By the time she was 6 years old, her parents began taking Jewel on their singing engagements to local hotels, bars and restaurants, where she learnt how to deal with drank assholes, later she was officially part of her parents' act. Her yodeling always was the star attraction of the act. The family lived together in a log cabin, without electricity or plumbing. Because of this, baths for the Kilcher family became a weekly ritual. Bathing in a community sauna and pool. She recalls, "It was education, too, to see red pubic hair for the first time. It was like, 'Whoa! I didn't know it could be like that.'"

Jewel explains, "Look, it was a lot of work. We'd be canning salmon after school while other kids would be watching He-Man on television. But, I was also very proud of it, and it shaped me into a certain kind of person. You'd get up at 5 in the morning, and there would be frost on your eyelashes. I shared a room with my brothers. I'd cook breakfast, milk the cow, walk three miles to the road, hitch-hike to school. It was a romantic and poetic existence."

Without either electricity or television, Jewel had to rely on her own imagination for entertainment. "I was spared a lot of media. I'm aware now how affected I am when I hear on the news how violent we (the human race) are, how we can't trust our religious or political leaders. That affects your ability to interact as a person. I was spared of that and instead given natural curiosity about life." Recalling the earliest memory of her childhood, she recounts, "Well, I was in a basement - I don't know how I got down there - and there was all these colours in my head, shimmering and dancing, as colour might. My mom goes, 'Jewel? Are you down there?' I remember consciously taking my name. And what was 'Jewel', were these colours and brightness in my head."

Despite her vivid imagination and the fact that she loved the social interaction of attending school, she found that she had a bit of a learning disability. Expressing her childhood disappointment, she says, "Having dyslexia made me feel like I would never be interested in life again. I used to love reading when I was little, and then it became difficult and I didn't understand why. My passion all drained out of me."

Her only exposure to outside music came from the radio. She knew very little of rock & roll, as jazz was very popular in Alaska. Speaking of her earliest musical influences, Jewel says, "What really got me into perfecting my voice and stuff was Ella Fitzgerald - just listening to her ability, her skill. It was so versatile and playful. It just made me feel better to listen to her." The first rock album that she recalls hearing was from the group Pink Floyd, with their classic LP, 'The Wall.' "I was 6. I thought it was 'Pink Panther'. Which is pretty funny to think that the 'Pink Panther; was going around singing, 'All in all, it's just another brick in the wall.'"

Singing was in Jewel's blood since very little. She didn't even suffer from "stage fright." She explains "I've been performing live since I was 6 years old. I was very driven. We toured Eskimo villages and I yodeled - it was a novelty thing. People have always like yodeling." Although she was talented at yodeling, it sometimes get her into trouble. "My father is Swiss, so I guess it's in my blood," she says. "When I was in third grade, I got kicked out of class for yodeling." According to her father, Atz, "she was always a quick learner, very hard-working and tenacious. Anything I'd tell her to do with her voice, she could do. One time when she was about 6, she was yodeling with us at a hotel show, and this lady came up and said she was a professor of music. She told us it was supposed to be impossible for a child like that to be able to yodel - as a child's vocal chords hadn't developed properly yet." Jewel remembers her early childhood as being very relaxed and easygoing. Both of her parents gave her and her two brothers a free rein in their after-school activities. "My dad was like, 'Do whatever you want,' but my mom would say, 'Be home by 9:00,'" she says. Jewel began to practice her vocalising. She was especially encouraged by her father to learn to sing more proficiently. "We'd practice - at my own will - for five hours a day." Jewel explains. "At 7 or 8 years old, I was doing these really sophisticated bluegrass harmonies. My dad was a real entertainers' entertainer: He would chide me

for not moving around on stage. He never wrote a setlist - he said you had to read the crowd's mood." She adopted that same theorem for playing to a crowd. Today she proudly proclaims, "I never write a set list."

Her life made a swift change when her parents divorced, and her mother moved away. She explains "Until I was 8, my upbringing was very normal." "It was very unreal. I lost all equilibrium," she recalls. "Leaving your mom on a street corner while you drive away in the back of a car is just... brutal." Her mother had always taught her about art, poetry and music. Jewel says, "Through those lessons, I was given a tool. After my parents got divorced, I started writing poetry a lot because I didn't always know how to express myself. That, to me, is the real beauty of writing: it makes you more intimate with yourself."

Jewel remained in Homer and continued singing with her father in bars and restaurants. Jewel was always willing to play with him in front of the audience. "I always had a choice," she claims, "I really did. People always think, 'Oh, an 8-year-old in a bar,' but it wasn't like that. I didn't feel unsafe. It was more family-restaurant bars. My brothers didn't do it. I was the one that liked to practice five hours a day. It definitely wasn't a boredom thing. I loved it." And so she practice music five hours a day for the next seven years.

Then there was a bizarre incident with the local pervert with a camera. A man in Homer approached Atz and told him that he wanted to photograph his daughter. "My dad was flattered. He's flattered that I am cute, which is sweet." Jewel recounts. "So I went there to the man's trailer, and he puts me in a dress and combs my hair out. I was so uncomfortable, and I told my dad I didn't like the man. Later it turns out that the man was in the paper as a child pornographer and molester. My dad came to me crying, and said, 'I will never doubt your instincts again.'" Throughout this time, it was music that really bound Jewel to her father.

With her mother gone, Jewel began to feel out of place, especially after she reached puberty. "I lived with all guys," she claims. "I didn't tell anybody. You just kind of shave your legs in the dark by yourself, embarrassed. And I didn't have any privacy, either. It wasn't a great place to become a woman. No matter how hard my life was with my family, it just gave me such tremendous spirituality and comfort. You knew there was a God. You knew there was some good force in the world, and you were lucky to be a part of it, safely."

When she was 14 years old, Jewel joined a local amateur rap group called 'La Creme'. As she explains, "My boyfriend at the time, Damien, was in the group. They called me the Swiss Miss. When my father met Damien, the first black boyfriend I ever had, he was in tears." What her father said to her was, "I'm so proud I raised such an open minded daughter."

Now a teenager, Jewel found that she was having feelings and frustrations that she had trouble expressing. "I got to the point where if I had a problem with my father, I could never speak it. I would write four pages and give it to him".

Unsatisfied with her home life, she became close to several of the local Native American Indians. All of them were very wise and a very good influence to Jewel. They said she was going to bring heart to the people. She explains, "They took me out to a meadow and said, 'Your life in the future will call for you to speak honestly to people. You don't know how to speak from your heart, and you need to learn how.' I remember going on top of a mountain and trying to say anything honest- just to the wind. I was crying because I couldn't say anything sincere." Afterwards, she learned how to speak from the heart and, according to her, she gleaned a lot of spirituality from the experience.

At the age of 15, Jewel travelled to Hawaii to see the world outside her little hometown of Homer. And, tired of the cold and her dad, she packed up her bags and stayed with her aunt in Hawaii. However, she was an outsider since the first day she got there. She was one of two white kids in her school. "I would almost get beaten up every day by the Hawaiian kids because I was white", she recalls. But the Hawaiian kids were amazed by Jewel's yodelling, they often asked her to yodel, and Jewel preferred yodelling than being beaten up every day! "It was my first time dealing with prejudice. I was stuck there until I could earn enough money to go home." She worked odd jobs until she got enough money to fly back home. But instead of returning to Homer, she went to live to Anchorage with her mother, Nedra.

Although she was glad to return to the "big city" of Anchorage, things weren't that easy for her. Her mother had gone into business with a partner, and apparently there were shady dealings relating to the partner. Nedra was investigated by the FBI, causing a local scandal. Jewel says, "Investigators would come to my school, and there would be things on her in the paper. We ended having to hock our stuff and move 200 miles away." Together they moved to the town of Seward, Alaska. As Jewel recounts the experience, "I was facing my 16th year of life, and I was really desperate. I kept thinking, 'What am I going to do with myself?' I had a sense that something needed to happen or else I would suffocate".

A friend of hers was enrolled in the prestigious Interlochen Fine Arts Academy in Michigan. Jewel decided that she wanted to attend the school as well, and really hone her craft. She got a partial vocal scholarship, but she still needed some cash. So Jewel and Nedra arranged a concert in Homer, where all of her friends and neighbours would attend. At the end of the concert, they passed around the hat. So, in a way, the citizens of Homer, Alaska, paid for the other part of Jewel's tuition. At Interlochen she immersed herself in drama, dance, sculpture, music and took up the guitar and began to write songs in her senior year. It is hard for Jewel to learn things since she is dyslexic and she had to practice 20 times as hard to learn to play the guitar.

After graduation, Jewel followed her mother to San Diego, which by now she calls home. They were in the same financial boat- broke. She began working as a waitress, and scrounging around for money. But it was after Nedra had to quit her job because of a temporary heart ailment that they had to cut down expense. When faced with making a big decision - an apartment or a vehicle - Jewel borrowed money from a boyfriend, and opted for 1979 Volkswagen van. Not only she drive the van, but she lived in it. Nedra also moved into a van, she lived in the van parked next to Jewel's! "It was a decision of freedom. If I could afford an apartment, I couldn't afford a car. If I could afford to pay rent, I couldn't afford food." She absolutely hated being a waitress. "When you're so poor that you can't find food, and you're scraping food off people's plates in restaurants to take home, it's degrading. And I would let bosses flirt with me, because they would take me out to dinner. I'd say, 'I'm no interested in you.' But, you still played the game." Jewel started to feel desolate. Jewel says, "This was a difficult time for me, I felt a lot of social pressure to figure out what I was gonna do with the rest of my life. I had no desire to go to college, but I also felt no peace in travelling or just bumming around. I got a number of dead-end jobs - got fired a couple of times. I was frightened and a little depressed. The idea of spending my life in a 9-to-5

job made me feel trapped and hopeless." "My mom always kept challenging me. She asked me 'What do you want? What does your spirit say?' Finally I said, 'I know what I want. I want to sing until people never feel alone.' And when I said that she said, 'OK.'"

Living on a shoestring budget and a diet of carrots and peanut butter, she decided to live her dream by surfing, writing poetry, and hanging out at coffeeshops writing songs. All she owned was a backpack, a surfboard and a mattress. She met Steve Poltz, a local musician. He became Jewel's musical mentor, as Steve found Jewel musically unawared and a real social misfit. He sat her down and had what he called Jewel 101 classes.

Without Jewel's waitressing job, Jewel and Nedra were really down on their luck. Jewel had a kidney infection go too long, and they went to all these doctors' offices and they'd refused Jewel because they didn't have money. "I'm in the car, throwing up all over myself, and my mom would get refused by one clinic after another. And seeing my mom walk out of the clinics was damaging to my spirit. It just made you angry. Nobody gave a shit. Nobody had to." "I was scared. I was 18, and I thought I would have to give up everything I believed in and everything I wanted to do. I just hated life. I cried every day. It was so frustrating."

She was at a turning point in her life, and she knew it. "I told myself, 'OK, I'm going to do something I love or I'm going to die,'" she claims. By that year, Jewel and Nedra's big meal out experience consisted of a session at the Happy Hour buffet of a cheap local bar. A luxury bathing experience consisted of splashing water on herself in the lavatory of the local K-Mart or Denny's restaurant.

At the age of 19 she began performing at Innerchange Coffeehouse, what she didn't know was that there her life was destined to change. After weeks of singing her introspective story-songs there, she gained quite a following. "They were an amazing audience," she recalls, "from 8 to 80 years old. That's what I want my fan base to be." She became such a huge hit in fact, that several of the other musicians invited her to sing during their sets, as a "guest artist". The next thing she knew, she was offered her own weekly gig, as her audience had grown from 4 to 400. It wasn't long before she began to attract a loyal following of people who loved her music. "I learned to pray, and I learned to manifest things," says Jewel. She always ended up with exactly what she needed, at precisely the right time. "People would help me out. If I said, 'Angels, or whoever, I really need a place to take a shower,' I'd meet a guy in a coffee shop who was really nice. He'd give the key to his apartment and would let me take showers before shows." Word of mouth reviews helped to spread the word. Slowly, her attitude about life began to change and she focused on her singing career. Critics and audience members alike, flocked to see Jewel. One of her first glowing reviews came from the local San Diego magazine, 'Slamm'. The publication said "Her voice is many things, all of them beautiful. When she opens up, the sound is crystalline and pure."

One night, a woman named Inga Vainschtein came into the Innerchange Coffeehouse, and was absolutely mesmerized by Jewel. It was Inga who first brought Jewel to the attention of Atlantic Records. Jewel has always claimed that she believed in miracles. Within five months of her Innerchange debut, Jewel was signed to her own recording deal! Her debut album, 'Pieces Of You' was released February 1995, and it began its slow ascent up the record charts in Billboard Magazine.

Her way to the top wasn't easy though. She had to overcome bad press reviews, "Pollyanna neohippie" prejudices, and other people's hopelessness in her. But determined to make it, she toured all over the country by her own until people listened her songs. Slowly, people recognised Jewel's merit and amazingly honest songs, and she changed the music business with her folk-pop style tingled with country, at a time when grunge music was ruling the airways and the music market.

"I have a different definition of optimism. I've noticed a belief that somehow optimism lacks intelligence and that optimism stems from a lack of experience and naiveté. I believe optimism is a choice. Cynicism isn't smarter, it's just safer".

What followed was constant touring, a record breaking multi-platinum debut album which stayed on the charts for over two years, a 2 million dollar contract to tell her life story (more than any pop musician has received for a memoir, she surpassed the autobiography advances paid to Aretha Franklin, Grace Slick, Aerosmith, LeAnn Rimes, Gladys Knight), which was released in the year 2000 as a collection of short stories and journal extracts called 'Chasing Down the Dawn', two Grammy nominations, an American Music Award for Best New Artist, a best-seller poetry book titled "A Night Without Armor", a film debut in Ang Lee's "Ride With The Devil", a multi-platinum hit second album called "Spirit", thousands of interviews and appearances on several TV Shows, herself on covers of the most prestigious magazines... and now an upcoming new album which is due on November 2001. Now Jewel is one of the most famous women musicians in the world with one of the most promising careers in the entertainment business. What we don't know is what Jewel will do in a future, as every time she surprises us. But we know she hasn't changed despite her success, she's the same down to earth person and the same cute sweet girl.

She is a voice to illuminate the dark reaches of the human heart, and to unleash enlightenment. She is a radiant star in a galaxy of mere singers. She has proved to us her originality in style, presentation and emotion. All brought together in a wonderful musical package. She is simply Jewel.

"Love bravely, live bravely, be courageous. There's nothing to loose. There's no wrong you can't make right again."
--Jewel

"Ama con valor, vive con valor, sé valeroso. No hay nada que perder. No hay error que no se pueda enmendar."
--Jewel

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