From: owner-jewel-digest@smoe.org (jewel-digest) To: jewel-digest@smoe.org Subject: jewel-digest V4 #623 Reply-To: jewel@smoe.org Sender: owner-jewel-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-jewel-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk jewel-digest Monday, October 18 1999 Volume 04 : Number 623 * If you ever wish to unsubscribe from this digest, send an email to * jewel-digest-request@smoe.org with ONLY the word * unsubscribe in the BODY of the email * . * For the latest information on Jewel tour dates, go to * the OFFICIAL Jewel web site at http://www.jeweljk.com * and click on "Presence" * OR * go to the Atlantic Records site at http://www.atlantic-records.com * and go to the "On Tour" section * . * PLEASE :) when you reply to this digest to send a post TO the list, * change the subject to reflect what your post is about. A subject * of Re: jewel-digest V4 #xxx or the like gives fellow list readers * no clue as to what your message is about. Today's Subjects: ----------------- * Pieces Of UK and Jewel featured in The Sunday Times ["Chris Groves" ] * Jewel tapes [greg delaney ] * LU - new version [Poofoo545@aol.com] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 17:37:19 +0100 From: "Chris Groves" Subject: * Pieces Of UK and Jewel featured in The Sunday Times There's a 2-page article on Jewel in the Culture magazine included with today's Sunday Times. The text below is taken from the web site at... http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/ The article mentions my site, Pieces Of UK, as a useful Jewel web resource, if you would like to visit it, my address is... http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~cmgroves/Jewel/ - --------------------------------- There are two sides to the singer-songwriter turned actress, DAVID EIMER discovers - the one who writes iffy poetry, and the one you don't mess with The Jewel personality When Jewel Kilcher, who's better known by her first name, was spotted singing her slight folk songs in a San Diego coffee shop, the executives at Atlantic Records can't have suspected they were witnessing the start of the career of a genuine multi- media phenomenon - albeit one who grew up milking cows in Alaska and who can yodel convincingly. But in swift succession Jewel has produced a debut album, Pieces of You, which sold 10m copies, a bestselling book of poems and then a second multi-platinum record. That only left the movies, and now with a solid supporting role in Ang Lee's latest film, the American civil war drama Ride With the Devil, the 25-year-old blonde with the crooked teeth and big chest has covered all the bases. "I feel more comfortable now that I've got a book and a movie out. When I was only a pop icon, it was scary. It was fake," she says. "With the poetry, it was my thoughts, and people could then see what I thought about my life and life around me." Never mind that she's dyslexic, or that her poems are painfully simplistic. For Jewel, all art is pretty much the same. "It's like, if you have a creative body, singing is one limb, writing another and acting another. My singing and songwriting one is the buffest - you know, the strongest - and the others were beginning to atrophy." It was Ang Lee who saved her from wasting away completely by casting her as Sue Lee Shelley in Ride With the Devil. Based on Daniel Woodrell's excellent, vivid novel Woe To Live On, it's part period war movie and part western and follows the bloody and increasingly desperate adventures of a gang of Southern bushwhackers, operating on the Kansas/Missouri border. This isn't the Civil war of received history, where armies in grey and blue bled each other to death in giant set-piece battles. Rather, it was a brutal game of hit-and-run that split families, pitted neighbours against each other and swiftly degenerated into a relentless cycle of revenge killings. Told from the perspective of Tobey Maguire's first-generation German-American, it's ultimately more involving than The Ice Storm, where Lee filmed the characters as if they were interesting specimens from another planet, and that's mainly due to the impressive ensemble cast, which reads like a roll call of up-and-coming actors - including the ubiquitous Jonathan Rhys Myers as a villain. Lee has a knack for getting the best out of young performers, and Maguire in particular has never been better as an outsider fighting for a cause that isn't really his. The surprise is that Jewel, in her first acting job since playing Dorothy in a 1995 charity production of The Wizard of Oz, fits into the picture so neatly. As a Southern war widow, she has the only significant female role and, despite being in the background much of the time, she's completely believable as a woman trying to raise her child and live a normal life while the men run around playing their deadly games. She also gets the Missouri accent down, but insists that Lee deserves a lot of the praise for her performance. "He's just been so patient and nurturing and careful. He's very quiet, he'll never get mad, he'll always help you to do better." She chose not to work with an acting coach, and instead just read as much as she could find on women of that period. "I was clueless to the fact that it was the beginning of feminism in many ways. The South was fighting to preserve a patriarchal system, where they got to own their property. The property was slaves, but it also included women. Women, in exchange for protection, served their husbands; they were a step above slaves but not their husbands. But so many men went to fight that it left the women alone, it destroyed the patriarchy," she points out. Of course, it helps that she looks the part. In her T-shirt, combat trousers and clogs, with rosy cheeks and a light tan, she's clearly an outdoor girl, the sort of sturdy type you can imagine running a farm in 19th-century America or roaming the Swiss Alps (where her grandfather came from). Unlike most of the other actors, she didn't need riding lessons. "It's such an ideal first role for me," she concedes. "I was raised on the land, I grew up with guys on a ranch." Her upbringing is a key part of the Jewel legend and one of the reasons why she's achieved such spectacular success, despite the apparent blandness of both her songs and poetry. The daughter of two not-very- successful folk singers, she grew up in Alaska, which is traditionally a place where eccentric Americans go to reinvent themselves after they've failed everywhere else. When her grand- father moved there from Switzerland, it wasn't even a state and the American government was still handing out free land to anyone willing to live the frontier life in the 20th century. There was no electricity or running water on the Kilcher homestead, and she lived a curious half- traditional, half-bohemian life as a child, mixing her daily chores on the ranch with singing alongside her dad in truck- stop bars. Her influences were those of her parents, who divorced when she was eight, and as she started to become famous, she had to put herself through a crash course in modern music. "I was a little backward, I didn't really know the Beatles or the Stones." By her own admission, her father was "out to lunch", and after brief stints with relatives in Hawaii and at an arts school in Michigan, she moved down to San Diego (still her nominal base) with her mum when she was 17. Living in a VW van, with her mother resident in another one parked alongside, she scrounged food, wrote the songs that would become Pieces of You, started singing in local coffee shops and ultimately scored a record contract. It's a classic American rags-to-riches tale, but she isn't one to sing the praises of how the United States is the land of opportunity. "I feel kind of left out of all that. A lot of my friends were left out of the system, on welfare or whatever. I never felt I was part of the American dream. I never thought about it, I just wanted to eat every day and not waitress." There's the sense with Jewel that she's a solo act in every way, and she claims to feel no solidarity with the likes of Sheryl Crow or Sarah McLachlan. "I'm kind of sick of the girl-rock thing," she states, "it's just boring as hell." One of the results of her early experiences is that she's not a woman to be messed with. She used to hitchhike around Alaska with a big knife and by the time she was a teenager was already used to fending off the unwelcome attentions of the men who saw her singing. She isn't short on self-confidence. Ask her if she's worried about spreading herself too thin by pursuing three different careers, and you get a blunt reply. "Not if you do it good." Her forceful attitude nonplussed the crew of Ride With the Devil, who apparently had to get used to running her errands, while her habit of strumming her guitar while other actors were rehearsing didn't initially endear her to the rest of the cast. "It's a real team sport, and that was hard for me to get used to," she admits. This side of Jewel, though, isn't the one her legions of mostly female fans see. They relate to her unconventional road to stardom, her optimism and the semi-cosmic ruminations that constitute her lyrics. There are no hidden depths to Jewel: she simply puts it all out there, and while songs such as Who Will Save Your Soul? make critics cringe, their directness conquers audiences. Along with her willingness to position herself firmly in the mainstream - she sang the national anthem at the 1997 Super Bowl and is about to release an album of Christmas-themed tunes - it's made her a huge star in the United States. It's a sobering fact that Pieces of You has sold almost as many copies as Nirvana's Nevermind. Some people have murmured that her spirituality might be a clever front. Mentioning this to Jewel, though, is a surefire way of getting her to drop her easy smile. "I don't use it at all in a marketing way. I don't think people perceive me that way." She seems serious about her fight to balance her spiritual concerns with life as a multimillionaire in the public eye. "I don't know how, I'm still learning. I'm always struggling with what is truth, what is just, what isn't just. It's just my own journey, and I do that in front of people now." Being the singular person she is, it's no surprise that she's stayed away from the star dating circuit, although there was a brief fling with Sean Penn in 1995 that ended when he returned to his wife and kids. She's currently seeing Chris Douglas, a former actor on a daytime soap who now travels the rodeo circuit roping cows and riding steers. "I'm not exactly hungering to get married and have kids right now, obviously, but I've been with a cowboy for a while and that's nice," she says sweetly. "I go to Montana whenever I can to see him." List Moderator Note: this is an OLD article, as she is no longer seeing Mr Douglas. (according to more recent interviews she's given) So far, the only blip on her horizon is the $10m lawsuit her former manager Inga Vainshtein slapped on her and her mother, who now manages her, last year. Vainshtein had seen Jewel while she was still in the coffee-shop stage of her career and introduced her to Atlantic Records, but was fired on St Valentine's Day, 1998. Jewel won't discuss her, but is remarkably close to her mum. "She's the one who encouraged me to live in my car because she knew it would force me into figuring out what I needed to do with myself, what was my purpose. She always encouraged me to ask those kinds of questions, rather than just settle for going to college and being safe." Whether or not Ride With the Devil is the success it deserves to be - and period movies only tend to work in the United States when they feature English actors and settings - it's likely to be just the start of her acting career. There will also be another book next year and no doubt another album, which is the way she always planned it. "I was really clear when I got in the business why I was getting into it. I wanted the love of doing what I do, and secondly to help people. Every decision I've made in my career has been, 'Does it help people or doesn't it?', so I've gotten to keep my career real to myself. It doesn't feel too alien now." Ride With the Devil opens on Nov 5 WWW: easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~cmgroves/Jewel/ Text-heavy, but undoubtedly useful resource for UK Jewel fans - ----------------------------------------- Chris Jewel:Pieces Of UK : http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~cmgroves/Jewel ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 19:01:25 -0400 From: Robby VanSciver Subject: * Re: gods gift to women Actually the "And you're so vain, you probably think this song is about you" is from a different song. The original song is "You're So Vain" sung by Carly Simon in the early 1970s. Hope this helps. :-) CaitAdaire@aol.com wrote: > i recently posted asking about gods gift to women. > The story goes, > my best friend and i would always sing the exerpt from a song we didnt really > know " i've been saving myself my whole life for some mf like you to come > along. i am so desperate im writing you this song, and your so vein... you > probly think this song is about you." > well we would laugh, cause we had no idea where we even heard this song. so > one night i was listening to my new angel food, and i heard this song. and > stunned byond belief, it was JEWEL! so i called her asap. i screamed for her > to listen. so she then in turn got in the BIGGEST fight in the world about it > cause she said jewel was NOT the original writer of this song blah blah blah, > and i shouldnt give her credit for it. > > long story short?; > how can i prove this to her? ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 18:04:39 -0700 (PDT) From: greg delaney Subject: * Jewel tapes Hi everybody I am a new collector to Jewel and lookin for tapes of her Spirit tour. Can interested in tradeing . I have a (Jewelstock to trade Tks Greg ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 21:13:13 EDT From: Poofoo545@aol.com Subject: * LU - new version Hey there angels! Well, I was at the radio station I work for tonight (WBRS), and I was in vinyls and all of a sudden I hear Jewel's beautiful voice wafting in from studio A! They were playing the new Life Uncommon single, it was so great because I hadn't heard it yet! Lol, just thought I'd let ya know! Emily, the blue angel ------------------------------ End of jewel-digest V4 #623 ***************************