TV 2015-10-06 Hollywood CA
| TV Info
| |
| Date | Tuesday, October 6, 2015 |
|---|---|
| City | Hollywood, CA |
| Venue | KCET Studios |
| Event | The Tavis Smiley Show |
| Musicians | Jewel |
| Other | Long interview followed by a performance promoting her album, Picking Up the Pieces, and her book, Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story. Broadcast on PBS. |
Setlist
- Interview
- My Father's Daughter
- Interview
- Mercy (possibly broadcast on October 7, 2015).
Transcript
Tavis Smiley: Good evening from Los Angeles. I’m Tavis Smiley
Tonight, a conversation with multiple platinum singer-songwriter, Jewel. The four-time Grammy nominee is out now with her New York Times bestselling memoir. It’s called “Never Broken”, which recounts her remarkable life journey, and a new album called “Picking Up the Pieces”, which debuted at number one on the Billboard Folk chart. She’ll also treat us tonight to a performance from the new project.
So we’re glad you’ve joined us. A conversation and performance from Jewel coming up right now.
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Tavis: Always pleased to welcome the very talented singer-songwriter, Jewel, to this program looking as lovely as ever. The four-time Grammy nominee has sold more than 30 million albums worldwide to date, also a New York Times bestselling author now. She recently released a memoir that chronicles her remarkable life journey, and I do not use that word lightly. It’s called “Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story”.
And as if she wasn’t busy enough, she’s also out with a new album titled “Picking Up the Pieces”, which hearkens back to the folk roots of her breakthrough 1995 debut project, “Pieces of You”. So that’s a lot to say. You got a lot going on. It’s good to see you again.
Jewel: Very nice to see you.
Tavis: Welcome back to this program. I wanted to ask you do to me a favor. You don’t need glasses to read, do you?
Jewel: No.
Tavis: Okay, because I do, increasingly these days.
Jewel: I’m getting there.
Tavis: I want you to read, if you don’t mind, just this opening piece right here, just the first paragraph…
Jewel: The first paragraph?
Tavis: From the foreword to your book.
Jewel: Sure.
Tavis: Just read that for me.
Jewel: “I should probably not be here today. I should probably not even be alive. Being alive, I should have become an addict, knocked up as a teenager, or struck romantically in a cycle of abuse. If you look at my life at any stage, you might have said, “This girl will never make it” and you probably would have been right. What I had going for me, however, was at a fairly young age, I figured out what I wanted: happiness. You have to know what you want to ever be able to have it.”
Tavis: Every one of us, I believe, wants to be happy, so I take your point. You got to know what you want. I guess the question, though, is how did you get there? Why do you think, given all that might have happened, or perhaps happened to others who grew up in your neck of the woods, why do you think you made it?
Jewel: I knew when I moved out at 15 that statistically girls like me end up in a ditch, pregnant, in an abusive relationship, and that if I wanted to not be a statistic that I had to use all my wit, all of my logic and all of my creativity to try and beat those odds.
I had a great philosophy teacher when I was in eighth grade. I went to an alternative school for at-risk youth and he had us reading a lot of the Greek classics, and I was familiar with things like nature versus nurture.
And I thought, you know, at 15, if I don’t like my nurture, how can I re–nurture myself? Is it possible to re–nurture myself? So that was a journey I set out on to see if I could avoid being a statistic, and it took me on a really amazing path.
Tavis: It did, and the book chronicles all that. I can’t do justice to the book in the time that we have tonight, but I want to talk specifically. As viewers know, I do this often because I believe that we are who we are because somebody loved us. Every one is who we are because somebody loved us.
And sometimes that love is imperfect and sometimes, as you well know from this book, that love takes different turns and different paths. But I want to talk about your parents, your mother first. Tell me about your mother and then this relationship with your father, which is so unique to me. But tell me about your mother, that relationship.
Jewel: My family was Mormon. I was raised Mormon. My mom left when I was eight. My parents divorced and she didn’t want to be a mom anymore. I didn’t know that at the time. But my dad took us and he took us back to home where I was raised, the homestead where he was raised. So I was raised in a saddle barn.
My father began drinking and became abusive starting at about that age, and my mother seemed like a very mythical figure. She seemed like the opposite. You know, I didn’t realize at the time that she just kind of didn’t want to be a mom.
So I would hitchhike and catch rides all the way to Anchorage, about 200 miles away, to go see her. And she just seemed like a tremendously spiritual, calm, tranquil counterpoint to my father who was volatile and much more violent.
Tavis: And yet she seemed all that to you, but she had chosen to leave.
Jewel: Yeah, and I didn’t know that at the time. It took me years to figure that out. It took me years to figure out what my mother was and who she was, and I haven’t spoken to her since 2003. My need for her love, that wound, that deep wound for me as a child, blinded me to really seeing the truth about my mother. I think I had a fictional relationship with her. I didn’t really see the truth about her until I was in my 30s.
Tavis: And what did you write that story to be? What was that fiction for you?
Jewel: That she loved me, that she cared about me, that she wanted me. It was hard for me to see that she really only, you know, came back into my life in a significant way when I got signed. She did end up help managing me and it ended up being a really difficult relationship. It ended up being much more damaging than the one with my dad.
Tavis: Why did you, given that history, why did you let her back in? And particularly at a moment when you had made it at that point? Why’d you let her back…
Jewel: I haven’t yet, actually. I remember calling her when I was living in my car. I was homeless and record labels started coming down. “Mom, you’re not going to believe it. Record labels are coming down.” It’s not like I didn’t talk to her over the years since a child. I just didn’t see her as regularly. I did live with her in Anchorage for a little bit off and on.
So we had a very intense relationship, you know. She said we were the same soul in two different bodies, which when you’re a young kid, sounds amazing. That means I’m just like my mom and I worship my mom, very powerful things.
Tavis: When I said you had made it, what I meant was what you just said, that the record labels were calling at this point, so you were on the verge of making it, to be more exact. But I’m still not clear why you let her back in in that moment and in that capacity.
Jewel: I was actually helping take care of her prior to that. I moved to San Diego because she had a heart condition and I went down there to help take care of her, paying rent. My boss propositioned me one day and, when I wouldn’t sleep with him, he didn’t give me my paycheck and I ended up living in my car and she was living in her car.
Then she went back to Alaska and I ended up staying in San Diego and was homeless for a year. But I stayed in touch with her. I thought I had a great relationship with her, even though we really didn’t have a lot of contact.
Tavis: And you thought when you let her back in at that point that she could help you advance this career?
Jewel: Yeah. She was sort of–I imagined we were best friends. I think, you know, for a child that didn’t really know what love was, that need for love is so great that it’ll blind you to a lot.
Tavis: You know, there’s so many takeaways for me from this beautiful, richly written text. But one of the takeaways for me–I guess I never processed it this way till I read your book, of all the books I’ve read, is that imagination can cut both ways. Imagination is what an artist needs if an artist is going to be a great writer, a great performer. If you’re going to make your way in the world, you have to imagine. That old adage, you have to see it…
Jewel: But I say in my book there’s a difference between dreaming and pretending.
Tavis: I was about to go there [laugh]. All right, so you’re psychic too. I was about to go there. Unpack that statement for me.
Jewel: I wrote a song about, you know, when I realized what the truth was about my mom, as far as I can tell. I wrote a line in there, you know, “Love can be used against you like a weapon”, and I really feel like that’s what happened. And I did that to myself to a large degree, not really seeing and not knowing better.
But, yeah, there’s a difference between dreaming and pretending. Dreaming is important. It brings new things to life. That’s what artists have to do. Pretending is actually trying to fool yourself, you know, actively engaging and putting yourself to sleep so that you can keep a connection that means a lot to you.
Tavis: So, for those watching this conversation and listening right now, when you say that the relationship with your mom ended up being more damaging ultimately than the one you had with your father, that’s hard to believe for a moment, at least, when one hears the story of the relationship you had with your father. Tell me about that relationship.
Jewel: Yeah. So in the book, I talk about what I call emotional English. We’re each raised with an emotional language in our homes and you can say it’s like a real language. Like if I was taught French and I can say French hurt my feelings. I’m never going to speak French to my kids. Unless you learn Spanish, you’re going to speak French. Our emotional language is the same way.
So I wanted to talk about cycles of abuse from a standpoint that wasn’t shaming, wasn’t bitter, but was actually with a lot of compassion because it’s a learned behavior. And it takes a lot of safety to step in and relearn a new behavior. My dad was never told he was loved until his dad was on his deathbed. It changed my dad’s life. It healed him in a lot of ways.
My dad was abusive. Once things hit the fan, my dad turned to drinking and then he became abusive. Probably in his 40s or 50s, he started going, “Oh, my gosh, how do I change this cycle? How do I change the behavior?”
I was long gone. I moved out at 15. But he did change those things and he and I have a great relationship now, not just through an amends, but through actual changed behavior, earning back trust, earning back respect.
Tavis: There’s a song about this.
Jewel: Yeah [laugh]. Shall I get my guitar?
Tavis: Hint-hint [laugh]. And the song is called…
Jewel: “My Father’s Daughter”.
Tavis: “My Father’s Daughter”. You gonna play a little bit of that for me?
Jewel: Yeah. My grandmother and grandfather came from Europe and she was an aspiring opera singer, gave up her dreams of being an opera singer to have kids in a free country. She and all of her kids could sing. My aunts and uncles are very talented. My dad picked up where she left off and played music and was about to go national when my mom left.
So he gave up those dreams. We became bar singers and I picked up where my dad left off. And my grandmother and he both got to live to see me become successful. So I wrote this for them about the sacrifices that they made.
(Performance of My Father's Daughter)
Tavis: Good Lord. That got me. There’s a line in that song, “When I step on stage and the music finds me.” When people hear your music, the music finds them. But when you walk onstage and the music finds you, what does that feel like? What do you mean by that line?
Jewel: Feels like church to me, feels like, you know, a spirit moves into you. Music’s always saved me and really healed me, and nature. You know, I grew up in a log cabin. It was a pretty hard home a lot of the time, but the song was such a healing thing and it’s so pure and so beautiful, you can’t help believe in something bigger than yourself. There’s something very transformative about it. I always clung to that.
And at eight, you know, I was singing in barrooms. I was probably the only fourth grader that would go from elementary school right to the bar [laugh]. And I made a vow to never drink because I realized, and I put in the book, I say you can’t outrun pain.
You know, I watched peoples’ pain, trying to cover it with medicators and it adds more pain to your pain. So I made a resolution to never drink or do drugs, and writing is what would take that pain away enough, you know, just the pressure away enough to kind of be able to see straight and keep going.
Tavis: I am grateful, as all of your fans, I think, are grateful, that you are so transparent, so earnest, so willing to be open with your life in your lyrics. But there’s a certain courage it takes to do that. And what I appreciate and yet quite don’t understand, I admit, so I ask you, is how one lives this and then decides on top of having to live it, having to navigate it, to sing about it, to share it with the world. Why?
Jewel: When I was 15, I had this misconception that, through hypervigilance, I could avoid pain and that that would help keep me from being a statistic. It actually wasn’t the case. What helped me stop from being a statistic wasn’t avoiding pain. I found plenty of it, no matter how careful I was. It actually was my approach to pain.
Safety isn’t an armor. It’s invulnerability, and that’s a very counterintuitive thing. But by watching nature and looking at trees and seeing that what doesn’t bend, breaks, our armor makes us very brittle. It makes us very brittle, insecure people.
It does feel very vulnerable and scary to be more open and it’s not appropriate at all times, you know. There’s bad people in the world. You don’t be vulnerable around, you know, everybody, but you find people that you can. And for me, being honest wasn’t that hard because I’m not inventing a new feeling.
You know, you can take out the details in my book that are specific to me, but the themes are very universal. Everybody’s been betrayed, everybody’s lost. These aren’t things that we should keep quiet because shame lives in secrecy and the only way to heal is actually by letting light in and communicating, and I learned that when I was homeless.
I started writing songs and finally getting onstage and saying, “I’m not just going to be known in my notebook by no one. I’m going to try and be known”, and that means you have actually show up and let people know who and what you are, and not use artist propaganda to make yourself seem more perfect.
Tavis: I love that. There’s two things you said now, Jewel, I want to go back and pick up on. First, in this conversation by my count now, you have mentioned both nature and nurture a couple of times which leads me to ask what, at this point in your life, have you learned about that dialectic?
Jewel: It’s interesting. I had a bunny as a kid that was raised with chickens, and we put it in the chicken coop so it was safe. It never knew it was a bunny. It thought it was a chicken. It would peck at its food and it would kind of walk funny. It didn’t hop and it would sit on the nest and hatch eggs, actually [laugh].
I remember looking at that bunny, going what if I’m a bunny and I’m raised by chickens? How can I know my nature if my nurture was so extreme?
So it is an interesting debate. I do think we’re born with certain gifts and certain talents and our lives can shape us. But I really believe like when I got out of the relationship with my mom, I felt shattered. I really felt like I had been so brainwashed, and I had this image of this light being covered by layers and layers and layers of sediment.
A lot of that was nurture, but my nature was here and I wasn’t broken. A soul isn’t a teacup or a chair. It can’t actually break, so a lot of it was just not fixing myself. It was more doing a very loving, archaeological dig back to my actual self. It’s a complicated answer to a complicated question.
Tavis: No, it’s an answer that I follow and it does have layers and textures to it, but I take it and I’m glad you responded that way. I want to be sensitive in asking this other question, but you write about it and you write about it and you write about it [laugh]. Jewel’s got product, y’all. She writes about it and she writes about it.
But I want to ask this because you were talking a moment ago, Jewel, about the vows that you made as a child that you didn’t want to repeat. You didn’t want to drink, you didn’t want to do drugs, etc., etc. I don’t know if you ever made this vow, and it’s not like you were in control of this by yourself anyway.
But you end up being in a marriage that doesn’t work, and now you’re the single mom of a son. I don’t want to color the question any more than that, but what do you make of that? What have you taken from that? How do you process that? What, what, what, what?
Jewel: It was such a tragedy for me to lose my marriage and my family. I so desperately was just ready for peace and that happy ending. It wasn’t to be. And facing that was another thing of like I’d rather know the truth. I’d rather see truth and be in reality than hope for something that isn’t actually there.
When my son was born, I looked in his eyes and I knew I wasn’t quite the woman I wanted him to know. And if you said, “What do you want your son to take away from life? What do you hope your son’s fate has? What does he carry forward in life?” I hope he feels permission to try and keep trying and keep trying, and that’s what I felt like I had to do.
My outer life didn’t match my inner life, and that meant I had to try harder to make my outer life match my inner life. And it’s been a process I’ve been involved in over and over and over. It isn’t the funnest of processes, but I feel happy to be finally, at 40, I’m actually free.
I’m my own person. I don’t have anybody controlling me, trying to tell me to be any one thing. I actually get to decide that for myself. That’s a late time to come to it, but I’m here and I’m glad my son wanted that woman.
Tavis: No one would believe you’re 40, except you’ve just said it on public television [laugh]. Nobody looking at you would believe that.
Jewel: I mean I’m 29 [laugh].
Tavis: You’ve been on this show a couple of times before and, I mean, I’m always honored to have you come on. I learn something about you every time, but because this book has been so, again, so beautifully written, I feel like I know so much more about you now. I’m struck tonight, as I have always been, but even more so this evening, struck by your honesty, by your humility, by your authenticity.
I’m still hanging on this admission that I don’t know that other parents are willing to make, that they can look into their child’s eyes and realize at that moment that I am not the mother, I am not the father, I am not the person that I want to be. That’s a serious…
Jewel: It is serious. You have to do something about that, yeah. That’s a serious thing. I want my son to…
Tavis: I mean, it takes a level of courage, I think, to admit that. But it might take even more courage to just acknowledge that. Does that make sense?
Jewel: Mm-hmm, yeah.
Tavis: That’s a serious acknowledgement.
Jewel: It is, yeah. Luckily, I’ve had a lot of practice with it [laugh]. My life seems to give me many opportunities [laugh]. But it’s all you can do. I don’t want to waste the rest of my life. You know what I mean? I feel very excited. I said in the book, “This is the best worst time of my life.” It’s a tremendous failure, but I’m going to make good with it.
Tavis: We all fail up. We all fail up, yeah. What kind of life do you want for your son?
Jewel: I hope my son has a lot of internal permissions. You know, I hope he has the internal permission to like himself enough to say, you know, this is what I’d like today and, if I know more tomorrow, I’ll take that into account.
You have to be willing to make mistakes and it takes a lot of courage to go ahead and do that and give yourself permission to say, “I don’t quite know what I’m doing yet, but I’m going to figure it out as I go.” All of us have that feeling. I just hope he has that internal permission to say that about himself and to figure out who he wants to be.
Tavis: I get the sense talking to you that you are–and if I’m wrong, you can disabuse me of this notion. But I get the sense that you’re okay with the journey. Put another way–I don’t know. Maybe you have a different answer. I don’t know that you’d be the 30 million selling album or album selling, whatever the right order is, artist that you are if this had not been the journey that you had to navigate.
Jewel: I’m not sure. There’s a lot of the stories in my book I would have liked to avoid and I think I still would have turned out okay and, hopefully, been successful. Some of those were just really heartbreaking and excessive, it felt like [laugh]. But I don’t think happiness is a destination. Happiness is a side effect. It’s a result of how you handle your life and an attitude you take toward your life, an environment you build.
You have to build a home for happiness to exist in. And I feel like I’ve been able to do that. It’s something I learned when I was homeless. I remember Buddha had said, “Happiness doesn’t come depending on who you are or what you have. It’s what you think.“
And I had nothing left except what I thought and I really tried to put that to the test and consume my thoughts as carefully as I consumed my food, more carefully, and see if that would turn my life around, and it did. And it’s continued to prove itself over and over to me. When something’s amiss in my life, go back to my thoughts. Rethink these things, challenge my perceptions.
Tavis: I don’t know how you choose to answer this, but let me ask it anyway. For your fans, those diehard Jewel fans, and there are millions of us, and the answer may be one and the same or different. I don’t know, because you have the project, the album, “Picking Up the Pieces”, the book, “Jewel -Never Broken”. What do you hope or want the takeaway about you to be for your fans?
Jewel: The reason I shared so much in this book especially is I wanted people to know the level of pain that I endured so that they could know what you can heal from. And I haven’t suffered as much as other people, but I’ve suffered some. And I know there’s other people out there that think they’re the only ones that have. Unless you see somebody else go through it, you don’t actually know it’s possible to heal and recover.
And I really do believe in the resiliency of the human spirit. Our losses don’t have to define us except in the ways we choose. I really mean that. It’s not like a slogan. Like I really believe that. They can make us more exceptional, more deeply caring, a more compassionate people. We don’t have to be made bitter by it.
Tavis: With all the time I spent tonight talking about this book, I could do this for two or three shows because there’s just so much here to unpack. “Picking Up the Pieces”, that’s the latest album from her, latest CD. And the book which, trust me, if there are only two or three books you read this year, make this one of them.
You will not be disappointed. It’s called “Jewel – Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story”. I highly, highly, highly and even highly recommend it. That’s our show for tonight. Thanks for watching. Thank you for being here.
Jewel: Thank you.
Tavis: Thanks for having the courage to share this with us. Be sure to tune in tomorrow to see another performance from Jewel off of this new project, “Picking Up the Pieces”. That’s our show for tonight. Thanks for watching and, as always, keep the faith.
Announcer: For more information on today’s show, visit Tavis Smiley at pbs.org.
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