Hit singer-songwriter Jewel is going full-circle on the tour for her most recent album, “Picking up the Pieces,” which was conceived as a bookend to her wildly successful 1995 debut album “Pieces of You.” For the latest album, Jewel returned to her folk and country roots.
“I was inspired by one of my mentors, Neil Young,” she said about the album. “I loved that he did ‘Crazy Horse’ but would also go back to ‘Harvest’ with ‘Harvest Moon.’ That’s what I wanted to do per my role model. I love that style. It’s very close to my heart and my poetic soul. There was a time in my life when I needed to make an emotionally raw, stripped-down record with no pretense where I attempted to get rid of 20 years’ worth of things that may not necessarily have belonged to me as an artist or even as a human.”
Jewel also ended up producing the album, though that wasn’t the initial plan.
“It wasn’t my intention to produce it myself,” she said. “I did have a production partner and he backed out at the last minute; he thought I was the only one that should do it, which fairly annoyed me at the time. I was really upset. But in hindsight, I ended up realizing he was right. I just wanted no filters. I wanted this to really be a direct experience of who I was and where I was at in my life. It was actually really important that there wasn’t anybody else that had an influence on that.”
When Jewel hits the road this month, her shows will include songs from throughout her career as well as stories from her recent memoir, “Never Broken — Songs Are Only Half The Story.”
“It covers the gamut,” she said about the tour. “I don’t tend to do set lists. It’s just me with my guitar on stage and my fans are incredibly well-versed on unreleased material. I have a lot of records out. I tend not to be very rigid.”
Jewel’s success has resonated with fans of folk, country, rock and pop music over the years but, surprisingly enough, when her first album debuted in 1995, Jewel started breaking big on alternative-rock radio on her way to becoming a commercial smash.
“It was all very organic,” Jewel said about her early success. “When I came out, nobody knew what to call me. I actually think that ‘You Were Meant For Me’ was a straight-up country shuffle song. But country radio at the time was Shania Twain and Faith Hill. They were very produced and that was the opposite of what I was, so I didn’t fit there. I didn’t know that there were these strict rules with genres and which songs get put where. The alternative movement was wide open enough that, somehow with Nirvana and Soundgarden, I was able to kind of fit in there. Not that I was a perfect fit, but at least I got a voice and was able get on the radio. ‘You Were Meant For Me’ becoming a pop smash was really funny because the Spice Girls were out at the time and I was the opposite of that. I was just glad to get played. I don’t really care what people call me.”
That flexibility hasn’t changed over the years, Jewel added.
“As the industry changes, and pop moved incredibly swift, I listened to country because country is what alternative used to be, minus grunge. That’s why I like The Eagles and rock and storytelling. That was a natural fit for me. I feel like I haven’t changed a ton. I love to experiment with songwriting but my heart and my style of writing at the core has stayed the same. I think [Bob] Dylan and Neil Young have encouraged me to do that. You have to follow your muse.”
Jewel said that she’s always had LGBT fans and friends who inspired her even before she made it big.
“I think the LGBT community is so wonderful,” she said. “The sense of humor among all my gay friends … as someone who has had so much to overcome in my life, humor has really helped me survive. That’s one of my favorite things about my gay friends. They have great taste and they don’t take themselves too seriously and have a great sense of humor. They are able to overcome the challenges of life by being clever and witty.”
Most music artists, whether highly successful or not, usually have some form of cautionary tale about the pressures to conform to the perceived tastes and expectations of the mainstream. But Jewel said from the beginning, she’s always been allowed to do exactly what she’s wanted with her music.
“I’ve always had creative control,” she said. “I’ve never had a label come to the studio, not that I’ve banned them. They’ve always respected what I did and trusted me. I’ve never had anybody say, ‘You have to do this’ or ‘You have to do that.’ If I made a left turn, they just made a left turn with me. In my book I tell a story about ‘You Were Meant For Me,’ which had failed at radio. So I made this really bad pop version of it. And it cost so much money that I was embarrassed to tell them I didn’t like it. Amazingly, my label came to me and said, ‘We don’t want you to change for radio. We’d rather have radio change for you.’ And we went back to work for a whole year and finally got ‘Who Will Save Your Soul’ to get traction at the height of grunge. They really believed in me. The amazing thing for me about the success of ‘Pieces of You’ was, at first I was like, I didn’t mean to write a hit. I don’t know how to do it again. Then I realized, Hey, you just sold 12-million records. Save your money and you don’t have to have a hit again. So I gave myself permission to experiment, have fun and not really care what people thought of me. I did what I thought was right.”
Jewel performs 8:45 p.m. April 16 at the Borgata Hotel, Casino & Spa Music Box, 1 Borgata Way, Atlantic City, N.J. For more information or tickets, call 609-317-1000 or visit www.jeweljk.com/.