Suggest to a 20-year-old she might be naive and you're likely to get your head chewed off. Who are you to say such a thing, right to a person's face? But if you ask Jewel how she got signed to a major label, she'll answer, "I think angels, personally." She's not kidding. And she doesn't care what anyone thinks of that sort of rainbows and unicorns attitude.

Jewel is opening for one of her heroes tonight, indie-darling Liz Phair, at the ornate Warfield in San Francisco. The spotlight must be blinding as she peers out at the faces looking back at this slight figure with blonde hair parted exactly down the center, dressed in faded jeans, a black tee-shirt and black pointy-toed boots. Before the show, she fretted endlessly about this outfit -- "I've really got to get back to the hotel, and put something more glamorous on" -- and then promptly changed her mind -- "Oh, this'll be OK, don't you think? No one cares what I look like. They're here to see Liz."

Jewel stands, alone with her guitar, smack in center stage before a sold-out crowd in the largest hall she's ever played. And she's smiling so wide her face might just split in half. Before the show she professed a bad case of nerves, moaning, "If Liz thinks she gets nervous, she should try opening for her!" But now she's implausibly self composed. Some of this aplomb may be due to the fact that the singer-songwriter started out playing to drunks a long time ago -- when she was eight. Talk about a crash course in reality.

"Singing in the bars that early taught me so much," she tells me before her set in the bleak florescent-lit cell called a dressing room. She's curled up in a corner of a ratty couch, clutching both knees to her chest. Her voice is so soft that it's nearly swallowed up by the bouncing acoustics of the high-ceilinged room.

"I used to get so bummed because people wouldn't listen; I'd pout on stage. Then one time, a drunk came up. I leaned down and he says, 'Stop looking so goddamned depressed!'" She laughs, remembering. "It taught me that even if there's only three people in the bar you've got to be professional. Still, there's things I won't put up with. At a really young age, guys would come on to me and tell me 'Call when you're 16.' Yeah, right."

She clutches my hand for emphasis, wanting to be sure she's getting complete attention. "I'd see all these guys, and you're young so you think they're sincere -- you think they're really going to come through. So you sleep with them, like this one friend of mine with this club owner who came onto her. But then it gets really weird. Really bad." She may look as fragile as a kitten, all curled up on the couch, but there's more going on behind those feline green eyes than suggested at first glance. "I always knew it was just talk."

Earlier, before our interview had even begun, she'd related a breakneck story about her recent vacation in Mexico that involved federales, mountains of other people's pot, driving down an airline runway, guns, language barriers and handcuffs. She laughs with abandon when speeding through what sounds like a B-movie script, screeching to the end of the tale -- which has an unlikely happy ending -- before the tape recorder can be set in motion.

Just when you think that all Jewel's stories have happy endings, she yanks you back so hard your head wobbles.

"There was this guy that came in when we'd play, and every night he'd do the same thing: Lay his money out in piles: twenties, tens, ones, fives, and two pitchers of beer. Every night he'd request the same three songs: 'Ain't Gonna Study War No More,' 'Cotton Field Back Home' and 'House of the Rising Sun.' Sad songs. He'd just sit there and drink; he'd get through one pitcher by the end of our first set, and then he'd call me over and tell me to pick any bill I wanted. I'd always take a twenty, and get a Shirley Temple with it. And he'd get hammered." Her eyes are cloudy, fixed on a point somewhere below a peeling strip of paint on the wall.

"One day he didn't come in. I guess he got really drunk one night and the bartender took him home, made him a pot of coffee, even tucked him into bed. Then when he left, the guy shot himself in the face. I found out he'd been a medic in 'Nam when he was 18, and he didn't know how to do surgery. So he basically killed people until he learned." She sighs. "He didn't have any family so we gave him a fundraiser to get him a coffin. I remember thinking that I don't want to hide behind things. I decided right then and there that I never wanted to drink."

So who you calling naive?

Jewel has the kind of incongruous surety -- remarkable in a 20-year-old -- that can sweep away even the most acerbic cynic. She writes lilting songs and belts them with such assurance that the hokey phrase "old soul" comes to mind unbidden, despite the fresh face and unspoiled shimmer hanging about her. Quite frankly, it's a bit spooky. A bit much for an old misanthrope to swallow whole. Maybe there's a clod of dirt here somewhere, a hint of taint moldering beneath all this sweetness and purity. There must be. Right?

"They told me you'd be a hard crowd," she glowers. "Now shut up." And they do, surprisingly enough, for the full 20 minutes that she sings and plays her guitar. Happy to have that behind her, she's ready to talk about how she came to be at this enviable place, with a new album in the stores and a world of possibilities glittering before her.

It's a far cry from living in a van in Pacific Beach, scraping the bottoms of jars to get by. But just a year ago, that's where Jewel Kilcher was, playing coffeehouses and begging showers from friends. And by the time the crowds turned into standing room only, the word had already spread to the big mucky-mucks in Los Angeles: "there's this singer, with this voice that sounds a little like Joni Mitchell, a bit like Michelle Shocked, kind of folky but she's good, and people line up to get in ... "

But Jewel just kept on singing. "I prayed every night in my van that my dream would come true, and by me living my dream that other people would remember theirs. It's wonderful to do a show and have people say, 'Oh!' At least they're breathing for an hour in their lives." She's not being corny on purpose; this really is the way Jewel sees the world. Hey, it seems to be working.

"Off that a good buzz got started," she continues. "And in a relatively short amount of time, a bunch of limos started coming down and I'd get flown off to New York. I'd be eating carrot sticks and peanut butter in my van, then fly off to New York and have these huge dinners, and then be plopped back in my pumpkin bus."

Talk about your happy ever after stories.

Apparently, growing up in an isolated 800 acre homestead in Homer, Alaska is the kind of childhood every kid should have tucked under their psyche's belt. Jewel couldn't be more glowing if she were talking about winning the lottery. "We had a coal stove, and I'd wake up and see frost on my brother's eyelashes because the fire would go out during the night. We loved it. A lot of kids grow up knowing how to bank, but I'm kind of a retard about city things." Her eyes glow greenly. "But I know what a porcupine sounds like climbing a tree."

Since those halcyon days, she's travelled all over, singing in bars and roaming with her family from Hawaii -- where Samoan kids taught the blonde haole girl about prejudice -- to an arts high school in Michigan, to Colorado, to finally end up in San Diego. But it turned out that Southern California was hardly nirvana, at least not at first.

"I came to San Diego because I wanted some sunshine. Me and my mom rented an apartment together but neither of us could make ends meet. So I ended up living in my van." She's matter of fact: it's just the way things had to be.

"I was desperate for a job and I saw this kid playing in a strip mall coffee shop called Java Joe's. So I asked if I could have a job and the boss said yeah. Then he asked if I'd pose naked for his calendar. Oh God, here we go again!" But she kept her clothes on and managed to convince the boss that she could actually sing.

"I've played a lot of places in the U.S. over the years, and other places are always a lot less talent and a lot bigger egos. When I came to San Diego, I'd just started writing my own stuff and people were so encouraging, so supportive of one another. It was incredible, just a brilliant environment. I'd go out to cafes and I'd feel like it was Paris in the '20s." She's not being a bit ironic. "We all were starving, and no one was recognized but here are all these talented, brilliant writers. I just felt so honored to be around them and writing with them."

The explosion of the San Diego music scene has been gratifying. "It's been really neat over the last two years; a bunch of people [from San Diego] have gotten deals. And we all have first albums out, we're going through it together. Unless you're a musician, no one knows how it is for you particularly. To have another friend who's a musician means that you can call them up at two in the morning and have your little support group; tell them, 'I'm freaking out about Liz Phair! I have to go on right before her!'" She laughs heartily at the sort of problems she's all of a sudden being confronted with. "Who else but a musician is going to get something like that?"

Who indeed?

That's fortunate; an informal survey of reactions to the album cover was, shall we say, less than favorable. Virtually no one had even bothered to listen to a single note. "Too cutesy-poo," said one. "Oh, spare me that 90210 crap," said another. "Straight to the bargain bin," predicted a third. But it turns out that all this cheeseball stuff doesn't have a thing to do with the music on the disc itself.

The first track, "Who Will Save Your Soul," is a hook-heavy ditty that showcases Jewel's remarkable voice, a tool that dips and soars effortlessly, delivering lyrics like, "You got social security, but that don't pay your bills/ There are addictions to feed and mouths to pay." The title track starts out with a deliberate diffidence, easing into a condemnation of a society obsessed with surfaces ("She's an ugly girl, does it make you want to kill her? ... She's a pretty girl, do you call her a bitch?").It's a song that she's gotten some flack over, apparently. On stage in San Francisco, she laughs during the intro, "They asked me not to play this. They said it was written too naively. But I'm 20 -- if I was 30 they'd say it was a good song."

The album "Pieces of You" is rounded out by another dozen songs, a string of folk-tinged ballads that blend together with smooth simplicity. Jewel attributes much of the album's pristine sound to producer Ben Keith, who's worked with Neil Young. In fact, the album was recorded in Young's studio.

"I was looking for a producer that could nourish and give me just enough without being too heavy-handed. I'm not very solidified in what I am and what I'm not yet." She's thoughtful, twirling a lock of hair. "It's kind of like baby grass: if you walk on it too much you'll trample it. If you're not supported enough, you die too.

"Ben is a really Southern gentleman. He played with Patsy Cline when he was 16 years old," She's excited, bouncing on the dingy couch. "That's incredible! He's just this great old guy who's done every drug, every woman, and he tells stories like you've never heard." Jewel's face lights up even more, her voice vehement. "He doesn't listen to the manager, he doesn't listen to the record company. He just listens to the artist."

More than 2,000 people listened to Jewel that night at the Warfield, an audience she feared would simply tolerate her as someone to get through before Liz Phair took the stage. But then a funny thing happened: the crowd was rapt within five minutes, paying attention, laughing at her jokes, being quiet in the right places."Hey! Anybody got a pick?," she asked, squinting in the spotlight. "If not, I can just use my fingernail." Right on cue, a long arm quickly waved from the sea of faces, pick in hand.

"If you treat people decently, you'll be treated decently back," she says to me just before taking the stage. "You don't have to assume the worst of people. You just have to have faith that passion counts." She doesn't care who hears her say it -- it is, after all, simply what she believes. If that's naive, so be it. After all, just look at who's in the spotlight now, and who's standing in the dark, listening.

This article originally appeared in the San Diego Reader

Julene Snyder is a San Francisco-based freelance writer. E-mail can be sent to julene@well.com


Back to Article Index