THE SHAPING OF JEWEL

By Howard Chua-Eoan

With her blue cotton top worn inside out and with black riding sweats overlaid by suede chaps, Jewel lounges bareback on the Thoroughbred quarter horse she calls Jazz. She wraps her arms around his neck after riding him in an indoor arena at the stable in Del Mar, Calif., a few miles from the house she has just bought outside San Diego. She'd like to take him on the road. "If Neil Young can go out with a truck full of Harleys, I can have a horse trailer. I'm sure country acts do." She pauses at that last sentence, as if caught in an indiscretion. But she goes on and on, about horses and many other things. "Horseback riding is the most natural thing in my blood--that and singing," she says. She first rode a horse when she was two or three while growing up in Alaska, before the hard years--her parents divorcing, life with father in and out of bars, life with mother living out of cars, life alone. But now, at 23, she has sold more than 5 million copies of her debut album, Pieces of You. And she's got Jazz. Lovingly, she picks sawdust out of his hoof with a brush claw.

Her metaphors can be equine. She has said she is not a workhorse, not a racehorse, but a show horse. She brings up a fictional character who looked "impossibly sad, like a horse's eyes." It is a quote, she says, from Nabokov, and she pronounces the novelist's name correctly, with the stress on the second syllable, exactly as exacting old Vladimir used to instruct his readers. He might have been able to appreciate this latest of pop goddesses, this star of the Lilith Fair. After all, it was a Nabokov character who said that while he was capable of loving Eve, "it was Lilith he longed for." Jewel's is a fey, insidious charm, equal parts worldly and naive, where flaws--the crooked nose and crooked teeth she is so proud of--only betray an uncommon beauty. Then there is the improbable match of slender youth and that voice--an astonishingly versatile instrument ranging from soul-shattering yodels to the most eloquent of whispers to arch Cole Porter-ish recitative.

She has sung Porter, of course, performing Too Darn Hot in Jewel Unplugged on MTV. She also polished her singing style while listening to what she calls her Bible, the classic album Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook. But only last month did she learn that Porter was white. "Whew!" she said. "I'm learning minutiae. It's killing me." And it's only been a couple of years since she discovered it was the Beatles who sang I Want to Hold Your Hand--which she liked. When another rider at the stable tells her she was born on the same day as Joan Collins, Jewel doesn't know who Joan Collins is.

But how could she have known who played Dynasty's Alexis Carrington Colby? Or had time to care? Till she was 14, Jewel Kilcher grew up in an unelectrified log cabin on an 800-acre homestead near Homer, Alaska. Her father Atz Kilcher was a folk singer, the son of a Swiss immigrant to Alaska who helped write the state charter (Grandpa Kilcher still tools around occasionally in his horse and buggy in Homer, scaring the residents). Her mother Nedra Carroll also sang and dabbled in other crafts. When Jewel was eight, her parents divorced, and her mother left for Anchorage. Jewel remained with her father, who made a living singing in local bars and halls. Traveling with him, and sometimes performing with him, left a deep impression. She says, "I saw women who would compromise themselves for compliments, for flattery; or men who would run away from themselves by drinking until they ultimately killed themselves." She began putting down her thoughts as poetry.

Jewel left the 49th state for the 50th, but she found Hawaii unappealing and very quickly made her way to her mother. She won a partial scholarship to an art school in Michigan, and after graduating, she sang on street corners to raise train fare to rejoin her mother, who had moved to San Diego. There Jewel worked in a string of dead-end jobs. When mother and daughter ran out of money, they moved from Carroll's tiny apartment and lived in Jewel's Volkswagen van. Her mother bought her own van, and the two often parked side by side. They used the lavatories at the local K Mart or at the Denny's by the intersection of Mission and Gabriel, where Jewel washed her hair at the sink and, with suds still on her head, winced when people behind her complained about the homeless. A chronic kidney disease forced her into the hospital at one point--though at first, clinic after clinic turned her away because of her poverty.

Barely employed, she became a surfer girl, writing songs on the beach, including the future hit Who Will Save Your Soul? She wrote many of the songs on Pieces of You during that difficult period. And yet, while they recognize that reality bites, the lyrics are surprisingly optimistic. Jewel explains, "It's so easy to feel alone and to feel like you're the only one going through whatever you're going through. You feel very isolated in it--especially when you're young, when you're around 18. When I was that age, I was amazed and so thankful for what little pieces of encouragement I got. It was profoundly affecting. I know that my music does that."

In 1993 she got the break she needed to show off the power of her music: a job strumming guitar and singing at a local coffeehouse called the Innerchange. "The first time I saw her perform, she reminded me of Barbra Streisand meets Meryl Streep," says Inga Vainshtein, a Russian-born former movie executive who brought Jewel to the attention of Atlantic Records. It signed her up, and Pieces of You was released in 1995--and went nowhere. Vainshtein and Jewel's mother became her managers and sent her on the road, opening at ghoulish Goth concerts, singing at country-music fairs, appearing at high schools. Her voice and stage presence began upstaging headliners like Liz Phair. Soon, TV appearances on talk shows sparked public interest. By early 1997 Jewel was a certified star, complete with Grammy nominations and gossip about what she wears and whom she's been seen with. (Asked about an old liaison with Sean Penn, she says, "Next question." She's now dating a French-Canadian male model.)

Jewel is worried about being put on a pedestal. "People look at me in magazines and feel like I'm a phenomenon, as if what I've accomplished is beyond their ability. I tell them to knock it off. If you respect what I've done, then do something yourself." She is certain of what she is. "I still giggle to think I'm a writer," she says. There is another word she prefers to singer-songwriter. Not artist or performer. "Entertainer," she says. "It's a craft, and I like that."

At the stables, Jewel is chewing "original papaya enzyme" tablets. "They rule," she says. It isn't a celebrity affectation. The enzymes are good for the kidneys. (She discusses bladder pH like an M.D.) She also drinks celery juice cut with lemon to clean out her system. She doesn't pretend it tastes good. For all her equestrian predilections, she isn't about to join the horsey set. She still drives a musty but sensible Volvo station wagon littered with unboxed cassettes, bottled water, her guitar, a watermelon, the wrapper of a health bar and other leavings of the confirmed automotive life. The Volvo, she says, is "a great car 'cause you can still go out and sleep in the desert." She laughs. "Old habits die hard."

--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/San Diego and David E. Thigpen/New York

With reporting by JEFFREY RESSNER/SAN DIEGO AND DAVID E. THIGPEN/NEW YORK