A Search for Truth About Jewel
Part One: She Likes Dessert
The first thing Jewel and I talk about is cannibalism. It is a good icebreaker. Then she orders the sweetbreads and steak.
We’re at the restaurant at the Four Seasons hotel in Manhattan, and already I am relieved. The reality of Jewel is putting the stereotype of Jewel to shame. As beautiful and uplifting as Jewel’s new record, Spirit, is, lyrics like “What’s simple is true,” “Set down your chains until only faith remains” and “If I could tell the world just one thing, it would be, ‘We’re all OK'” have too much of the air of chicken soup for the soul or Christian proselytizing. Then there’s her best-selling book of poetry, full of adolescent confusion about sprouting breasts and first love.
“I’m starting to get over myself,” she says now, at twenty-four. “All that poetry was written from fifteen to twenty-two or something. It’s very self-absorbed: ‘What is love? What isn’t love?’ I’m noticing that poetry doesn’t seem to interest me anymore.”
Jewel — wearing blue jeans and a gray sweatshirt unzipped one-quarter of the way to reveal a white T-shirt that may or may not have been slept in — is quick to display the depth and self-awareness that others have accused her of lacking. First of all, she has a sense of humor — which only those who have seen her concerts when she is in a chatty mood know. Second, she orders sweetbreads just to try them, which means that she is more adventurous and experimental than her music and poetry would lead one to believe. And third, she is a red-meat eater. I had suggested a health-food restaurant downtown, but she was adamant about having her steak. Maybe it was to prove that she isn’t a vegetarian hippie, as might be assumed from the Jewel myth — raised in a log cabin in Homer, Alaska, by a family of artists and musicians who would later urge her to live out of her van in San Diego while she chased her muse.
“Sometimes I want to take that Volkswagen van and affix it to a burning cross,” Jewel, tired of the myth, blurts at one point, shattering stereotype Number Four. She may sing on her new single, “Hands,” that “only kindness matters,” but she’s got a sarcastic streak, and she’s far from naive and dippy.
“I kept trying to figure out why people in the press thought I was so stupid,” she says. “I kept getting typified as this Pollyanna neohippie. I think it’s because I have a different definition of optimism. I’ve noticed a belief that somehow optimism lacks intelligence and that optimism stems from a lack of experience and naiveté. I don’t believe that. I believe optimism is a choice. Cynicism isn’t smarter, it’s just safer.” Talking with Jewel sometimes feels like sitting in a college dorm room with a very cool stoner girl, She doesn’t take things for granted; she questions how they got that way. When she says she’s over herself, it doesn’t mean that she’s sick of herself — it means that she feels she is moving beyond hedonism, ambition and self-obsession and into the sphere of community and her duty to it. At the same time, in the middle of a discussion of quantum physics and relativity, she’ll start talking about Jelly Bellys. “I’ve been on a jelly-bean binge,” she says. “I guess it should be its own food group — all those flavors and colors. Then you start combining them — cream soda with a cherry on top, or a juicy pear with a strawberry. . . .”
She smiles with the guilt of a woman talking guiltlessly about eating candy, exposing the twisted tooth in the upper right corner of her mouth. The tooth. Her father always told her to get it fixed or to get braces; she never did. She thinks she did the right thing — sometimes people don’t even recognize her until she grins. But, still, she gets self-conscious when photographers ask her to smile. On Spirit — the slicker, more self-composed follow-up to Pieces of You (which was recorded more than four years ago, when she was nineteen) — she sings about a stupid but attractive man, “You say, ‘He’s got straight teeth, and it’s good sex,'” as if straight teeth were one of the most desirable physical attributes in a partner.
Jewel finishes her steak — every last bit — and calls her boyfriend, former One Life to Live heartthrob Christopher Douglas, who is waiting upstairs in her hotel room, to see whether she can tempt him downstairs for dessert. She can’t. Nevertheless, four desserts arrive at the table for the two of us, and every one is attacked with enthusiasm. We talk until the restaurant empties. We debate the meaning of religion, drugs, beauty, success, benevolence, life, death and chocolate. She describes her father slaughtering cows, argues that the world is experiencing a revival of spirituality, imagines the consequences of all time existing at once (relativity again) and wonders whether human beings have evolved beyond the idea of monogamy. She laughs, wrinkles her nose and tugs at the zipper of her sweatshirt. She confesses to having meditated before the interview, hoping that I would be someone she got along with. She is so perfect that I need to start looking for faults: the bridge of her nose has a little crook; there are blackheads in the indentation between her lower lip and chin. But those imperfections — and the fact that, like the tooth, she has done nothing to remedy them — just make her more perfect.
