Darling of Singer-Songwriter Set Comes Home to Country Jewel
Posted on: Thursday, 28 August 2008, 09:00 CDT
By SCOTT GOLD
By Scott Gold
Los Angeles Times
NASHVILLE, Tenn.
BACK WHEN she was living in her van, when playing a San Diego coffeehouse was a big gig, Jewel Kilcher had an inspiring vision of fame. She'd read about intellectuals who gathered to find common ground in disparate pursuits, each bringing his or her own ingredient - a little Klimt, a little Henry Miller and Monet - to create a magical stew of ideas.
That, she figured, had to be what it was like for the famous and the fabulous in the modern pop music world - lying about, perhaps, as if they were students in Plato's academy, swapping songwriting tricks and unusual chord progressions.
"Wrong," she said.
That would have come as a surprise only to a kid who grew up largely in the wilds of Alaska, playing lumberjack bars with a knife on her belt, prohibited from cutting her hair until it was the same length as Crystal Gayle's. It turned out, of course, that the pop music world was a petty place, laced with narcissism and insecurity; collaboration can be difficult when one artist's success is seen as correlated to another's failure.
So Jewel set off on her own path, and she's done pretty well for herself. Since the 1995 release of her debut, "Pieces of You," she has sold roughly 27 million albums - about one every 15 seconds, 24 hours a day, for 13 years. All along, she said, she was driven largely by a quest to find authenticity in the music business.
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