Jewel’s Journey to Now (Part 4 of 4)

Continued from Part Three…

Early on, you began co producing and then producing your own albums. What did that mean to the kind of music that you were able to make?

My label was always very supportive of me. They never heard an album until I turned it in. They weren’t involved in the making, the process. When I chose a producer, it was the producer and me talking. It was me always coming to terms with the producers. And often the contracts were negotiated between me and the producers.

Artists should never be afraid to understand how their business works, because I am the parent of my music and I cannot be a good custodian – a good parent – if I don’t know the environment I’m trying to raise a “child” in. And so the more you can have those conversations up front before you start working, the better. I began to realize that my opinions and my viewpoint were important to making my music.

In all honesty, I still don’t think I’m a very good recording artist. But if [an album] was going to come out anywhere close to what I hoped, I had to have an active participation role, and I never had to fight for it.

Your public life has been marked by some high profile activism. What would you point to as the most significant achievement of your Inspiring Children Foundation?

We set out to see if we could help kids with suicidal ideation, anxiety, trauma, and help them without therapy. A huge thing to underscore is that I like therapy, but it’s not accessible. It is not affordable. And there’s not enough of it.

And it is unacceptable to me that misery is an equal opportunist. Misery is quite efficient. I don’t care if you’re rich or poor, black or white, famous or not, but if you’re going to learn how not to be miserable, that’s an education. Education costs money. Therapy, at its best, should re-educate us. It should teach us new ways of behaving and thinking and perceiving ourselves and the world. But it’s expensive. The idea that happiness could become elitist – for the haves, not the have-nots – that really bothers me. So our goal was to see if we could create a system that didn’t depend on therapy to get clinical results.

And I’m very proud of the Foundation, because I think we’re the first of its kind, and we have staggering success rates. We did it by reinventing and completely reconfiguring the model. We’re one of the best in the world of helping kids with suicidal ideation. We’re free, and we don’t do it with expensive one-on-one therapy.

Tell me about the upcoming tour. What’s the character of it, and how will it be different from other tours, if at all?

I guess it’s different just because I’m touring. I don’t tour that much. I took a good seven years off when I had my son and became a single mom, and then toured with Train two years ago. I wanted tour again and was looking for the right fit for multiple reasons, and I was really convinced that Melissa Etheridge and I are going to be a really wonderful bill together.

I almost did a tour with a very famous band, and I would have [only] broken even after four months. It’s just not a real appealing thing. That’s just not a great proposition as a single mom, and who wants to spend four months of their time breaking even? But I get it. I had a price to pay because I don’t have the same ticket power as I had before. So that’s fine, but you have to find a way to solve things that work for you. So I pitched Melissa on this idea: let’s split everything. Let’s split the band. Let’s use the same band and crew. And it’s allowed me as a single mom to tour less, but to still make some money. I’m pretty excited about that.