Jewel has never had a case of
writer’s block; if need be, she can write on command. “I’m lucky for that,” the
singer-songwriter says with a laugh, playing down the fact that over the past
few decades she’s penned hundreds of poignant songs, many of which she’s been
performing in concert for over two decades but has chosen not to record. Jewel
knows that at this point in her life – after selling millions of albums
and establishing herself as one of the most successful musicians of her generation
– she could take many routes: she could wait on releasing a new
album for years at a time, strictly choosing to perform live instead; or
perhaps she’d focus on her memoir, the forthcoming Never Broken; or be satisfied she wrote two children’s books and a
pair of successful children’s albums. That’s not Jewel though. Jewel remains a
storyteller. The itches are ever-present to document her thoughts and perceptions
in musical form.
“It was the time in my life to do
this,” the Alaskan-born music icon says bluntly, reflecting on her decision to
record, produce and now release Picking
Up the Pieces, her first “proper” album of new studio material in five
years and a self-described return to the territory explored on her landmark
1995 debut, Pieces of You. “It’s
something I needed for myself.”
Perhaps due to Jewel's desire to
confront the darker side of life head on, her inimitable vocals sound as
emotionally potent here as on her earliest work, conveying an unrelenting
desire to share herself once more, a poet and troubadour on a lifelong journey
of reflection. “My mission was to try and make a record where I didn’t feel
diluted,” she explains of a 14-track collection of songs that finds the singer baring
her soul and exploring a wide range of sonic textures, from sparse to exotic,
in a manner few have ever treaded so successfully.
Picking Up the Pieces, which Jewel
describes as a “singer-songwriter’s record,” and one she hopes her influences,
Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell and Rickie Lee Jones and mentors, Bob Dylan, Merle
Haggard and Neil Young, would be proud of, is the project many have been waiting
patiently to hear for years. With her vast and wide-ranging
catalogue, which is rapidly approaching 1000 songs - all written over the last
quarter century, Jewel has indeed become one of the premiere singer-songwriters
of our time.
Over the course of the album, Jewel conveys the emotional
turmoil of life during it’s most difficult and challenging moments, with
genuine emotional pain fueling her vocals and reaching a new intensity level
with her music in the process. A singer
cannot transmit feelings into listeners without tapping into those feelings and
this collection of songs provided the opportunity to dig deep into her own
experiences.
Meditations on lost love
and broken relationships are prevalent on Picking
Up the Pieces, with the potent and poetic “Love Used To Be" and the
hopeless despair of "It Doesn't Hurt Right Now," a penetrating collaboration
with Rodney Crowell that explores the aftermath of an
affair. Previously unrecorded live staples from the original Pieces Of You era like "Everything
Breaks," "Here When Gone," "His Pleasure Is My Pain"
and "Carnivore," which manages to convey heartbreak, hostility and
defiance simultaneously, are also among them.
Family relationships are also eloquently explored, with the
self-examining "Family Tree" and “My Father’s Daughter” – a stunning autobiographical collaboration with country legend
Dolly Parton.
“I was trying to keep my mind
quiet and honestly get back to something I feel like I’d lost touch with in my
life,” she adds of the reflective LP. “It was really an exercise in shutting
out fear. I was giving myself permission to be exactly who and what I was.”
To be sure, this is an album
about self-awareness: namely, the way it affects our evolution, maturation and
acceptance. “It really felt like returning to a part of me that I didn’t mean
to lose, but with time and relationships and life and surviving and dealing you
take on new things and not all of them are great,” she admits. The recording
process for the album, which Jewel describes as a “very holistic process,”
centered on “carving away things about myself and returning to a sense of
myself that I really needed.”
The 41-year-old singer didn’t come
to this place easily however – a rough childhood, a recent
divorce and countless moments of introspection led her here. Still, as when she
was a homeless teenager, hitchhiking the country and finding herself along the
way, she persevered. Specifically, Jewel spent the past few years hashing out her
new album in Nashville, hunkering down at a workmanlike clip with an accomplished
band comprised of several of her mentor Neil Young’s longtime musical comrades.
Typically, she’d log studio time for several hours a day, multiple days a week while
her four-year-old-son, Kase, was at school.
Self-producing the album, she
says, was something that came as a matter of unfortunate circumstances. “My
original goal was to have Ben Keith do it,” she says of the late Pieces Of You producer. In his absence,
she took it upon herself to man the boards, a challenge, she says, only in teaching
herself to forget all the music-industry shortcuts she’d picked up throughout
her career: “When I made my first record I knew nothing so I was able to make a
very pure record. To try and do that 20 years later and forget all the
quote-unquote clever stuff about the business is challenging.” The absence of polished production and studio
trickery reveals a clear focus on vocals and the instrumental empathy between Jewel
and her musicians. This was a risky
approach that could have led to disaster but instead has helped her reach a new
level of lyrical and musical unity. One of the finest examples of this is
"Here When Gone," which is virtually unrecognizable from its solo
acoustic incarnation, now vacillating between a haunting groove and a shuffling
swing. About this track, she says,
"Thanks to the chemistry between these musicians and I, this song has
finally found its place."
If returning to several songs
she’d written at a much younger age – not to mention participating in
countless moments of introspection – for Picking Up the Pieces, has taught Jewel anything, it’s that no
matter her place in life, at her core she’s a singer-songwriter. “It isn’t just
thinking about you,” she explains of her natural-born craft. “It’s thinking
about the world and wanting to rise with people. You have a social obligation.
You’re aware that there’s more than just you.
Picking Up the Pieces, she concludes, is born out of a simple
purpose: it’s about “getting very comfortable with saying “This is just me.
These are my thoughts. These are my feelings. This is my poetry.”