Jewel: Interview

The overall mood of your new record, Goodbye Alice in Wonderland, seems to live in lyrics like "There's a difference between dreaming and pretending."
Yes. A lot of the record deals with having the willingness to find the truth instead of wanting to escape in a constant fairy tale. Children are told so many fairy tales, and then life really works out differently and I think it causes a lot of us to become cynical or bitter because life never quite adds up to this continuously satisfied, happy world. We're constantly trying to escape our circumstance to get to this utopia that I don't think really exists.

But, like Alice, one's point of view changes.
Yeah. What fascinates me about Alice in Wonderland is that it really was a self-imposed trip that she took. You know, she drank the elixir, she chose to live in that world and there's a lot of ways in my own life that I've chosen to escape and not really deal with what was real.

Are you, as a more mature artist and person, on the other side of those myths now?
You know, it's funny. It's like a cruel joke. I feel like each of us is destined to live the same life over and over within one lifetime.

Ugh, tell me about it.
I feel like the things I'm writing about now are the same things I was writing about in Pieces of You. Am I loved? What is love, you know? Each of our lives is shockingly similar. Only the details change, you know? I mean, I lived in a car and now I'm on a tour bus. The details change, but they're really details.

It's just more wheels, isn't it?
Yeah. And hey, there's plumbing in here, so I'm way ahead.

Speaking of details, do you have any belt-buckle bling, now that you're with rodeo champ Ty Murray?
Yes, I do. I have one of Ty's world championship all-around buckles. I also have one of his world championship bull-riding buckles.

You also have a mechanical bull on the ranch [in Stevensville, Texas].
Oh, yeah.

Does Ty get on and just get bored?
You know, not really. We only do it when, you know, we've all had too many Keystone Lights and everybody heads to the barn, you know.

Interesting. So you basically handicap him with beer.
It doesn't handicap him. He's really good. But it's just like when we have guests over, you know, and we have a barbecue, everybody will head up there and he'll run the machine and everybody else will get on it.

That's the most dangerous barbecue I've ever heard of.
It's not dangerous. There's a pad for you to land on. It's soft.

Uh, OK.
It's not alive. It isn't gonna charge you and stab you with the horns. So all you gotta do is fall on a pillow.

But during the recording, it almost threatened your producer Rob Cavallo's life.
No, he did good. It was just cute, you know. Him and my engineer both got on the bucking machine and they were like, "My hand's killing me!"

Record producers are not known for their athleticism, generally.
Yeah. The only exercise most musicians got was running away from jocks.

I suppose it'd be tough for a guy to tell his friends he got wounded on Jewel's ranch.
[Laughs]

Out Now:
Goodbye Alice in Wonderland