Song Shopping Center®
General
Daily Feature
Entertainment News Wire
McClure & Trowbridge
General
Membership
General
Public Relations
General
| |
Today's Featured Songwriter
JEWEL
Members
Bio: Raised in the Alaskan backwoods, singer-songwriter Jewel began appearing with her
parents at the age of six, yodeling as an integral part of their folk act, and then replaced her
mother as her father's singing partner when her parents split up. Used to hard work on the
800-acre homestead, the angel-faced blonde practiced her music five hours a day and
immersed herself in the philosophy of Kant and Pascal, the poetry of Charles Bukowski and
Pablo Neruda.
After finishing high school at Michigan's Interlochen Arts Academy, she joined her mom in San
Diego, where the two eventually lived out of vans while Jewel was acquiring a following in local
coffeehouses. Signing with Atlantic Records, she released her debut album "Pieces of You" in
1995 and through relentless touring (sometimes 40 dates in 30 days) promoted the initially
slow-selling disc into a multi-platinum bestseller.
Though she had struggled with dyslexia and adolescent insecurity, her neo-hippie perspective
stressed spirituality and positive-thinking, representing the very antithesis of Generation X's
pervasive anomie.
Jewel was the perfect package for the 90s, a naive female folk singer delicately strumming an
acoustic guitar to accompany her ethereal voice (reflecting her yodeling roots) of protest. Her
fantastic figure, providing legitimate "babe" credentials, solidified her as a marketer's dream,
and the public's appetite for sweet emotion made her not only a recording star, but a
multi-media phenomenon as well.
Despite viewing "Pieces of You" as a time capsule of the songwriter as a 17- to 19-year old and
sometimes feeling embarrassed by its success, she unflinchingly published a collection of
poetry, "A Night Without Armor" (1998), containing poems that predate her earliest songs, and
contracted to follow with a book of prose the following year.
Jewel's long-awaited second album, "Spirit", also appeared in 1998 and, though commercially
more polished than its predecessor, did not present a significant shift in style or attitude. Jewel,
who made her TV debut as Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz in Concert: Dreams Come True" (TNT,
1995), portrayed a Civil War widow in her first feature, Ang Lee's "Ride with the Devil" (1999).
JIPrecords: http://JIPrecs.nu/
Trowbridge Profiles: www.TrowbridgePlanetEarth.com/T2/T2I1.html
|
|
Home | About Us | Contact Us 
Free MP3 |
Games | Freebies
