As part of Clear Channel Entertainment's on-going "Two For One Thursdays"
radio campaign, Pittsburgh area Jewel fans may appreciate knowing that for
ONE day, June 20 (tomorrow), many local radio stations will offer tickets
to Jewel's June 29th Pittsburgh concert on a "buy one, get one free"
basis.

For more information, listen in or contact the following radio stations in
the Pittsburgh, PA area: WZPT, WBZZ, WLTJ, WKWK, WMXY, WSHH, WOMP and WGLU

Jewel, Restored

By Sandra Barrera
Los Angeles Daily News
June 14 2002

Jewel thought about leaving her line of work for another altogether. But that was before the singer-songwriter popular for the lilting folk songs put out her latest platinum seller, This Way.

The album that Rolling Stone called "elegant, earthy, engaged" came as a result of a therapeutic two-year hiatus that found Jewel assessing her career for much of the time along the open spaces of her rodeo champion boyfriend's Texas ranch.

During that time, Jewel said, she had fallen out of love with the spotlight and its never-ending demands.

"I promoted way more than I wrote and, for me, writing makes me happy," the 28-year-old said from the San Diego ranch that she shares with her mom.

But even her writing began to suffer, leaving Jewel with a feeling of desperation.

"I got into this job at 18 because it was the first thing I loved," Jewel said.

"To lose that was frightening. I thought I'd have to find something else, and so it was nice at the end of two years that I fell back in love with it.

"I knew what kind of record I wanted to make," she said. "And I knew what things to change to guarantee it would not happen again."

Jewel's biggest problem was scheduling.

Following the breakthrough of 1995's Pieces of You, Jewel toured more than a month at a time with no weekend breaks or holidays off.

One Christmas, she sang for President Clinton at the White House despite being run down from pneumonia.

As Jewel puts it, "I wasn't getting better."

Constant touring had affected her hearing in one ear, and Jewel was told that if she didn't rest soon, it would become permanent.

Jewel said that she started to feel ungrateful for the success that had befallen her at the age of 22.

"This isn't a job you should be unhappy in," she said.

"That's another reason I wanted to quit. That and the fact that I talked to a guy from England ... who saw me on two television shows at the time and said he could tell that I didn't really want to be there. I'm really bad at faking it when I'm not happy."

Fortunately for Jewel, who also is a best-selling poet, rest came shortly after she finished promoting her 1998 follow-up to Pieces of You, Spirit.

For Jewel, rest meant getting back to the way she was raised in Alaska. Back to nature.

She said that it was the stillness there on her boyfriend's ranch that allowed her time to reclaim both her health and creative voice, resulting in what Billboard magazine called "[her] most ambitious effort yet," albeit This Way is also her least accessible to the masses.

"You don't just make records for you; otherwise, you just sing in your bedroom all day," Jewel said.

"If you don't have something useful to say and if you don't feel like you're adding to the craft, you should just let your heroes do it. You shouldn't be a part of it. But I didn't want to make a record until I felt like I knew what I had to say and I felt like it was valuable."

Jewel said that she didn't have a problem. The songs off This Way flowed with little effort.

"I wrote Jesus Loves You during a walk along a river," Jewel said. "It took me five minutes."

Many of the songs are reflective, such as Standing Still, which harbors two meanings for Jewel.

The first, she said, is love.

"It's me wondering if me moving so much and my lifestyle causes my love life to stand still," Jewel said, explaining there's also a more cryptic meaning to the song that may not occur to people listening.

"I wrote it about the fact that fame really affords a prolonged adolescence and that unless you're careful emotionally, you start standing still to where you're a child and you're bratty and your writing quits developing and many dangerous things like that."

As for her own life, Jewel said that she is no longer standing still but taking charge of her singing career. She is touring North America, playing three weeks straight and then allowing for 10 days of reflection at a time.

A Jewel that shines


By JEFFREY S. SOLOCHEK, Times Staff Writer
) St. Petersburg Times
published June 15, 2002 TAMPA

-- Alaskan folk star Jewel kicked off the American leg of her This Way tour
Friday at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, thrilling a near sellout
crowd of 2,500 with more than 90 minutes of her intensely personal, poetic
reflections on life. Having broken her collarbone and a rib in April, Jewel
relied on her backing band to provide the music for most of her set, focusing
her energy on soaring vocals that entranced the audience. She played several
songs from her latest CD, including the hit Standing Still and the skewering
Jesus Loves Me. Jewel also reached back for the crowd pleasers Foolish Games
and You Were Meant For Me, which became a sing-along, as well as more than a
dozen other tunes. Band members Mark Oakley and Stuart Mathis on guitar,
T-Bone Hannon on bass, Steve George on keyboards and Trey Gray on drums
skillfully bolstered Jewel's performance, never getting in the way. Perhaps
most pleasing, though, was when she shooed the band away for a 30-minute
acoustic set for which Jewel slung a guitar around her neck and played. When
she could remember the songs, that is. She trotted out one number, only to
toss it aside remarking that she did not recall how it went. "Okay, we're not
doing that one," Jewel said with a laugh, quickly moving on. Out came a silly
polka in which she sang, "When your nose is running, it's a perfect time for
kissing and hugging. Do you want to catch a cold with me?" Next was the
gorgeous ballad Grey Matter, followed by a remembrance of a friend she said
had died of cancer. The band returned to close out the show with Jewel, whose
voice was in fine form. She ranged from coquettish, getting guys to scream as
she sang, "Do you want to play?" to a belt in several songs that would have
made Janis Joplin proud. She only looked uncomfortable in that she seemed not
to know what to do with her hands when she did not have a guitar in them. But
Jewel bantered with the crowd, and they loved her back. A couple of fans
shouted so much that at one point she urged them to shut up so she could
play. The rest of the audience burst into applause. Jewel released This Way
in late 2001, and then toured Asia and Europe before heading back to the
states. She plays Fort Lauderdale tonight and Orlando on Sunday, with her

Here's an interview from a Fort Lauderdale newspaper:

Love Jewel. Hate Jewel. Fear her manipulative mom. Laugh at her poetry. Give
her props for not fixing that snaggletooth. Marvel at her staying power.
Almost seven years ago, I interviewed the fresh-from-Alaska Jewel Kilcher,
before she'd sold many copies of her first album. At the time, she'd just
parked the van she lived in prior to her fabled rags-to-riches saga, was
happy not to be a waitress anymore, and promised herself and her growing
public a long career. Two albums and a book of poetry later, Jewel is still
Jewel. Emerging from a hiatus with a bull-ridin' boyfriend (rodeo champ Ty
Murray), a new Nashville-tooled record (This Way) recorded with producer Dann
Huff (Celine Dion, Reba McEntire, Shania Twain), Jewel seems back in the
saddle. Until, literally, she was thrown from a horse during an April riding
mishap. While recuperating, Jewel again answered a barrage of probing
questions.

Q: How bad was your accident? What happened, exactly?
A: We had a branding in Texas (at Murray's ranch). I have a colt that a
cowboy gave me, and he bucks with you a little bit when you first saddle him.
So my boyfriend got on him and rode that out of him. But it wasn't out of
him. As soon as I got on him, he bucked me off. Pretty wicked. I broke my
collarbone and a rib.

Q: What's changed since 1995?
A: Everything has changed, and nothing's changed. Whatever ghosts you have in
your head follow you anywhere, which I knew before I got into this. So far,
I've been able to stay true to my goals, which were to try and create a
career that would give me longevity and artistic freedom. And somehow in the
meantime, I sold a shitload of records!

Q: Did that success take something away from you?
A: If you stop ringing true, then people are going to stop being touched. You
have to really, really fight in this business, and you have to keep writing
true. You also have to take a lot of risks and not care about record sales
and not care about radio hits yet really care about how you're evolving and
maturing and how you're metamorphosing as an artist. I fight for that more
than anything, and it's a hard thing to fight for. By the end of Spirit, my
second record, I'd had it. For years, I quit. That was it: no more chick
singer. I didn't know if I'd ever come back. I started feeling more like a
pop star than something useful. It wasn't very fulfilling, and I had to do
something that would make me happy. So I quit until I knew what it was. I
think part of it was extreme fatigue -- I worked endlessly. Another part of
it was, you know, your head gets too full with other people's voices --
statistics and things that are just garbage. As long as I can get away to the
quiet and a place like I was raised with open space all around me, I can
rejuvenate and feel pretty gregarious and forthcoming again.

Q: Did you really think about quitting music for good, abandoning your
childhood dream?
A: When you're 18, you dream a dream, and when you're 25, it may not look
like you anymore. And you've got to face that. I could have continued for
quite a few more years, living on the vapors of something that truly wasn't
me any longer. It would be like a tree that has died but is still standing.
And unless I found something that made me burn again, that made me need it
again, I just wasn't going to come back. It just makes me really unhappy to
be that way. Fame was never enough to go, "Gee whiz, isn't this cool?" I've
always been able to beat the system, whatever that means. I need to feel like
I have integrity. But the game got boring -- constantly being on tour, never
being home, never writing, always talking. But I do still enjoy it, and it's
nice to know I'm still in love with this. I was definitely worried I wasn't.

Q: Why did you make your new album in Nashville?
A: I like it there because a lot of people just want to make a record. They
don't care if your haircut's the coolest or what the Goo Goo Dolls' latest
guitar tone was -- you know, all that shit that sort of insidiously creeps
into a record. Or you suddenly have this producer trying to give you his idea
of what radio sounds like. I wanted to get away from all of that and find a
producer that would do nothing but, well, my bidding, really. And Dann was
that guy. He has an ego that's really in check. He was there to make a record
for me. That may sound strange to you, but I can't tell you how important
that is. This is the first record that sounds like me.

Q: Have writers asked you about some of your chores on Murray's ranch -- like
castrating bulls?
A: Yes, quite a few have asked. But I mean, I don't think it's a big deal. I
mean, golly, it's just part of life. I got a letter from somebody saying, "Do
you enjoy their pain?"

Q: How did you and Moby become friends?
A: He was playing a little show here in San Diego, no more than 200 people. A
friend and I went backstage, and we just hit it off instantly. He's a fax
friend: He draws cartoons and I draw cartoons, and so we send each other
faxes.

Q: Doesn't he give you shit about rodeo's treatment of animals?
A: He's curious about it, but Moby's never given me shit. Moby's not didactic
at all -- he does what he believes in, but he doesn't act like a Nazi. Plus,
it isn't an issue because there isn't an unfair treatment of animals, in my
opinion. A lot of that is mythology; I don't know how it got built up. I
guess people just don't have any comprehension; they don't understand because
they've never been around animals. They don't understand that people are
managing animals in the most humane way possible. Those animals are -- those
animals cost $50,000! That's like saying people are going to abuse a car that
cost them $50,000. You have to take really good care of those animals,
because if they don't perform, you don't get paid. So you can't starve an
animal or hurt an animal. I think the funniest argument is that people think
they always put something around the bull's testicles to make them buck. (
Laughs) But if you had anything around your testicles, would you buck?

Q: I'm not sure -- would I?
A: No. You'd be very still.

Apparently, there is a virus going around that sends copies of itself claiming to be people in Outlook/Outlook Express address books. I have had over 300 emails from people stating that I sent them a virus when in fact it was not me. I do not check email on a Windows computer nor do I use a microsoft email client (Netscape 7 right now actually).

I strongly urge anyone using Microsoft Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook, or Microsoft Entourage for Mac to change email clients immediately. Most of the email worms are written for Microsoft products do to their insecure active scripting system. Eudora also has scripting problems and is not recommended. Less vulernable email programs include Netscape 4-7, AOL, pine (although it has its own problems), and Apple Mail (Mac OS X email). If you have to use windows, I recommend Netscape 6 or 7.

I received a report the other day that Jewel is playing the guitar again. It was the first time she has played her guitar publicly since her accident. Aside from a few concerts that were cancelled that could not be rescheduled, Jewel will be performing her tour as planned.

A visitor emailed me to let me know the real audio files were not available. I have since fixed the problem. If amyone notices any other links that are bad, please email me.

The first phase of Jewel's European Tour went well and she enjoyed her
birthday in Barcelona yesterday. After a few travel days, the tour resumes
in the UK.

Note Jewel did not cancel everything as a result of her injury. This is contradictory to the information found on this site previously.

MAY 25 Jewel
VH1:
Top 30 Countdown Of The Week
(8:00 AM EDT)

MAY 25 Jewel
Comedy Central:
Saturday Night Live
(Rerun. Jewel is the musical guest. Broadcast at 8:30 PM EDT.)

MAY 25 Jewel
VH1:
Top 30 Countdown Of The Week
(6:00 AM EDT)

***MONDAY

MAY 27 Lenedra:
Philly Live, WYBE Public Television
Channel 35, Philadelphia, PA
(Jewel's mom and manager Lenedra Carroll will be interviewed from 8:00 -
8:30 PM EDT.)

***WEDNESDAY

MAY 29 Jewel
VH1:
Saturday Night Live 25: The Music
(Rerun. Musical highlights from the first 25 years of SNL includes a Jewel
performance and a hilarious skit about Jewel. Broadcast at 6:30 PM EDT.)

***FRIDAY

MAY 31 Jewel
Comedy Central:
Saturday Night Live
(Rerun. Jewel is the musical guest. Broadcast at 12:00 AM EDT.)

***SATURDAY

JUNE 1 Jewel and Lenedra
CNN & CNN International:
CNN: People In The News
(Interview of Jewel and Lenedra at 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. EDT.
CNN International at 14:30 GMT)

***SUNDAY

JUNE 2 Jewel and Lenedra
CNN & CNN International:
CNN: People In The News
(Interview of Jewel and Lenedra at 1:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. EDT.
CNN International at 11:30 GMT)

***MONDAY

JUNE 3 Jewel and Lenedra
CNN:
CNN: People In The News
(Interview of Jewel and Lenedra at 1:00 a.m. EDT.)

"Break Me" will be in the June 21st episode of "The Young And The Restless."