Jewel to perform at A Day on the Green

HER first album was one of the biggest debuts of all time and now Alaskan singer-songwriter Jewel is revisiting her folk-rock stylings and she’s ready to bring some new-found wisdom to Australia.

Australian audiences will be able to see Jewel when she tours in March with Don Henley of the Eagles.

It began with a record, then a book and now Jewel has started a movement.

The Alaskan singer-songwriter, who rose to fame in the 1990s as an unsure 20-year-old who had been living in her car to survive, has been on a journey of personal growth in the past few years.

In September 2015 she released her most recent album, Picking up the Pieces, a return to the folk-rock stylings of her debut Pieces of You, released 20 years before.

“Never broken” is a phrase that has long resonated with her and is the title of her memoir, released around the same time as her last album. It’s also the title of her new website, on which she shares techniques in attaining inner peace that helped her get through some of her most difficult times.

“I went through some ­incredible exper­iences,” Jewel, now 42, says. “A lot of ­trauma, a lot of abuse. And I realised one day I wasn’t broken.”

Australian audiences will be able to see Jewel when she tours in March with Don Henley of the Eagles. As for many of her generation, the Eagles were the soundtrack to her youth, yet not in the way you might expect. “I grew up without any television or radio but sang a lot of Eagles cover songs with my dad in bars,” she says.

Jewel’s father, Atz, gave up his own ­ambitions of becoming a recording artist to raise her and her three brothers after their ­mother left when Jewel was eight. She pays tribute to the sacrifices he made on the first single from Picking up the ­Pieces, My ­Father’s Daughter, a duet with Dolly ­Parton. “I fangirled,” Jewel says with a ­giggle of meeting Parton. “I wrote her a ­letter explaining the song and was beyond thrilled that she decided to sing on it with me. She’s a firecracker. She’s witty and smart, and funny and irreverent, and everything you would hope she would be.

“I love that Dolly and Loretta Lynn and Joni Mitchell had the nerve to write about what they were thinking and doing and wanting. They were unapologetic about who they were. They didn’t try to fit in.”

Jewel acknowledges the importance of these female role models in her life, ­especially as her own were lacking. Her mother, ­Lenedra, was her manager until it was discovered she had been embezzling money, leaving Jewel ­several million ­dollars in debt. Her relationship with her father is also complex. She says he was abusive to her and her brothers ­growing up, but they have since reconciled.

“Kids like me often end up in abusive ­relationships or on drugs or in some bad cycle,” Jewel says. “I made it my life’s work to try to avoid that. Writing for me was a process of learning. Becoming more mindful was the key to changing my life, and I wrote the book to share a lot of what I had to overcome.”

One of the biggest traumas of recent years was her divorce in 2014 from her partner of 16 years, rodeo star Ty Murray. “My marriage was a failure. I don’t think there’s any getting around that,” she says. “It should be something you allow yourselves to learn from.”

Don Henley and Jewel perform at A Day on the Green, Sirromet Wines, Mount Cotton, March 12

Originally published as Jewel to perform at A Day on the Green