A JEWEL OF A MILLION FACETS

She writes and sings her own songs. She has published two books. She has acted in a Lee Ang movie. Most of her efforts drew acclaim. So why does Jewel tell Paul Zach that she just wants to be alone?

Three years ago, American singer-song-writer Jewel seemed to be everywhere. She was in the pop charts with sales of more than 23 million copies of her three albums; in the bestseller booklists with a collection of verse that has so far sold more than 1 million copies; all over MTV and VH-1; performing at Woodstock, the White House and in Singapore; and even acting in a Lee Ang movie.

And, of course, she was on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, a most coveted spot for all popsters. But as far as Jewel was concerned, she was nowhere.

"I got into this because I like songwriting a lot, and I like performing for people," she says on the line from Los Angeles.

"But I started being more of a cheerleader than a songwriter, which wasn't fun for me."

So at a point where she was poised on the brink of an enviable future of unlimited possibilities, she did something that few would dream of. Sometimes that made music executives at her label, Warner, shudder.

"I quit." she says, sniffling. "I have a cold so you have to excuse my stuffy nose. "Ya, I just quit. I didn't know if it was going to be terminal, or what. I just didn't think I'd ever come back and do it the big way that I had before. "I knew I'd always write songs and always make records, but I really broke away from thinking about radio, caring about radio, caring about anything but making music that I liked." Two years passed. Jewel risked losing her sparkle.

Then last November, she released This Way, which critics have called her best yet. She is also on the road again- but this time, on her own terms.

"I made an agreement with my label that, if I came back and did another record, I wouldn't tour more than two or three weeks without getting a 10-day break," she says.

She took such a break after three weeks in Europe, and will get another after three weeks inAsia. She performs at Suntec City on Friday.

"I can write in those 10 days, and this will help me not get burnt out."

Indeed, unlike many pop stars, she says she does not "go out", preferring to keep to herself no matter where she is.

This results in songs like the infectious Cleveland on her new album. She wrote it while performing in the Ohio city, the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, into which she inducted 1960s singing sensation Brenda Lee last month.

It's about missing someone," says Jewel, who turns 28 next month. "I just was in Cleveland and i needed a name for a city and it worked.

Her someone is seven-time world rodeo champion Ty Murray, whose life on the trail she sings about on This Way in an anthemic  ballad, Till We Run Out Of Road.

It was to his sprawling ranch in Texas that she retreated during her self- imposed two-year exile. 

"I just went back to the kind of wide open spaces where I was raised, and wrote songs the way I fell in love with writing them, which is just for the love of it."

ROUTE TO SUCCESS

Born Jewel Kilcher in Payson, Utah, in 1974, the family soon moved to Homer, Alaska. Her parents, Atz and Nedra, were musicians who made a modest living performing in the local bars and lounges.

There was no television, telephone or even indoor plumbing, so Jewel had to create her own entertainment. When she was eight, her parents divorced. She turned to writing poetry to cope with the trauma.

She also started singing and, in tribute to her Swiss ancestry, yodelling, with her father. She won a vocal scholarship to the prestigious Interlochen Fine Arts Academy in Michigan. There, she studied opera, drama and sculpture.

After graduation, she headed for San Diego, California, to live with her mother. Enroute, a career was born. 

"I just needed money. I was going to sing in the streets. I took a train across the country and I taught myself guitar on that train. And I'd get out and sing at each stop, like, say in Chicago," she says.

"I also started writing a lot of songs. That was just because I didn't read music. I couldn't learn other people's songs, so it was easier to write them."

In San Diego, she lived first with her mother, and then in a 1969 Volkswagen bus, K-Marts served as her bathroom. She scraped out a living as a waitress, then landed a gig performing at the Innerchange coffehouse.

By 1993, her bus-honed songs, shimmering voice, earthy manner and unearthly beauty were packing the house.

One night, the audience included Atlantic Records representatives. They signed her to a deal and she recorded her debut album, Pieces Of You, both live at the Innerchange, and at the San Francisco-area studio of enduring but eccentric rock star Neil Young.

Released in 1995, the album was not an overnight sensation.

HITTING THE BIG TIME

It was not until a year and nearly 500 shows later that the album's re-released single Who Will Save Your Soul caught on, peaking at No. 11 on the Billboard chart in September 1996.

The next single, You Were Meant For Me, went to No.2. The album was nominated for two Grammy Awards. It would go on selling 10 million copies worldwide.

Her second album, Spirit, made its debut the following year at No.3 on the Billboard chart, selling 6 million copies.

By then, The Times of London was calling her the "most sparkling female singer-songwriter since Joni Mitchell."

Mitchell is the influential 1960s singer-songwriter whose influence on many solo women artistes cannot be overstated.

"There was another critic there who said that I should have stayed in the woods and not done another record," Jewel says,  giggling like someone half her age.

HarperCollins also published her poetry collection, A Night Without Armor, in 1998.It has been through 29 reprints.

The following year, it published Jewel's intimate portrait of her turbulent life in the road, Chasing Down The Dawn, which shows off her photography as well as more of her writing.

She hit the big screen in 1999 in Lee Ang's civil war movie, Ride With The Devil, to more acclaim. The New York Times' Stephen Holden wrote, "Jewel conveys an orneriness and tough humour beneath a facade of 19th-century decorum."

The Chicago Sun Times' critic, Roger Ebert, noted that Jewel "is an actress here, not a pop star trying out a new hobby."

Later that year, Jewel and her mother, who is also her manager, founded Higher Ground For Humanity. The group aims to promote global community and individual action to inspire positive change.

BACK TO HER ROOTS

"I really figured out a lot of stuff in those two years. The hard thing about this job is that you're expected to promote entirely all the time ad you're never given time to write." she says. "That's fine if you're just an entertainer and all you need to do is get your dance routines together. But when you are trying to stay socially involved in the world and with art, it's hard."

   Time passed. "And I knew what kind of record I wanted to make. And then I made a record and I finally felt like talking about it."

With rootsy song structures steeped more deeply in country and the blues than folks, it reveals a heightened lyric sensibility too. Listeners who felt her earlier work too simplistic and naive for their tastes may find This Way a revelation, as has Rolling Stone magazine.

Giving it a 3 and 1/2 -star (out of five) rating critic James Hunter calls it "elegant, earthy, engaged."

'CRITICS DON'T GET IT

But she laughs harder when informed that another critic for the All Music Guide website found a line in the track Do You Want To Play? plain silly. It tells of a girl who has pictures of another singer-songwriter scattered all across the floor.

"Who on God's green earth would have pictures of Randy Newman across the floor?" roared the critic. "That's so dumb," she says. "No wonder he's a critic."

She explains that the song is about a girl who is too cool to be functional and that she used Newman- who wrote such classics as Short People before turning to the movies- because his is a smart person's choice of music.

"Critics don't have a sense of humour. They don't get it. They'll think it's being earnest, when really I'm being ironic." she says.

"The song is sung by a character whose saying, why all the pretence? Why do you have to act so pretentious? Let's just have fun.

"I think silliness and whimsy in songwriting is important. If all I did was try and do cool lyrics that would impress critics, that were serious and meaningful and deep all the time, fans would get bored and that would become one dimensional."

She also remains just as bemused about what has happened in her own life, going from living out a bus less than 10 years ago to fame and fortune. As her prolonged absence from the scene indicates, the prospect of stardom was not why she picked up a guitar at the first place.

"It's no big mystical thing. I didn't ever think I'd make it big." she says. "I didn't think I was God's gift to music. A lot of people sing; I was just one of them.