told there is a
tight deadline to meet. 

For an international star who has graced the covers of Time,
Rolling Stone, Vogue and Details styled to the nines, her lack of
vanity amazes. There is no Major Star Attitude. 

Lounging around the Hilton hotel suite with band members Doug
Pettibone and Brady Blade, she is as down-to-earth as her songs
about love and life that have won her the adoration of fans
worldwide. 

Wearing a fuschia tank top and jeans, she has no hang-ups about
her image -- a 24-year-old sexy folk singer with a milk-and-cookies
wholesome appeal. 

"I'm a half-child-half-woman trying to grow up," she points out,
when asked to define her image, for which she says there is no
fixed formula. 

"It is a young woman's prerogative to change her mind," she adds
laughingly. 

In town for the South-east Asian leg of the Jewel Spirit Tour, she is
in high spirits, swopping comments and chuckles with Pettibone
and Blade throughout the 20-minute interview. 

"I love travelling. And it's great to get paid to travel," says the
singer, a first-time visitor here. 

With her delicate looks and heartfelt songs that mirror her
concerns and emotions, she has endeared herself to legions of
fans since her debut album, Pieces Of You, took off in 1996 after it
was released in 1995. 

That work, which features live solo acoustic performances
recorded at a San Diego coffeehouse, plus tunes recorded at Neil
Young's Redwood Digital Studio, has sold more than 10 million
copies. 

But to Jewel, her maiden release, hailed as the one of the top
debuts of all time, will always be "the album that was not meant to
be". 

"It was a folk record. Folk records don't sell so much, what with
songs that last seven minutes and all," she says. 

Four years down the road, Spirit, her second album, is on track to
duplicate the success of her first. It sold more than four million
copies in sales within three months of its release. 

The album, which started out as a batch of Christmas tunes, is now
a polished collection of "spiritual" ballads that mine their inspiration
from love, hope, faith and human experience. 

"I wanted the record to be very specific about how I've tried to stay
alive -- emotionally, physically, spiritually -- over the last four
years," she told Newsweek when Spirit was launched last
November. 

But there has been no drastic change in her evolution as a
musician, she maintains. "I still look back to those early days and
find that some of that stuff is really rare and pure," she says. 

"You are bolder, cockier, more idealistic when younger, and you
are pretty vocal about things." 

Writing, be it songs, prose or poetry, has always been her tool of
dealing with her experiences. 

A Night Without Armor, her book of poetry published last May, is
filled with adolescent musings on topics ranging from sexuality and
first love to fame and homelessness, which she began writing
about at 15. 

She is working on a collection of short stories that is due out in
July. "It's about what I want to tell people, what I wish I was told
when I was a kid," she says. 

Her rags-to-riches story has captured many an imagination, but is
beginning to bore her. Commenting on it once more, for the benefit
of her fans here, she says patiently: "After a while, it feels like I'm
talking about someone else. I feel so removed from it all." 

But it still begs telling. Born Jewel Kilcher to a family of artists and
musicians, she was raised in a log cabin on an 320-acre homestead
near Homer, Alaska, that had no electricity or running water. 

After her parents divorced when she was eight, she stayed with her
father and did gigs at the local bars. 

She moved in with her mother, Nedra Carroll, in Anchorage at 15,
and saw herself through an arts school in Michigan as a
sculpture-class model. 

The spin to the tale comes when, in 1992, mother and daughter
moved to San Diego, and into separate vans, in an attempt to "cut
down on living expenses". 

Urged by her mother to "make herself available to her dream", she
lived out of a blue Volkswagen van for about a year while her
mother parked next to her for six months. 

Discovered while singing at a coffeehouse, and signed up by
Atlantic Records, she saw that her ascent to fame was of the sort
that could jack up sales, and the press milked it for it was worth. 

But it became a strain on her. "I feel like a comicbook," she once
said. 

She has a few bones to pick with the press, which has alternately
idolised her for her insightful honesty and slammed her for her
naivete and lack of depth. 

"The press never had any real talent for recognising real talent,"
she offers, then laughs and adds: "Oh boy, am I going to get it for
that." 

She is puzzled, too, by rumours about her that find their way into
print. Her alleged obnoxious behaviour on the set of Lee Ang's
Ride With The Devil is one. In the film, she makes her celluloid
debut as a widow who falls for a soldier, played by Skeet Ulrich (As
Good As It Gets), in a coming-of-age drama set in the American
Civil War. 

Reports listed her lack of acting experience and guitar-strumming
habit as behaviour that irked her colleagues. 

"I don't know where that came from. Everyone was great. I was the
only girl on the set, so people were all very nice," she says. 

"And Lee, he was my saviour," she adds about the Taiwanese
director of Ice Storm and Sense And Sensibility. "My job was just to
please him." 

If she could have a shot at altering anything that fame has sent her
way, it is to shatter the rumour about her liaison with Jean-Claude
Van Damme, she says. 

For the record, she is dating Chris Douglas,
soap-opera-star-turned-Mon-tana-rodeo-cowboy. 

The tidbit about Van Damme had its roots in a party, at which she
never showed up. But reports the next day described a necking
session she had with the beefy actor. 

"Jennifer Aniston was probably there," she says cheekily, referring
to the Friends actress who share the same flaxen long locks. 

"Or it could be Baby Spice! I'm always being mistaken for Baby
Spice," she adds, to loud guffaws from Pettibone and Blade. 

Glimpses of the child in her are caught frequently from her
interaction with the two, who, by flanking her, seem to be lending
her morale support. 

"Let's see whose shoes win," she says to her companions and
begins to compare the aesthetic value of footwear midway through
the interview. 

After a few seconds of pondering the three pairs of feet in front of
her, she declares to Pettibone: "Yours suck!" 

The happy face belies the pressure and stress she encounters
daily. 

"You just have to be very strong and get on with it," she says,
sober now. "I became so self-conscious once I couldn't even go on
stage. I had no idea people were watching everything and all I
wanted to do was to sing." 

Her mother, who is also her manager, she reveals, is her pillar of
strength in her moments of darkness. 

"She engages in reflection and meditation. She is fearless and
impenetrable. That's what I'm trying to be," she says. 

A knock on the door signals that time is up. She has many other
journalists to meet for the day. 

"Thank you for your time," she says sweetly. 

Apart from a shining songwriting capability, Jewel, it appears, has a
gem of a personality, too.


March 30, 1999