Jewel Returns To Her Roots with Picking Up The Pieces

This Friday, Alaskan-raised singer-songwriter and former child yodeler Jewel will release her new album Picking Up The Pieces, a raw and confessional song-cycle that is meant to bookend her multi-Platinum debut smash Pieces of You.

We caught up with Jewel recently and talked about the new album (which comes out on Sugar Hill Records), her forthcoming memoir Never Broken, and the recent success of the Americana movement.

You’re also doing a reading from your book the night you play AmericanaFest. Are the book and the album companion pieces?

Yes. Obviously, they are such different mediums that you have to do them in a way that is appropriate to each medium. My goal with the record and the book was to be incredibly raw, and very transparent and [have it] where the emotion elicits a very visceral response, so that the emotion I have in my body is the response I’m trying to put in other people’s bodies. I really tried to produce the record like the way I sing live. I’m a much better singer live than I’ve ever been in a recording, because you have an audience in front of you. When I’m in the studio in a vocal booth, it’s so sterile and I have no idea how to get that out of myself.

To get around that, we set up mics in an old-school way and mixed the record by how far I placed the drums from the mic, etc. I pushed “record” and then I pushed “stop record.” It really was a very live performance. I also recorded live at The Standard in Nashville and had fans fly in from all over the world and did a recording there, sort of like I did in the coffeeshop for Pieces Of You.

Regarding the book, I feel like a lot of people feel that they know my life. They know broad strokes. I think they’ll be pretty surprised. The [book deals with] how does a person heal in the face of so much heartbreak and so much setback? And I went about it in a very specific way. Statistically, girls like me end up with what they were raised with … I should have been addicted to drugs, I should have been knocked up by 18. So how do you avoid becoming a statistic? How do you re-nurture yourself if you can’t change nature? It’s like a scientific experiment and I’m writing about my findings and it became a career.

But the book is really about the process and revealing the truth of what happened. I never had resources so I was figuring these things out on my own and developed my own system. I’m aware of the suffering of other people, andI hope this encourages people to be architects of their own lives. You don’t need therapy, you don’t need money, you don’t need a house even.

When you’re writing so close to the bone and the subject matter is autobiographical, do you have any internal blocks that keep you from “going there,” and if so how do you to get over those? 

In the book I write about the first time I was homeless. I learned so much about being able to not succumb and get myself out of that. And one of the things I did was to start writing down secrets and being really honest. Shame loves secrecy and the antithesis of that is communication and I had nothing else to lose, literally, so [I thought] I better try it. And it had a profound effect. And with some of the first songs I wrote, I got on stage at a coffeeshop in front of two surfers and just bled my heart out … I [revealed] certain embarrassing truths about myself that I thought would make me unloveable and it had a really shocking effect — it actually touched people and I felt less alone because the audience felt the same way.

Very few people are willing to tell the truth and show what a real human life is like. We try to pretty it up, especially in art, and use it as propaganda to make ourselves seem more perfect than we are to sell an image. And that’s never been me. It doesn’t make me comfortable to do that.

Was the production style you opted for on this album borne out by the intimate nature of the songs, or had  you planned on making a really stripped—down record for a while? 

My goal was to make a bookend to Pieces Of You, my first album. It was that time in my life. I was going through a divorce, and it was a very holistic process as nothing in my life is untouched by another area. So I was getting back in touch with my most official self, stripping away what got added through the years that I don’t think belonged to me. I challenged myself to be as raw and as bold as I was as a 20 year old before I knew better — before I knew about the business, before I knew about genre, before I learned about radio. Learning how to forget that is really a challenge in the studio … so I knew I had to make this record live.

Originally, I went to [producer] Paul Worley and he came to me and said he was backing out, saying, “You’re the only who should make this record.” And I thought that was a total cop-out …  But he said that [any other producer] would be a filter … He said I’d end up thanking him one day … and I did thank him in my liner notes.

What is your take on the Americana movement and its recent success? Your new label Sugar Hill Records is an Americana label for the most part and you’ve been on a country label with the Big Machine imprint. Recently, it seems like there’s been a blurring of the lines between Americana and country and it’s not as dichotomized as it has been in the past.

That’s interesting, and to have done this for 20 years and watch the shift of what people call things. The music’s always been there, and there’s always been people who are very lyric-driven, let’s say. When I came out nobody knew what to call me … I found it hilarious that I made a living on pop radio … You listen to Pieces Of Me today and you think, “That’s not a pop record, that’s an Americana record,” and for a while it would have been considered a country record. So it’s been interesting but I feel like a lot of what I’ve done hasn’t changed that much … but the genres at the radio have changed a bunch.

For your book, did you use any other memoirs as a blueprint? 

I never read a lot of memoirs … I read a lot as a child. I read a lot of philosophy and great fiction, like Steinbeck. I have tremendous respect for writing but I’ve never been a long-form writer. I’ve always written poems, essays, short stories. The longest thing I’d written was a 12-page essay or something like that … So tackling long form for me, especially a memoir, was really a new experience. I didn’t know how it would do, really. So I had to just dig into it and find my way through it. For a lot of the book I felt like a bad writer … But then I got really fascinated with the timing and the pacing and having recurring themes and an arc over 400 pages. [I had to learn] to be more lyrical and use a lyrical style of writing to really slow it down.