"I had to ask myself, 'Am I still doing this because I like it?' It had got bigger than I intended. I found I was talking about me more than I was writing about me. The only thing to do was stop."She insists that the pressure she was under was her own making. At 19, Jewel signed to Atlantic and released her first album.Four years ago, the career that Jewel had worked so hard to create nearly unravelled.
They would queue around the block hours before my show started, just to make sure they got in." Eventually, the word spread to Los Angeles, and record companies started sending representatives to see her shows. "I remember passing out flyers for my first show to surfers on the beach I think three people showed up But the whole thing grew fast. I played every Thursday night, and it got to the point where I had 100 people crammed into this tiny room. "My relationship with my dad was troubled, but every time I went outside, I felt inspired: I could see the natural order to the world, in the surroundings and in the way people lived."When she was 16, she moved to San Diego to be near her mother, who was suffering from a heart defect She got a series of low-paid jobs but "got fired a lot" Unable to pay the rent, she eventually moved into her van. Jewel gradually became involved in the local songwriting community and started performing her own music in coffee shops.
There was no heating and no plumbing, and they shared a telephone with 20 other homesteaders "I really loved living there," smiles Jewel. They played everything from bank openings and weddings to blue-grass festivals. Though she loved performing, she found her father difficult to work for "He's a perfectionist," she recalls "Sometimes we would practise five hours a day. I would be crying with exhaustion."After the divorce, she and her brothers lived with their father on a homestead in Homer. She insists that never had ambitions to be a pop star - for her, music was a means of making money, just as it had been for her father. She started singing on stage when she was six, alongside her parents and two elder brothers. The family would put on dinner shows for tourists in hotels and restaurants in Anchorage.
When she was eight her parents split and Jewel became a double act with her father. You know, fame's just like high school, with everyone wanting to be the most popular girl or the sexiest or wanting to be prom queen I'm serious - it's shocking. No matter what you do, you're not going to please everyone, so at some point you just say to yourself, 'I'm just going to be me'."Jewel was raised in a family of Alaskan ranchers, whom she describes as "bold, tough, hard-working, charismatic". "I appreciated the fact that they didn't use their fame or their art to make themselves look more perfect than they were."Fame, she says, is a simply a by-product of being a good artist. When I ask if she would prefer anonymity, she shakes her head "It wouldn't make any difference. You're living a life in front of people whether you're famous or not. As a teenager, she was drawn to writers such as Bukowski and Ana?Nin because of their truthfulness.
