Growing Up With Jewel

“This was a gradual steel frost / That started with cold feet / And ended with numb hearts,” the artist known as Jewel sings in a sad whisper.

The lyrics were recorded for a song on her newest album, “Picking Up the Pieces ,” out last month. In this particular song, “His Pleasure Is My Pain,” she tells the story of a souring relationship -- a man indifferent to his partner’s sensitive disposition.

On paper, without the smooth edges of the singer’s soft crooning, the words seem a little maudlin, or maybe just fitting for a singer-songwriter who’s just endured a divorce -- which Jewel did, last year. But the song wasn’t written about her reportedly amicable split from her husband of six years, Ty Murray -- it was written when she was 17, homeless and scouring for food. 

“I wasn’t in a relationship when I wrote a lot of those songs, when I was young. I was just imagining,” Jewel said in an interview with The Huffington Post. Revisiting them decades later, she added, was “kind of eerie.”

Jewel’s been doing a lot of revisiting lately. With “Picking Up the Pieces” she returns to her humble beginnings as a down-and-out folk artist, finally producing some of the songs that didn’t make it onto her debut album, recorded in 1995 after she was spotted in a coffee shop by a talent scout. Before that, she performed a yodeling act with her family at hotels and bars in Alaska, and moved out at 15, putting herself through high school.

If “Pieces of You” was an unfiltered look into the imaginative, wounded mind of a teen who’d willfully taken to the streets, “Picking Up the Pieces” is Jewel’s reflection on those years, from the vantage point of a woman who has now experienced some of the heartbreak she once dreamt up as metaphor. In the past 20 years, Jewel got married, got divorced, gave birth to a son and recorded albums in myriad genres, including a record of children’s music and a pop album with mixed reviews.

“I think it was good to go back and look at some of the wildness of my earlier writing, and draw from that, and also bring in some of the experienced, patient craft I’ve learned over time,” Jewel said. “I was picking and choosing from my 19-year-old self what worked, and what didn’t. Over 20 years, you become slightly domesticated, and part of it’s good. You learn some things that are important to learn. And sometimes you learn things that ... eh. You’re just domesticating.”

Jewel’s matter-of-fact manner of speaking about her career is refreshing. And, her self-awareness about her progression as a musician is evidenced by a soft crooning that matches her self-described tameness, a peaceful state she’s created for herself both personally and vocally.

In “His Pleasure Is My Pain,” a song she says has been imbued with new meaning post-divorce, you’ll only occasionally hear the tragic bellows that made her famous. They’ve been replaced by meandering, spoken-word storytelling, an emotionally honest means of addressing real sadness. No embellishment is necessary; she’s lived these words now.

Jewel says she’s lucky to have put forth such blunt emotions in her music at a young age. The decision made the oft-discussed transition from girlish pop sensation to mature recording artist a non-issue.

“I think one of the best things I did was choose as a 19-year-old to lead with the truth, because I think if you don’t it sets you up for having to maintain an image. Especially if you start at 19,” she said. “You have to somehow justify change in that case. And I never had to justify change. I think it’s one of the reasons I never had to face that sort of, ‘How will she transition from a teenager to an adult in her songwriting?’ Those kinds of questions weren’t necessarily apt to me in my career. I’m the same person.”

To accompany her reflective album, Jewel also released a memoir last month, surveying  her inherited love of folky vocals, her unexpected popularity, her familial and financial troubles with her mother (who was also her manager) and her successful attempts to stay afloat while attempting, also, to stay true to her artistic morals.

The book is titled Never Broken, a riff on perhaps her most popular single, “Hands,” an ode to the human spirit and the triumph of the individual. In the book, as in the song, Jewel shares blunt words sweetly: “My hands are small I know / But they’re not yours, they are my own.” The plainness of the words mirrors her approach to poetry, another craft she’s pursued since she was a kid, much to the dismay of critics. Never Broken includes a few poems addressing Jewel’s divorce, following up on a book of poetry she released in 1999, which was panned with zeal by anyone not already devoted to her sentimental musings.

“I think poetry is the snakeskin of the soul,” Jewel said, noting that she enjoys Pablo Neruda and other “folks who elevate ordinary objects, which I like, instead of being elitist in an approach to poetry. A really skilled poet will use the craft to form an elite thought. Sometimes it leaves the reader out of it. For that reason I like poets who very passionately include everybody in the process.”

Jewel says she began writing poetry around the same time she started writing songs. “Just writing, you know, how a cloud made me feel, silly things. I never meant to write as a profession. It’s kind of a hilarious joke that I did. In school I don’t think I was ever taught grammar properly," she said. "But writing was for myself, and it accidentally lead to a job that I’m quite thankful for.”

Jewel’s stumble into stardom sets her apart from singers who sought it; because she never aimed to be appealing, she feels she was able to tailor her career to her interests and moods, flitting from genre to genre based on what she felt capable of producing.

Referring to her her 2003 album “0304,” her only foray into dance music, Jewel said, “After my pop record is when everything went down with my mom, and I had some things I wanted to say, and they weren’t pop songs. It just wasn’t that time in my life. It will be again.”

She added that she prefers not to draw a hard line in distinguishing between musical genres: “It’s like going into your closet saying, ‘You have to choose if you’re a sweat pants girl or a dress girl.’ Like, who would do that? And why do we do it to music? For me it’s just like going into my closet and saying, ‘I wanna dance. I wanna have fun. And I wanna stop worrying,’ versus, ‘I want to tell stories.’”

So, how do you cobble together a cohesive narrative about a singer who has dabbled in a little bit of everything, and whose life thus far has spanned a rough-trod path from busking in rural Alaska to recording a new single with Dolly Parton? There is one unifying feature present in all of Jewel’s songs, and in the story she tells about her own life.

“I like to call it informed optimism,” she said of her unequivocally hopeful lyrics, both in her dance hit “Intuition” and her sorrowful love ballad “You Were Meant for Me.” “I find the process of pain to be intrinsically healing. If you give into pain you’re already engaged in the healing process. So I think it’s inherently optimistic. It’s when you resist pain that you become quite cynical and quite hardened. And that’s a type of pain that’s intolerable to me.”

She may not be subtly artful musician-turned-memoirist Patti Smith, but Jewel’s refusal to turn down her earnest message of hope amid pain is admirable in an age of irony. As a teen, she gained popularity by baring her sensitivity, which she characterizes as feminine. And as an adult she benefits from doing so with a little less raw wailing, and a little more self-aware finesse.

“I love my femininity and my viewpoint is feminine, certainly,” Jewel said. “But hopefully human, more than anything. Hopefully everybody can relate.”

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