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- ENTERTAINMENT

Jewel purpose
Photo: Quentin Jones
Plato, Dostoevski, Joyce, Faulkner ... there's more to this pop starlet's lyrics than Catherine Keenan had imagined.

The eye shadow is putting me off. Thick, luminescent green lines of it encircle Jewel's eyes, reminding me of the liquid glitter people once used to write their names on roller skates. It isn't what I expected from a singer often described as "dippy hippie" or even "folky", who has repeatedly said she's most comfortable in jeans and a T-shirt. With her Pamela Anderson-style mane of coiffed blonde hair and slinky black off-the-shoulder top, Jewel looks every bit the bombshell starlet she insists that she is not.

To be fair, she apologises for the eye shadow. The 27-year-old does her own hair and make-up and, today, after a few wines at lunch, she admits she got a bit carried away. As I watch her at work in a lush suite at Double Bay's Stamford Plaza Hotel - the TV cameras are in before us and she executes an interview and a series of promos with rehearsed aplomb - I realise she is nothing like her ingenue image. She is professional, in control and very canny.

Jewel Kilcher
• Born May 23, 1974

• Where Payson, Utah, US

• Albums 4

• Books 2

• Simpsons connection Spent childhood in Homer, Alaska

• Adopted at 14 by an Ottawa Indian tribe.

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During the 30 minutes I'm allocated for the interview I feel she is sizing me up, trying on different personas to see which one works best. There is baby-voice Jewel (a particular favourite, it seems), coy and sultry Jewel and, most often, Jewel the Profound.

This last incarnation causes the most controversy. After she was discovered at age 18 singing in coffee shops in San Diego and living in her Volkswagen, Jewel released her first album, Pieces of You. It sold more than 10 million copies and remains one of the best selling debuts of all time. It was followed by Spirit, in 1998, and the anomalous collection of Christmas songs, Joy: A Holiday Collection, a year later. Before she sold a single copy of her latest album, This Way, she had already clocked up sales of 23 million.

But even this was not enough for the Alaskan singer/songwriter. She has also released a book of poetry, A Night Without Armor, that stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for months. It got mixed reviews, but the not-as-bad-as-you-think school was ultimately outweighed by the worse-than-an-adolescent-would-do faction. She then turned her hand to acting in Ang Lee's civil war epic, Ride with the Devil (for which she got better press), and another book of prose reminiscences interleaved with arty photographs, Chasing Down the Dawn.

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It is clear that, although a fixture of popular culture, Jewel is very keen to place herself in a high-brow tradition. When I ask her to list the biggest influences on her music, Vladimir Nabokov and the Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda are the first names she mentions. I'm tempted to say I didn't know they sang, but she quickly explains that, for her, song-writing comes before singing and this is where the literary influences come in.

When she slips into a stream-of-consciousness mode, as she does with New Wild West on the latest album, she attributes it to the likes of Fyodor Dostoevski, no less. "When I write songs like that, they come out, it's not meant to be that way. It just rambles out of my head, like, I literally write it the way it is in the song. I got that from reading Russian writers."

I admit I was unaware that Dostoevski was such a big fan of stream-of-consciousness and wonder if she may have been influenced more by better known practitioners of the art, James Joyce and William Faulkner, say? Yep, she answers, them, too.

When it comes to literary fiction, Jewel's enthusiasm seems to know no bounds. "Yeah, you know, it's funny. I've gone through such different stages. I used to only read the classics. I used to only read philosophy - [Plato's] Symposium, all those types of things - when I was quite young and it changed my writing style immensely. I got very, very analytical and all that. And then I got into the poets and got my heart sort of married to my head and, you know, it's funny, my writing has gone through all those stages as a result."

Was it hard, then, to deal with the adverse critical reaction to her early lyrics and particularly to her poetry? She pauses for a while, before saying no. "It's not hard to know what is going on in culture, and what critics like and how to write for them and how to have a critically acclaimed book. But I just didn't want to write for the critics."

A Night without Armor included poetry Jewel says she did write as an adolescent, because she wanted to show her readers - especially kids - the progression. Too much polished, finished stuff can be discouraging to younger people, she explains, and her main aim was to get others to discover the joys of writing. "And I achieved my goal. I get hundreds of thousands of letters, of kids' writing. And they're beautiful. It's just a neat feeling."

That level of satisfaction has been rare for Jewel of late. Her voice goes quiet and she slowly stirs her tea in its beautiful china cup as she explains that she almost quit the music business two years ago.

She had her first taste of existential angst at 18, when she was so poor she was living out of her car and there didn't seem to be any point to her life. She went through it again at 25, when she was rich and famous, and this was in some ways harder to bear, she says. "I got very popular and it was a different position than I'd imagined. It can be a gilded cage, and [thinking like that] was a bit too martyred for my liking. It's a bit embarrassing to feel that way, really," she says with a laugh.

She spent almost two years away from the spotlight, but kept writing and, finally, Jewel Kilcher found she was able to make another record and even turn her hand to producing. When that was done, she surprised herself by feeling up to promoting it as well. The existential crisis was officially over. "I was like, you know, finally, I think I have the energy to do that, to do it without feeling like a complete wanker."

This Way is out now.

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Source: geocities.com/sun_day1080110801