Jewel didn’t just write Freewheelin’ Woman — she dragged it into existence like a pioneer woman hauling a broken wagon through the desert of her subconscious. “It brought up so much insecurity and doubt,” she tells me. “I get why heroic artists did a crap-ton of drugs in middle age to develop a new sound.” Except Jewel did it sober, somehow summoning an album that pulls equally from Muscle Shoals, Southern Americana, and whatever ether “Half Life” was channeled from.
That one, by the way, is her favorite. It's about the quiet panic of being only half a person in every role you play. “You're half a wife, half a mom, half a boss,” she says. “The desperation of people trying to have it all and realizing they've been robbed of significance.” It's a song about barely holding it together while gripping a Xanax prescription and a vape pen in the grocery store parking lot. And somehow it sounds like salvation.
This is an artist who went from playing Lilith Fair to selling lullaby albums in the baby aisle of Walmart — and making more money on that than on anything else. “That album still pays my bills. I haven’t worked in four years,” she says with a bemused laugh. Jewel has always known where her audience is, and more importantly, how they need her.
She cut Freewheelin’ Woman from scratch. Not because she didn’t have songs — she has dozens for every genre — but because this one had to represent who she is now. That meant letting go of everything she thought she knew about pop structure and chasing something raw. “A chorus should come 30 seconds in. The song should be three minutes. What’s popular?” she says. “All that makes bad art.”
There are characters on the album, but they're not real people. They're Chekhovian ghosts born out of her literary brain — Flannery O'Connor meets Butch Walker. “It’s like walking into a scene,” she says. “And then you look around and go, ‘Oh shit, there's a vista around the corner.’” On “Long Way ‘Round,” she sketches what could easily be the thesis of her entire career: detours, missteps, and what it means to arrive in one piece, still unbroken.
She’s co-writing again with Steve Poltz, the guy who helped birth “You Were Meant for Me.” Their dynamic is pure chaos vs. control. “He likes to pee on a song,” she says, meaning he’ll toss in some absurd line just to mess with the mood — and she’ll have to clean it up. But he keeps her from taking it all too seriously. Which is useful, especially when you’re writing songs about stoned husbands afraid to walk into their own homes.
Musically, she’s honoring her love of soul and R&B — “I cut my teeth on that stuff,” she says — and gives a subtle nod to Bill Withers on “Grateful.” There’s another nod to Tori Amos on “Almost,” though Jewel says she didn’t realize it until fans pointed it out. “She had such a rascally great spirit,” she says of Amos. “It was perfect for the ’90s and what it took for a woman to do anything.”
That subject still hits hard. “There are no iconic female singer-songwriters like Dylan or Neil Young,” she says flatly. “You’ve got Madonna and Cher, but they’re pop stars. Joni Mitchell deserves the same gravitas. She just doesn’t sell the same tickets.” And don’t even get her started on how the industry treats women after 40. “It’s unkind,” she says. “But I’m proud to be middle-aged. I’m proud to be a mom.”
She covered Maggie Rogers’ “Alaska” just because she liked it. And yeah, the home state connection doesn’t hurt. She also went full Piaf on her Queen of Hearts EP. “That was heroic,” she says. “Those women dared me to sing. And I dared back.”
Darius Rucker and Train’s Pat Monahan show up on the record too — a little ’90s yearbook signature in musical form. “I was really blown away by Darius,” she says. “That’s not an easy song to sing. People should hear it.”
If you're wondering whether she still believes in the lyrics to “Hands” — “In the end, only kindness matters” — the answer is a hard yes. Jewel’s spent the last several years scaling a nonprofit mental health initiative, Never Broken, with tools she developed to keep herself alive. “The most profound form of activism is to heal yourself,” she says. “Everyone’s yelling at each other about what they’re doing wrong, and no one’s fixing their own shit.”
Jewel isn’t just still here. She’s thriving, writing her best songs, and building a mental health empire from scratch — just like she did her career. It’s hard. It’s lonely. But it’s also rock and roll in the most necessary way.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
