Jewel's In Your Shoes

After Nearly Three Years, She's Back With Songs With A New Story

(CBS)  It certainly didn't hurt her songwriting to spring from a background that encouraged encounters with such a diverse sampling of humanity. But that was only one of her influences.

"There's probably a lot of reasons," she says. "Child of divorced people. Strange combination of things. I guess I always was a writer. The way I saw people, the way I saw the world, was always detached, making up stories about people. I guess I've always been that way."

There's documentation to prove that point. A fifth grade teacher she had saved Jewel's writing assignments in a file. Recently, Jewel got a look at her first piece of schoolwork for that teacher: She wrote about being a homeless man.

Aside from her music, Jewel is also involved in several personal projects. In 1999, she started a charitable foundation, Higher Ground for Humanity, which is managed by her brother, Shane, and to which she donates part of her income. During the summer of 2002, she launched Soul City Café Artbeat, a showcase for emerging musical and spoken-word artists who performed with Jewel during her tour in 2002.

The main focus of Higher Ground is the ClearWater Project, designed to bring safe drinking water to thousands of people in Honduras, Tanzania, Tibet, India, South Africa and Mexico.

"Writing, for me, has always felt like a release," she says. "It probably helped bring me closer to myself. I always felt safer, for some reason, the more truth I could pull from myself. I learned when I wrote. I always felt there was safety in that. I tended to be attracted to writers like that."

She points out that, since certain wisdom holds that there are seven basic human emotions, "I certainly don't have emotions other people don't have … But I'm not afraid of exposing myself."

And it doesn't make her feel especially vulnerable to prying eyes. She is fairly comfortable about staying one step ahead, in that arena: "I'm able," she says, "to beat everyone to the punch."

Her debut poetry collection in 1998, "A Night Without Armor," sold more than a million copies, and the audiobook version received the 1999 Audie Award from the Audio Publishers Association. The following year, she published "Chasing Down the Dawn," a chronicle of an artist’s life on the road.

"The more I read, the better I feel my writing becomes," says Jewel. "Love is the hardest write about — better writers, like Shakespeare, have zeroed in on it. But if you zero in on its fineness, on its subtlety, then you don't even have to try to make it original.

"Love is not as easy as it is that you're told when you're little. You know you're in love when you find you're not leaving … My experience has changed with it, though. It's like a thumbprint; it's always different."

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TEN QUICK ONES With Jewel

Dog or cat?
Dog (Jewel has a shitzu.)

Spring or fall?
Spring

Sweater or sweatshirt?
Depends on mood

Favorite color?
"Why pick?"

Favorite song?
"The Other Woman" as performed by Nina Simone

Latest movie seen?
"Brokeback Mountain"

Brownies: Nuts or not?
Nuts

Dinner for two or dinner for 20?
Two

Last meal?
"With a theology expert, to look for loopholes."

Motto?
"Drive fast, take chances — I don't know, I don't, really."