Jewel's In Your Shoes

(CBS)  CBSNews.com's Ellen Crean interviewed singer/songwriter Jewel.

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If you've ever read much of anything about Jewel, then you certainly already know she grew up in Alaska, she lived in a van for a while, and she doesn't suffer fools gladly.

Actually, she is liable to try to step into the fool's shoes and then write a song or a poem about it, a practice that has resulted in a very successful career. As she comes out with a new album May 2, she explains, she actually has recorded her life as it came full circle.

Jewel was born May 23, 1974, meaning that she is 31-going-on-32. As it happens, this is highly relevant to the matter at hand: "Goodbye Alice in Wonderland," the new CD, is Jewel's first release in nearly three years. (Past Jewel albums include her 1995 debut, "Pieces Of You," her 1998 release, "Spirit," her 1999 CD "Joy: A Holiday Collection," 2001's "This Way," and "0304" from 2003.)

"It's about coming full circle," she says, speaking by phone from the ranch in Stephenville, Texas, where she lives with retired world-champion rodeo cowboy Ty Murray, 36. (They have been together for seven years.)

The order of the songs on "Alice" fall into order like a book, with a beginning, middle and end, which, she says, "kind of came about naturally." It traces her path from the solitude of Alaska to the joys and pitfalls of fame. The album title also refers to the fairy tale vs. truth about love and friendship.

Among other things, Jewel's music provides a narrative of her own life. It is partly chronicled on her debut album, "Pieces of You," which came out in 1995. It doesn't take a rocket scientist or even a seasoned poet to figure out that time marches on and that, more than 10 years later, Jewel has new stories to tell and other insights to share. As a matter of fact, she says turning 30, finding herself in a committed love relationship, and settled on a Texas ranch definitely means that there's a full circle as the wanderer comes home.

It's not only her own life that she narrates, but the lives of other people; a habit of stepping into others' shoes has certainly enhanced the range of her writings. She says her songs "percolate" inside her as she moves through life. Suggest to her that she takes emotional risks as she nurtures those percolations on paper and Jewel is quick to explain: "Oh, I didn't mean to be a risk taker. Part of it has been that it has been necessary for me to make big movements or to be caught up in the current of my life."

Born in Utah but raised in Alaska, Jewel (born Jewel Kilcher) had musical parents who enjoyed performing and who encouraged Jewel's participation. She says she remembers being 6 years old and "singing for Eskimos and Aleuts in remote places, taking dog sled rides through frozen tundra."

After her parents divorced, Jewel continued, at age 8, to perform with her father, hiding from the authorities when they arrived unexpectedly at the biker bars and lumberjack joints that hired them.

But when she was 15, performing solo, she landed a vocal scholarship to Interlochen, a private arts school in Michigan, where she also majored in visual art. She learned to play guitar and also started writing songs. One spring break, when she was 16, she hitchhiked in Mexico, earning money as a street-corner minstrel.

"Hitchhiking through Mexico, that was just stupid. I wouldn't do that again. But I don't regret it," she says today.

How could she regret it, when she came out of the experience with the song "Who Will Save Your Soul"? Three years later, that tune became a huge success as the first single from "Pieces of You."

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