Jewel Kilcher (born May 23, 1974) is an American singer-songwriter. She has been nominated for four Grammy Awards and has sold over 30 million albums worldwide as of 2024.
Jewel was raised near Homer, Alaska, where she grew up singing and yodeling as a musical duo with her father, Atz Kilcher, a local musician. At age fifteen, she received a partial scholarship to the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, where she studied operatic voice. After graduating, she began writing and performing at clubs and coffeehouses in San Diego, California. Based on local media attention, she was signed by Atlantic Records in 1993, which released her debut album Pieces of You two years later. One of the best-selling debut albums of all time, it went 12-times platinum. The debut single from the album, "Who Will Save Your Soul", peaked at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100. Singles "You Were Meant for Me" and "Foolish Games" reached number two on the Hot 100, and were listed on Billboard's 1997 year-end singles chart, as well as Billboard's 1998 year-end singles chart.
Jewel's second effort, Spirit, was released in 1998, followed by This Way (2001). In 2003, she released 0304, which marked a departure from her previous folk-oriented records, featuring electronic arrangements and elements of dance-pop. In 2008, she released Perfectly Clear, her first country album, which debuted atop Billboard's Top Country Albums chart and featured three singles, "Stronger Woman", "I Do", and "'Til It Feels Like Cheating". In 2009, Jewel released her first independent album, Lullaby.
In 1998, Jewel released a collection of poetry, and in the following year, she appeared in a supporting role in Ang Lee's Western film Ride with the Devil (1999) which earned her critical acclaim. In 2021, she won the sixth season of The Masked Singer as the Queen of Hearts.
Jewel Kilcher was born in Payson, Utah, the second child of Atz Kilcher and Lenedra Kilcher (née Carroll). At the time of her birth, her parents had been living in Utah with her elder brother, Shane; her father was attending Brigham Young University. She is a cousin of actress Q'orianka Kilcher. Her father, originally from Alaska, was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, though the family stopped attending church after her parents' divorce when she was eight years old. Her paternal grandfather, Yule Kilcher, was a delegate to the Alaska constitutional convention and a state senator who settled in Alaska after emigrating from Switzerland. He was also the first recorded person to cross the Harding Icefield.
Shortly after Jewel's birth, her family relocated to Anchorage, Alaska, settling on the Kilcher family's 770-acre (310 ha) homestead. There, her younger brother Atz Jr. was born. She also has a half-brother, Nikos, who was primarily raised in Oregon by his mother, with whom her father had a brief relationship; Jewel would later become close to him in adulthood. After her parents' divorce in 1981, Jewel lived with her father near Homer, Alaska. The house she grew up in lacked indoor plumbing and had only a simple outhouse. The Kilcher family is featured on the Discovery Channel show Alaska: The Last Frontier, which chronicles their day-to-day struggles living in the Alaskan wilderness. Recalling her upbringing, she said: "We lived far from town. We had to walk 2 miles (3.2 km) just to get to the saddle barn I was raised in... No running water, no heat—we had a coal stove and an outhouse and we mainly lived off of what we could kill or can. We picked berries and made jam. We caught fish to freeze and had gardens and cattle to live on. I rode horses every day in the summer beneath the Alaskan midnight sun. I loved it there."
According to Jewel, the first song she learned to sing was "Saint Louis Blues". In her youth, Jewel and her father sometimes earned a living by performing music in roadhouses and taverns as a father-daughter musical duo; they also often sang at hotels in Anchorage, including the Hotel Captain Cook and the Hilton Anchorage. It was during this time that Jewel learned to yodel from her father. She would later credit the time she spent in bars as integral to her formative years: "I saw women who would compromise themselves for compliments, for flattery; or men who would run away from themselves by drinking until they ultimately killed themselves."
At age fifteen, while working at a dance studio in Anchorage, she was referred by the studio instructor to Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan, where she applied and received a partial scholarship to study operatic voice. Local businesses in her hometown of Homer donated items for auction to help allocate additional funds, and raised a total of $11,000 to pay the remainder of her first year's tuition. She subsequently relocated to Michigan to attend Interlochen, where she received classical training, and also learned to play guitar. She began writing songs on guitar at age sixteen. While in school, she would often perform live in coffeehouses. After graduating, she relocated to San Diego, California, where she worked in a coffee shop and as a phone operator at a computer warehouse.
1993–1997: Beginnings and Pieces of You
For a time, Jewel lived in her car while traveling around the country doing street performances and small gigs, mainly in Southern California. She gained recognition by singing at the Inner Change Cafe and Java Joe's in San Diego. Her friend Steve Poltz's band, the Rugburns, played the same venues. She later collaborated with Poltz on some of her songs, including "You Were Meant for Me". (He also appeared in the song's second, better-known video.) The Rugburns opened for Jewel on her Tiny Lights tour in 1997. Poltz appeared in Jewel's band on the Spirit World Tour 1999 playing guitar.
Jewel was discovered by Inga Vainshtein in 1993 when John Hogan, lead singer from the local San Diego band Rust, whom Vainshtein was managing, called to tell her about a girl surfer who sang at a local coffee shop on Thursdays. Vainshtein drove to The Inner Change with an Atlantic Records representative, and after the show called Danny Goldberg, the head of Atlantic's West Coast operations, and asked him to pay for her demo, since at the time she was living in a van and lacked the means to record any of her own music. Vainshtein, who was a Vice President of Productions at Paramount Pictures at the time, became her manager and was instrumental in creating a major bidding war that led to her deal with Atlantic. She continued to manage Jewel for the next five years. Jewel's performances at the Inner Change led to the first of several industry award nominations for the singer. At the third annual San Diego Music Awards in 1994, she won the award for Best Acoustic.
Jewel's debut album, Pieces of You, was released in 1995 when she was 21 years old. Recorded in a studio on singer Neil Young's ranch, it included Young's backing band, the Stray Gators, who played on his Harvest and Harvest Moon albums. Part of the album was recorded live at the Inner Change Cafe in San Diego, where Jewel had risen to local fame. The album stayed on the Billboard 200 for two years, reaching number four at its peak. The album spawned the Top 10 hits "You Were Meant for Me", "Who Will Save Your Soul", and "Foolish Games". To promote the album, she toured as the opening act for Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy on his 1995 North American tour in support of his album Cascade. Pieces of You eventually sold over 12 million copies in the United States alone.
In the late 1990s, Mike Connell created an electronic mailing list for fans, known as "Everyday Angels". Although Jewel does not subscribe to this mailing list, she maintained communication with her EDA fans. On July 18 and 19, 1996, she gave a two-day concert known as "JewelStock" at the Bearsville Theatre. Jewel allowed the concert to be taped, and fans circulated the concert without profit.
1998–2002: Spirit and other ventures
Jewel was chosen to sing the American national anthem at the opening of Super Bowl XXXII in January 1998 in San Diego. She was introduced as "San Diego's own Jewel!" but criticized for lip syncing the anthem to a digitally-recorded track of her own voice. This was especially noticeable due to her missing her cue and not mouthing the first words. Super Bowl producers have since admitted that they attempt to have all performers pre-record their vocals. She performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" again in the 2003 NBA Finals in one of the New Jersey Nets' home games.