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RELATED LINKS

• Jewel's official site
• "Jewel sees Nashville as a destination, not a detour"
• "Jewel's Rocketing Country Career"
• "The Jewel of the Hill"

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Singer-songwriter explains the importance of career artists and artistic longevity. (1:29)
 

Full Interview (10:51)
 

Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome Jewel back to this program. The three-time Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter is one of the biggest selling female artists of her generation and is out now with a first CD of country music called "Perfectly Clear." From the new disc, here's some of the video from the single, "Stronger Woman."

[Performance Clip]

Tavis: That's a powerful lyric. See, if that song had come out a year ago, Hillary Clinton might have used that as her campaign theme or something (laughter). That's a powerful lyric, though.

Jewel: Thank you. Yeah, I wrote it for a friend that was going through a bad relationship and she has a daughter. It was a lot easier for her to want something great for her child instead of for herself, so I wrote it for her.

Tavis: Is that typical of how your music gets inspired? Is that a pretty typical story? Anything that kind of -

Jewel: - anything, yeah. Anything from my life. I write autobiographically quite a lot. On this album, though, I grew up, you know, reading a lot of short stories in literature. I always loved character writing, so on this album, there's quite a few short stories about fictional characters as well, though.

Tavis: How offended is Jewel going to be after she hears for the umpteenth time, "Country western? She's changing on us."

Jewel: It's the same stuff I've always done, actually. "You Were Meant For Me," "Hands," "Standing Still," I feel like all of that would have sounded great on country radio.

I grew up on a ranch, you know, in Alaska. I had a coal stove and an outhouse. You know, we butchered our own cattle and lived off the land. We only went to town for sugar and salt. So I was raised with a lot of country influences and some of the best female singers have been in the country genre from Patsy Cline to Brenda Lee. Linda Ronstadt's record was one of the best. And then the best singer-songwriters, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn.

I mean, the list goes on and on. It's a really noble great tradition and, if a lot of people don't know or how to find their way into the market, they'll be very pleased to find that there's a lot of acts for all types of tastes.

Tavis: I guess I got stuck at Alaska country western. Alaska, a farm. I was thinking Tennessee, but Alaska?

Jewel: Yeah. My family were homesteaders actually. They came from Switzerland during the Second World War. They came out of Germany. There was a group called the [inaudible]. This was an art movement. There was a section of that called the futurists. My grandparents were part of this artistic movement that left Nazi Germany and settled Alaska. It was a territory.

My granddad had a ladder over his back and hiked across the glaciers. He laid that ladder over a crevice in the ice and then stepped across the ladder and put the ladder back on his back. Him and his wife settled six hundred acres in the middle of the wilderness. No electricity. I mean, just in the middle of nowhere and that's where my dad was born in a dirt-floored log cabin and it's the ranch I was raised on (laughter).

Tavis: Who knew (laughter)?

Jewel: Yeah (laughter).

Tavis: All of that in Jewel's past. That's amazing. Speaking of your grandfather in that artist movement, I guess you had this in you already.

Jewel: Yeah, my grandmother was an aspiring opera singer and she gave it up actually because she felt like, if she was gonna have kids, they should be born in a new country. She gave everything up for her future unborn family. The fact that I started to make it while she was still alive meant everything to her because it was a huge sacrifice she made.

Tavis: How does putting a project together like this differ from the other CDs you've put out? I mean, aside from just the sound of the music, the process of doing a country western record is different, if so, how?

Jewel: A lot of these songs I wrote when I was sixteen, when I was eighteen.

Tavis: You've been holding onto them for a while.

Jewel: Um-hum. I've been writing this stuff my whole career. It isn't a huge departure. I didn't have to shy away from certain instruments like mandolin or steel guitar. What I tried to do is sing great on it and tell great stories. It's a pretty minimal production. This is probably the most I produced on a record. I've co-produced several times, but this was the first time that I had John Rich co-produce tracks.

Tavis: Big and Rich.

Jewel: Yep. So we spent two days and cut ten tracks. He had a hit record at the time, so he went back out on the road and I did all the vocals, all the over-dubs, I mixed it, I mastered it, so I really had my way with how this record sounded.

Tavis: My sense is, listening to the record, that if your voice is capable of this all the time, the ups and downs, that twang and whatever goes with the country western sound, if your voice is always capable of that, then that means that, in the past, you've toned that down and you raised it up for this project.

Jewel: I don't think I really sang different on this album. Some songs are very traditional, Tammy Wynette style torch ballads, which I think are some of the best types of songs to show off singing because it's a slow tempo and you can really dig into it. But I didn't wake up and become somebody else on this album. It's more that the formats have changed so much.

When I came out, alternative radio was a wide open format. You can get "Who Will Save Your Soul" which was one of my first singles on there. Nobody knew what to call it. If it was folk or country, they didn't know what it was. That was in between Nirvana and Soundgarden and you had Joan Osborne with "What If God Is One of Us." It was really a diverse format.

Well, they're really narrowed down. Pop music has become more and more urban influenced and there's not much room for storytelling in the pop genre right now. So there's a real disenfranchised fan base. Singer-songwriters love James Taylor, love Sarah McLachlan, but they don't know where to go right now to find that music.

Right now what's happened is, country radio has really opened up. When you turn on a country station, you'll hear something very traditional like George Strait, who I love, but you hear something really pop or really rock like Miranda Lambert. It's an exciting, really dynamic format where you can really be yourself.

I don't feel like my music's really changed. I just feel like where I'm able to get myself on the radio has changed and I'm able to pay homage to a lot of my roots that I couldn't as directly before. There's a cowboy waltz on there. It's a cowboy style song and I yodel on it, so that definitely is a little bit of a departure from my other records.

Tavis: You finally came around to my point (laughter). That's all I was trying to get to, that yodeling thing and some other stuff. There's a freedom on here that you had. The point I was trying to make was that the range of your vocal talent really gets showcased.

Jewel: Right. I know what you mean. Yeah, I have had producers in the past tell me that sounds a little bit country, yeah. Tone that down just a little bit.

Tavis: Tone that down just a little bit, yeah.

Jewel: What's funny is, you know, my whole career I've tried to get my label to play me on country radio and they wouldn't work me at country radio. I've always been told, "You're a little too country for pop." You know, we needed to change your base line or take steel guitar out. And when I finished this record, I brought it to labels in Nashville and they were like, "We want it more pop. This is too country." I can't win (laughter).

Tavis: You can't win (laughter). That's funny. Back to your point, though, the point you were making about radio. So country western radio is, to your point, opening up.

Jewel: I think so.

Tavis: Pop music shrinking. What's your message? If you were asked to keynote a convention of radio programmers, what would be the point you'd want to get across to them particularly where pop is concerned?

Jewel: I really think that having an artist that's a career artist is important to our entire industry. I think it's important for record labels to remember to develop entire careers. We've become such a single driven industry that we're looking for hits and that's how you get two good songs on a record and ten bad ones and that's how you get people not wanting to buy a whole album. They'd rather do a -

Tavis: - just download the one song.

Jewel: Be one good song.

Tavis: Exactly.

Jewel: That's an artist's fault for not making an entire good record. It's the label's fault for not trying to promote a real artist. And radio plays into it in a way that they lose their identity and their community. In my opinion, if they stop having career artists as stars, you'll have somebody with one hit and then you never hear from them again. Then somebody else has a massive hit and you never hear from them again. So you start to really lose the identity of the station.

I think we're in danger of losing real stars, real career artists, and it's expensive. You know, it's expensive for labels to try and promote artists, but it's important for managers and everybody to look out for hits and pop artists and sensations, but also to try and have people with longevity.

Tavis: That's good advice. Maybe they'll hear it from you. Your fan base. You mentioned the word identity a moment ago. How do you not lose your identity with your fans? Was there any concern that your fans would come with you on this project? You don't think it's such a radical departure, but some of them might.

Jewel: Like I said, so many of these songs have been around so long that they've actually all been bootlegged and my fans are very familiar with about four or five of these songs. I've talked very openly my entire career about country songs. It's not something new.

I got to sing with Merle Haggard on the CMAs one year and sing on his record and I've always talked about my influences like Loretta Lynn. So on stage, I've played a lot of these. The title "Perfectly Clear," I've had that since I was eighteen, so my fans were really excited.

The second time I was on the cover of "Rolling Stone" was in 1999, I think, and I remember in that article I kept talking about this country record I wanted to make. I didn't know that it would take me leaving my label to be able to get this project done.

I think that labels forget that people buy all kinds of records. You know, people have Johnny Cash records and Bob Dylan records. I think radio stations and everybody gets so formatted that they forget fans like all styles of music as long as it's honest and speaks to what they like to hear.

Tavis: It's probably the first time in a long time I've heard somebody, an artist especially, use the word bootleg and steam didn't come out of their ears.

Jewel: Yeah (laughter).

Tavis: How do you navigate as an artist your way through a world where so much of your stuff does in fact get bootlegged before you get a chance to even deal with it the way you want to?

Jewel: I've enjoyed bootlegging in my career just because -

Tavis: - (Laughter) Give me a tape of this. It's maybe the first I've heard an artist ever say this. Go ahead.

Jewel: You know, I have about five hundred songs, so I can't get them all on albums. So my fans are veracious. They're real fans. They love to hear different versions. If I do "Who'll Save Your Soul" different from night to night, they'll swap versions and go, "Did you hear the version she did with Joshua Redman playing sax on Saturday Night Live?"

Those bootlegs, I think, create a bigger fan and it creates the kind of fan that will still go out and buy your record because they want that version. They want to hear what I did on this record. They won't just have a bootleg of a live show and then not buy an album. I've found it creates a real career long-term fan.

Tavis: Does a song that you wrote years ago when you were sixteen still hold up years later when you put it out?

Jewel: Some of them, not all of them (laughter).

Tavis: Yeah.

Jewel: You'll never hear those ones (laughter).

Tavis: Those won't be bootlegged?

Jewel: They are bootlegged, but I won't put them on a record (laughter).

Tavis: I got money that says they will be (laughter). They won't be on a record, but they'll be bootlegged somewhere. Jewel's new CD is called "Perfectly Clear," not a radical departure, she puts it, but the first time you get a real country western record from Jewel. Jewel, nice to have you on the program.

Jewel: Nice to be here. Thanks.

Tavis: Good to see you.