{"id":28128,"date":"2024-09-18T05:30:42","date_gmt":"2024-09-18T09:30:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=28128"},"modified":"2024-09-19T08:08:17","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T12:08:17","slug":"jewels-journey-to-now-part-3-of-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2024\/09\/18\/jewels-journey-to-now-part-3-of-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Jewel’s Journey to Now (Part 3 of 4)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Continued from Part Two<\/a>…<\/i><\/p>\n

Did the success \u2013 even belated success \u2013 of your first album put pressure on you when making Spirit<\/i>?<\/b><\/p>\n

By the time my second album came around, I did feel that pressure, the famous sophomore slump and all this stuff that they psych you out with.<\/p>\n

But I just did the math and realized what kind of contract I made for myself. I was so wealthy, I never had to have a hit again. And so I just said, \u201cYou get to take this one of two ways, Kilcher. You get to either feel pressure that you have to do this for the rest of your life, or you can say you just won the lottery and you never have to do it again. You get to do whatever the F you want. You have a free pass.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so I took it that way. Why feel the pressure to have the perfect follow up? I just dedicated myself to curiosity. And I took all that pressure off of myself. \u201cHands\u201d is such a different song than anything from the first album, but it was so authentic to who I was at that time. I don\u2019t know what you would call that type of song; it almost became a hymn.<\/p>\n

Some artists are dilettantes. They dabble in this, they dabble in that. Your forays into sort of different styles \u2013 folk, pop, Americana, country \u2013 have felt more authentic. Do you have an omnivorous approach to music?<\/b><\/p>\n

After Spirit<\/i> and its success, I just quit. I couldn\u2019t handle it. I didn\u2019t like how famous I got. And it felt weird to give myself permission to say I got so much more famous than I thought someone like me could get. I hated having bodyguards. I hated all the death threats, hated all the stalkers, people saying they\u2019d shoot me during a concert, not being able to grocery shop, not being able to go to the bathroom without people following you in. Oh, boy, it just didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

There was a lot of good, you know. I was making money. I was authentic to myself and the world. So many positives. But psychologically, that level of fame was very difficult for me. And I had made myself a promise when I was 18, before I signed my contract, that my number one job was to learn how to be happy. Nothing else mattered. Number two was to be a musician. And so I had to keep that promise to myself and admit that level of fame didn\u2019t work for me. So I quit for two years.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a very difficult thing to do in the public eye. The press and the articles at the time were like, \u201cShe can\u2019t make it. She\u2019s a has-been.\u201d But I knew it was an act of power. It was life-affirming what I was doing. And I gave myself permission to quit the industry indefinitely. And what I realized in that time were two things. One, I got un-famous fast; it didn\u2019t take long. That was pretty cool. Within a year, I was able to go to the grocery store. I was able to get on a flight and not be mobbed. Number two was, I love music. I don\u2019t love it to be famous. I don\u2019t really love it for the money. I love it because it\u2019s an expression of my human growth and development.<\/p>\n

I am a very curious person. And if I\u2019m not growing, I\u2019m dying. That\u2019s just how I am. And in the \u201890s, everybody was so obsessed with selling out. I saw so many people try to be credible. They were trying so hard to be credible that they were absolute sellouts in the process. But it\u2019s a fine line. Who\u2019s to say who\u2019s a sellout? Only you know in your heart what you\u2019re built to do.<\/p>\n

Now, there are people and artists that are iterative. They have one thing and one style, and they hone it their whole lives. And it is so authentic to them. That just isn\u2019t what I am in my life in any way, shape, or form. I am very adventurous, and I\u2019m always wanting to learn and grow and change. Now, that\u2019s hard on a career, financially. The smartest thing is not to switch genres. The smartest thing is to make \u201cYou Are Meant for Me\u201d [over and over].<\/p>\n

But I\u2019d literally rather shove a pencil in my eye. That\u2019s not what I want to do with my life. And if you\u2019re given the gift, the opportunity to be an artist, why wouldn\u2019t you be one? So I realized that I wanted to move into other genres. I knew that was going to happen; I knew it was authentic to me. I knew I would pay a price; maybe nobody would like it. And I knew that it would take years between albums, and I would kill my momentum every time.<\/p>\n

I grew up listening to country music. I grew up listening to Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton. I get chill bumps saying those two women\u2019s names; two heroic women. Those are two women to model a life after. And Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard were such a part of my ethos that I knew I wanted to make those [kinds of] albums. And I find it frustrating that the business is built in such a way that my label couldn\u2019t help me promote a country album, that I even had to declare that it was<\/i> country. That\u2019s just dumb.<\/p>\n

Our industry grew in a very segmented way. That\u2019s not my fault; that\u2019s just how the industry is. So I had to switch labels. I had to build relationships in a whole other radio category. It shouldn\u2019t be that painful. You would have thought I was murdering children because I made pop music or because I made a country album! But it\u2019s gotten easier now. I watched Taylor [Swift] go from country to pop, and I was like, \u201cGood!\u201d<\/p>\n

Click here to continue to the conclusion of the conversation<\/a>\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part Two… Did the success \u2013 even belated success \u2013 of your first album put pressure on you when making Spirit? By the time my second album came […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28146,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,30,41,51],"tags":[3863],"class_list":["post-28128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-country","category-folk","category-interview","category-pop","tag-jewel","cat-20-id","cat-30-id","cat-41-id","cat-51-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28128"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28228,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28128\/revisions\/28228"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}