Jewel Biography

Jewel made her mark as a singer and songwriter with her winsome 1995 debut album, Pieces of You, which featured the hit songs “Who Will Save Your Soul” and “You Were Meant For Me.” The album went on to sell 12 million copies and made Jewel a sudden star.

Jewel Kilcher was raised in rural Alaska and in the early 1990s moved to southern California. Kilcher lived in a van and sang in coffeehouses, gaining a following and, eventually, a record deal for the album that turned out to be Pieces of You.

Her introspective folk-pop songs and vocal talents soon had critics comparing her to Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos, and her second album, Spirit (1998) was an immediate success. In addition to being a pop star, Jewel published A Night Without Armor in 1998, a best-selling collection of poetry, and she co-starred with Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich in the 1999 film Ride With the Devil (directed by Ang Lee).

Jewel’s early pop records include the Christmas album Joy: A Holiday Collection (1999), This Way (2001), 0304 (2003) and Goodbye Alice in Wonderland (2006). In 2008 she switched to country, and her albums in that genre include Perfectly Clear (2008), Sweet and Wild (2010) and Picking Up the Pieces (2015).

On television, Jewel has also made occasional appearances on the Discovery Channel show Alaska: The Last Frontier, which focuses on the remote and rugged lifestyle of her father, Atz Kilcher, and other members of the Kilcher clan. She is also the author of the 2016 memoir, Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story.