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Atz Kilcher and Lenedra Carroll may not have made much of an impression with the two albums they recorded as a folk duo (1977’s “Early Morning Gold” and 1978’s “Born and Raised on Alaska Land”), but their daughter, Jewel, would become one of the most successful female solo artists of all time. She was catapulted into the mainstream – and to the forefront of the Lilith Fair pack of new female singer/songwriters – on the strength of a powerfully expressive voice and a debut album, “Pieces of You”, that took about nine months to chart and sold more than 11 million copies.
Jewel (who uses only her first name professionally) was born in Utah, where her father was attending college. Soon after, her parents moved the family back to Homer, Alaska, to live on the 800 acre homestead of her paternal grandfather, a Swiss emigrant who helped draft Alaska’s state charter. Their log cabin home had no running water. At the age of six, Jewel began singing with her parents and two brothers in local bars and restaurants. She continued performing with her father after her parents’ divorce two years later but moved to Anchorage to be with her mother when she was 15 and then to Michigan to attend the Interlochen Fine Arts Academy, where she studied opera and learned to play guitar. After graduation she rejoined her mother in San Diego, where she began a series of waitress jobs to make rent before deciding to live out of her VW van and concentrate on songwriting. This led to a steady gig at the local Inner-Change Coffeehouse, where Jewel began attracting such a large crowd that she landed a recording contract with Atlantic within five months. She was 19.
Released in February 1995, “Pieces of You”, seemed to be dead on arrival. But the label stuck by her and 14 months of steady touring later, the album’s lead single, “Who Will Save Your Soul”, began to take off. The song debuted on the singles chart in June 1996 and peaked at #11. A second single, “You Were Meant for Me”, went to #2. By the time the third single “Foolish Games” (Also featured on the “Batman & Robin” soundtrack), went to #7, “Pieces of You” had climbed to #4. The album was met with mixed reviews – Jewel herself would later dismiss many of the songs as immature and poorly recorded – but her voice (particularly her knack for both scat singing and yodeling) was widely regarded as a marvel. When Time magazine spotlighted the ‘90s brigade of female singer/songwriters for a 1997 cover story on Sarah McLachlan’s successful all-woman Lilith Fair festival tour, it was Jewel’s face that adorned the cover, with the headline “Jewel and the Gang”.
Released nearly four years after “Pieces of You”, “Spirit” (1998) debuted at #3 and sold over 4 million copies (as opposed to its 11-million-selling predecessor). The lead single, “Hands”, went to #6, but “Down So Long” and “Jupiter (Swallow the Moon)” stalled at #59 and #51, respectively. Jewel’s popularity and visibility remained high, however, as evidenced by the success of her 1998 poetry collection. “A Night Without Armor”, which topped the New York Times best seller list.
In 1999 she co-founded (with her mother) her own non-profit charity organization. Higher Ground for Humanity – intended, according to her Web site, to “inspire positive change on global, community and individual levels”. The same year, she performed both at Woodstock ’99 and at the NetAid concert at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, sang two duets with Merle Haggard for his career retrospective, “”For the Record: 43 Legendary Hits”, and released the Christmas album “Joy: A Holiday Collection” (#32). She also made her film debut with a starring role in director Ang Lee’s Civil War drama, “Ride With the Devil”.
In 2000 Jewel released her second book, “Chasing Down the Dawn”, a collection of journals chronicling both her public and private life.
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