How is Jewel on tour but at the same time not mainly focused on music? She can explain.
It takes precious little time of talking with Jewel to confirm that the things the four-time Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter has been saying about her personal growth as she’s moved into her 50s are true:
She’s found peace. She’s never been happier. And she still refuses to let anyone put a label on her.
After it takes a few minutes for a publicist to get her on the phone because it’s apparently been set to “Do Not Disturb,” Jewel notes — when someone mentions they understand need for periodic technology breaks — “I know ... even just the buzzing on my body all the time starts to elicit a trigger response — like, ‘Oh my God!’ I jump.”
Then, asked about preparations for the second leg of her co-headlining tour with folk-rock legend Melissa Etheridge, Jewel gives a cool, casual and incredibly practical answer.
“You know, I didn’t actually do any rehearsals for this tour,” says Jewel, who’ll return from a six-week break between legs with shows Tuesday night in Cary (at Koka Booth Amphitheatre) and Saturday night in Charlotte (at Skyla Credit Union Amphitheatre). “I was doing my Crystal Bridges Museum installation and didn’t have time to … rehearse. And I also am not using my own band. I’m using Melissa’s band.”
She laughs, then continues: “I’m the only person I’ve ever heard of doing this, but I thought it was really fun to share a band and share a crew so that we can both cut our expenses in half. I don’t tour very often, I don’t tour very long, so usually it takes several months to break even. By sharing all the crew and band with Melissa, we were both able to be profitable.
“And for me, being able to be profitable (while) only leaving home for a shorter period of time (because of her 13-year-old son Kase) was really important.”
In her recent chat with The Charlotte Observer, Jewel went into greater detail about her art exhibit, “The Portal: An Art Experience by Jewel,” which was on display at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas this summer; about being a thoughtful mother to her son; and about the peace she’s been able to find at age 50.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q. How did the installation in Arkansas go?
It was great. It was, artistically, an incredible experience, getting to merge together my visual art, behavioral health and music all into one thing. And it was well-received, and all the other stuff that’s nice to have as well.
Q. Expectation-versus-reality-wise, how did “The Portal” match up to what you were hoping to get out of it, in terms of personal fulfillment, or the reaction for the people who were able to go through it?
I definitely tend to choose things in my career that are high-risk, high-reward. I switch genres. I go into books. I’ll switch genres every book I write. I’m always starting over. I’m always having to convince people to take a risk on something new with me. But I really love it. It’s how I’m wired. I think it’s actually what my artistry is: learning, putting myself in uncomfortable positions, and figuring out how to do it.
So it (“The Portal”) was definitely one of those high-risk things. I would have looked silly going into visual art if I didn’t pull it off. There was a lot on the line, I guess, that way. But the institution, Crystal Bridges, also took a huge risk on me. And it was a really wonderful feeling to be able to work really hard and have so many people come together. It was so artistically rewarding — more than I ever could have hoped for to be 50 and feel more inspired than when I was 20. For me, just a wonderful feeling. We’re not entitled to that. I didn’t know that I would get to have that in my life. So that’s really rewarding. And then it became a phenomenon.
It’s this philosophical show about the three fears and how we navigate through the world and mental health. To see the experience of the people who would come and see it was all-around very rewarding.
Q. Do you think that’s something you would want to do again in the near-term, say, another year or two from now?
Yeah, I think taking this to other museums is my goal. Then I’m also continuing to create visual art, especially that incorporates technology and music into sculptural forms. I’m working on something right now that I think will be able to debut at Miami Art Week and Art Basel — a really big, ambitious piece that’s live-streaming data; I’m creating, basically, a sculptural instrument that the ocean can play by creating a sound vocabulary. It’s fascinating. I’m learning a lot.
Q. In the column that you wrote for CNN about “The Portal” and your own healing (from an abusive childhood and a painful divorce), you talked about how at 40 years old you decided to take a step back from your career. It’s been a few months now, but what did turning 50 mean to you? Was this another opportunity to reevaluate where you were in a intentional way, and if so, what have you been thinking about?
Yeah, I feel like the last 10 years — and kind of why I wrote that — I did have to take a step back at 40 and go, Is what I’m doing working? Is the strategy I have for healing working? Something I’m proud of, I think, in my career is I’ve never put my career money ahead of healing. I’ve been willing to step back from music, step back from touring — the only ways that make money — to say that healing is the singularly most important thing. It’s the spring water from which everything flows. And if that spring water is bitter or poisoned, what possibly can flow forward from it that isn’t tainted by that?
So being willing to quit writing, quit touring, quit creating to a large degree, and put my creative energy into healing and trying to transform in a really foundational way, it’s been neat to take that risk and then see it rewarded with what happens downstream of that. You know, when you sweeten your inner terrain, if you will — when you heal — seeing what kind of art flows from it, seeing what kind of even revenue streams flow from it as a side effect, has been really interesting for me.
I don’t think now, at 50, I’m doing another re-evaluation process. It’s more just enjoying the tremendous hard work I did in putting my blinders on and insisting that my inner life will be the most profound investment when it comes to shaping my outer life.
Q. At this point, do you feel the most settled you’ve felt, the most — relatively speaking — healed that you’ve felt in your life?
Yeah, I think that I’m able to make much more nourishing choices, more nourishing decisions, that aren’t just reactive to trauma or to past experiences. Instead of becoming more bitter or suspicious or mistrusting with time, I’m becoming more yielding, more compassionate, more loving, which for somebody with my type of life, that’s a great success in my book. I think it’s a better success than any album sold.
Q. Do you feel there’s a particular type of art that you’re most drawn to — or most passionate about — right now? Or are you drawn to the diversity of forms that art offers, and feel like over the next decade of your life you’ll want to continue to take as many risks in as many different areas as you can when it comes to art?
I write a lot of music. I’m not releasing a lot of it. I don’t know why. It just hasn’t been a main focus of mine. And it’s so easy to release music now is what’s laughable about it. But it just hasn’t been where my energy has been focused. I have so many poems. I should have 12 poetry books, but it just hasn’t been my focus in releasing it either.
Where a lot of my focus is right now is in visual art, where I have a lot of energy to want to put a lot of work into the physical aspect of getting art into the world, whether it’s books or music or whatever. I think I like it just because it’s a very philosophical medium. Visual art is very, very philosophical. And I’m finding ways to bring music into it in a way that’s very unusual and very interesting to me.
If you listen to “The Portal,” it’s a 10-minute piece of music that I made that has meditation and poetry and three songs in a nonstop, continuous piece of music. It’s just a very new, interesting thing for me. I’ve never created music like that. I don’t know if it’ll be very commercially popular, but it’s very much what I’m compelled to do, and the new sculpture I’m making incorporates music, in a way that I find intriguing.
Q. Do you think it’s possible that one of the reasons you’re not as inspired to create commercial music is because it’s so easy now?
Promoting commercial music is a formula, and unless you’re willing to sign up for that formula — and I don’t mean songwriting formula; I think you get to write whatever you want, so I don’t mean it has to be formulaic in the writing — but to promote something and make it commercially successful, that is a formula. And that does require leaving your home, touring radio stations, maybe a year’s worth of work to do the lift, to get something up off the ground. That just isn’t where I have energy, to do that. I’m not interested in that anymore.
Now, does social media circumnavigate that, and could I help songs be successful just on social media alone? I absolutely could. Am I doing that? No, I’m not. I really have no excuse. It just hasn’t been what’s interested me.
Q. What’s your opinion of social media?
I’ve always liked it. It took my relationship with my music and the people listening to it into a very direct relationship. When I had to go through press alone, there was always a middleman interpreting me for the audience. So, social media has given me the ability to telegraph the authenticity of what I’m doing directly, without that middleman. And I mentor a lot of artists. I say, “Make sure you have places that other people can’t mess with. Make sure you’re doing a blog and your own email blasts and things like that, so you can have that direct relationship.”
But clearly, social media has massive drawbacks. Having the algorithms change beyond our control? Very frustrating. ’Cause our livelihood can depend on these algorithms and building these audiences, and so that’s pretty rough.
The social media aspect as far as parenting is another thing. I just think that we have to be very diligent in all areas. I’m from Alaska, so we use guns a lot. Gun hygiene, social media hygiene, mental health hygiene — we have to, as parents, be constantly thinking about, How does my child learn their self-esteem, and is it intrinsic or extrinsic? The stakes are much higher now, and parents have to be thinking of these things in different ways, because they are dangerous.
Q. How does that mindset translate for you and how you talk to your son about these things?
With guns, he’s learned how to shoot, but he didn’t start with a loaded gun. He never is allowed to point a stick and pretend it’s a gun at anybody. And I know this is a controversial thing, because guns are a controversial topic. But teaching safety and respect and the ideas and concepts behind things is incredibly important. My son does not have a gun, to be clear. But he’s learned how to shoot.
So, he knows my house runs differently than his friends’ houses, and he knows why. We don’t have a TV in the house. He has an iPad, and we’ll watch some Netflix at night and things like that. Otherwise, he doesn’t have technology. He doesn’t have any social media. Ever since he was young, I’ve taught him about it. The research and the data on distraction addiction and vying for the neural chemicals of children — to be excited through this extrinsic object — it’s very clear: It’s not good for kids.
I feel it’s that dangerous and that scary to just give our kids phones, so coming up with a strategy, practicing that strategy, seeing how it’s working, seeing “how does he feel about it?”, making sure there’s no devices in rooms — all of those things — we have to have strategies as parents that we didn’t have to have for ourselves as kids.
Jewel in concert
With Melissa Etheridge.
When and where: 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Koka Booth Amphitheatre at Regency Park in Cary, and 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Skyla Credit Union Amphitheatre in Charlotte.
Tickets: $71 and up for the Cary show; $45.15 and up for the Charlotte show.
Details: www.ticketmaster.com.