It's a funny thing to say about someone who's sold 30 million albums worldwide, but Jewel's biggest accomplishment might be her everyday well-being.

She's the daughter of an absentee mother and an alcoholic father, who left home at 15, and by 18, she was shoplifting and homeless and also writing songs that became an integral part of a generation's soundtrack.

Beyond music, she's devoted herself to popularizing the best practices of neuroscience and psychology for kids from circumstances a lot like her own so that they might lead lives of creativity and emotional safety.

I'm Kelly Corrigan, this is "Tell Me More," and here's my conversation with multi-platinum, freewheeling, self-taught, and self-healed Jewel.

♪ Hi.

Hi.

How are you?

How are you?

Nice to see you.

Nice to see you, too.

Thanks for having me to your home.

Yeah.

Come on in.

You had such interesting grandparents, like Grandpa Jay, who died with $2,000 in his hollow leg.

Yep.

It was, like, amazing.

But your father's parents... Yeah.

are who I think would be kind of interesting to talk about, Ruth and Yule.

They were young idealists that were born in Switzerland, and he believed Europe was very near failing.

And he believed in this so much that he talked about 40 to 60 young philosophers, artists, academics into all leaving Germany where they were living at the time.

So they sent my grandfather ahead to Alaska as a scout to look for free land in Alaska as part of the Homesteading Act.

And during that time, Hitler started to become a problem.

My grandmother, she was an aspiring opera singer and a poetess.

And so she decided to give up on those dreams to have children in a free country.

And so she got on the very last civilian ship that left Germany and made it up to Alaska.

My grandmother raised these 8 children in the middle of the wilderness.

My grandfather ended up becoming a senator.

He actually helped draft the Alaska Constitution.

And then she taught all of her kids to sing and write and play instruments.

You know, there was no electricity, no running water, nothing to eat.

It was all what you could provide for yourself.

And you grew up mostly with your dad.

Your mom left when you were 8.

Mm-hmm.

Tell me about your dad.

My dad was the one that sort of picked up where she left off.

Musically, a very great writer, a great storyteller, and he was making several albums when my mom left.

And so he gave up these dreams of becoming a more nationally-known artist to raise my brothers and I. I think a good way to describe my dad is he's really brilliant, like a wonderful, creative person.

His childhood was so traumatic that when he went to Vietnam, his body relaxed for the very first time.

That really told me about how badly things were for the children on the homestead.

So flash forward, my dad gets out of Vietnam, marries my mom, have 3 kids, my mom leaves, he takes over raising us, but he starts trauma triggering.

But nobody knew those words.

He just started having incredible crippling anxiety.

So he started to try and drink to manage that.

And that went pretty predictably.

And so he became abusive when I was about 8, and that's why I ended up moving out when I was 15.

Tell me about the day you left home.

I was going to school in Anchorage.

I had started a philosophy program that I really loved.

My mom had to move away to Seward, so I stayed behind by myself in Anchorage.

And were you just dreadfully lonely and dreadfully scared or no?

I mean, homesteader background, I guess maybe there's a toughness there.

Yeah, I was a pretty resilient kid.

I grew up singing in bars since I was 8.

Yodeling, I think.

Yes, it definitely included yodeling.

But it was 5-hour sets, lots of cover songs, a lot of my dad's originals.

And I really just sang harmony.

[Yodeling] But when I was moving out, I did know how dangerous it was.

You know, statistically, kids like me end up repeating the cycle.

The odds of it working out for me were very, very slim, and I knew that, and I took that very seriously.

I was trying to come up with a plan of why would it work out differently for me.

I had an emotional inheritance that would predispose me to abuse or addiction of some kind, and I didn't want to be a statistic.

And I also didn't want to feel like I was already programed by 15.

Where do you go to learn a new emotional language?

That was a really frightening concept.

But because I was in that philosophy class, I had been learning about nature versus nurture, and I really wondered if my nurture, my really poor nurture, would ever-- if it would obscure my ability to understand my own nature.

And so I developed a sort of system in my writing, what I called going down and in, to see if I could investigate and understand my nature separate of nurture.

And when you were singing with your dad, when you're looking around at all these adults in these bars, what's going through your head?

I really could tell people were in pain.

I could tell because I was in pain, and so I was able to really recognize this common theme.

And some people used rage and some people used alcohol.

You would see all these different ways of trying to avoid this pain.

And I really took a note of that.

And, like, I remember writing down, "Nobody outruns pain."

And then I made a promise to never drink or do drugs because I didn't think that-- I think I had a dangerous life in a way.

Being a young kid in a bar is very dangerous and moving out that young is very dangerous.

And the pain thing was interesting.

Why aren't we taught what to do with pain?

And then I remember learning about buffaloes, and buffaloes dislike water.

And so when there's a storm, they actually run toward it.

It's the quickest way is through, and they'll be wet the shortest period of time by running right into the heart of the storm.

And I just began to use writing to try and move toward the pain rather than away from it.

And you were so musical that it was just natural to marry all that music with all those words?

It came a little bit later.

When I was 16, amazingly, I got a partial scholarship to a private school called Interlochen.

I still needed a $10,000, though, to go, and I did my first fundraising show in Homer, and my entire town turned out and helped me raise this $10,000.

I showed up with a large skinning knife on my belt, which I didn't think was bad or weird.

Everybody in Alaska does that.

But I almost got kicked out my first day.

Uh-huh.

They're like, "Where are you from?"

Yeah.

And I didn't realize you still had to pay for books and you still had to pay for food.

I was so caught off guard.

So I had to get another job at school off campus to try and pay for that.

And then I wasn't allowed to stay on campus for breaks, for holiday breaks, and I couldn't afford to go to Alaska.

I would hitchhike across the country.

And so to do that, I decided to learn guitar and just make up songs as I street sang, just in an effort to try and get food money and things.

That's when songwriting happened.

Yeah.

And what was the first song that you wrote?

It was called "Save Your Soul."

Really?

Yeah.

[Playing "Save Your Soul"] ♪ People living their lives for you on TV ♪ ♪ They say they're better than you and you agree ♪ ♪ She says, "Hold my calls" ♪ ♪ From behind those cold brick walls ♪ ♪ Says, "Come here, boy, there ain't nothin' for free ♪ And then you were living out of a car and people somehow picked up on you and started making you offers.

I ended up in San Diego after I graduated.

My mom was sick.

I went to take care of her.

I worked in a coffee shop where the coffee shop owner started telling all of the baristas he was going to be doing a company calendar.

And it turned out being a nude calendar, and I turned it down.

I was like an expert at just navigating that and brushing him off.

And so he never bothered me again.

But there was a 16-year-old girl who was a runaway and she was sleeping on friends' couches.

And she had said no, but she was so afraid, and he could tell.

So we were in the back room one day and I just said-- I was like, you know, "Leave her the eff alone."

And he goes, "You're fired."

And I left just in tears.

My rent was due.

My landlord had told me if I was late in rent again, he'd have to let-- kick my mom and I out.

So we got kicked out.

We started living in our cars.

My mom ended up going back to Alaska.

And I was like, "I got this.

No problem."

But I didn't have it.

My panic attacks were getting worse.

I was becoming agoraphobic.

I was really sick.

I had bad kidneys.

I didn't have medical insurance.

I kept getting sick and missing work from new jobs.

And I almost died in an emergency room parking lot because they didn't see me because I didn't have insurance.

Luckily, a doctor had seen me get turned away and he went out and he knocked on my door and he handed me antibiotics and his card, and he saved my life.

It turns out I had sepsis.

This was just, like, the most transformative time in my life.

I was shoplifting a lot.

So I was in the dressing room shoving this dress down my pants.

I saw my reflection in the mirror and I was like, "I'm a statistic.

"I'm homeless and I'm stealing.

"I'm going to end up in jail or dead if I don't figure something out."

And I would remember this quote that said, "Happiness does not depend on who you are or what you have.

It depends on what you think."

And I wanted to see, like, maybe I really could turn my life around one thought at a time.

What was I thinking?

And so I tried to develop like a hack.

Your hands are the servants of your thought.

So I was like, "Maybe I'll just write down "everything my hands do for two weeks, and then I'll figure out what I'm thinking."

Literally just writing down, "I picked up a cup.

I opened a door."

I had no idea what I was doing.

At the end of the two weeks, I read this and I was like, "I haven't had a panic attack in two weeks."

What I'd stumbled on is what you would now call mindfulness.

I had stumbled on becoming so obsessively curious about the present moment that I forgot to worry about things that weren't happening yet.

And so I started to develop exercise after exercise after exercise to start targeting habits to start to try and really turn pain points around, like stealing.

And one of the things I did to stop stealing was I replaced it with writing.

♪ The sun shines golden ♪ ♪ And I feel like my car ♪ ♪ A little rundown, a little beat up ♪ ♪ Maybe just a little green ♪ And then I found a coffee shop that was going out of business.

Every coffee shop in town, by the way, wanted you to pay them to sing there.

Like, they were all like, "You can pay us $500 because this is a signing bed of the industry."

And I was like, I don't want to get signed.

I just want to get rent money.

So I found this place going out of business.

I was like, "Hey, if you can keep open "for like one more month, will you give me a shot "to try and bring people in here?

"And can I keep the door money and you'll keep the coffee and the food?"

And she goes, "Let's do it."

And we shook hands.

At first, two people came, and then 4 people, and then 6 people, and then 12 people.

And it grew into this kind of phenomenon where people would stand with their faces pressed up against a window to hear me through the glass, just to watch me sing.

It was the most incredible, crazy thing that I got to be a part of.

I sang the most gut-wrenching, honest songs, and I-- I got to experience the joy of disarmoring, of letting myself be seen, which was the scariest thing in the world.

And so by the end of that experience, I had now developed tools and skills by myself about how to work with panic attacks, agoraphobia.

I was telling the truth and I was being accepted.

I won the lottery as far as I was concerned.

And then labels started coming to see me, and another label and another label and another label.

And pretty soon there was an all-out bidding war.

And then you went to the library and took out a book.

Yeah.

[Laughs] That book changed your whole life.

Great book.

It's called "Everything You Need to Know About the Music Business."

I was like, "That sounds like a good one to read."

It explained how the deals are structured.

So I was offered a million dollar signing bonus as a homeless kid.

And what I had learned by reading the book was that it was a loan.

I would owe that money back through record sales.

And then I learned how all of the royalties and mechanicals are divvied up.

And I realized that if I sell the record for $13, I would only be making pennies or fractions of pennies per song or per album.

And so for me to pay back a million dollars fractions of pennies at a time seemed pretty difficult.

I didn't want to put pressure on myself unduly, and I certainly didn't want to leverage a piece of art that didn't even exist yet.

I hadn't even made a piece of art, and I was already putting basically a bounty on its head that it had to become so successful.

And then I learned that labels often drop artists if they can't repay that debt.

And I wanted a 60-year career more than I wanted a million dollars.

Like, I wanted a chance to do something I loved for a living.

Like, that was the real lottery that-- It's insane that you had this perspective at this age.

Insane.

Well, I think it might be just more agricultural.

Like, when you grow up on the land, you see hardwood trees grow slowly, and they last a really long time, and then you see softwood trees grow really quick, and they fall over.

And I was just like, I don't want to be a softwood tree.

There's no shortcuts.

Like, I only signed to that record deal on one condition, that my number-one job was to learn how to be a happy, whole human, not a human full of holes.

That's literally what I wrote down.

My number-two job was to learn how to be a musician.

And that under that, I wanted to be an artist more than famous.

And I called those my North Star decisions.

I promised I would make every decision based on that little matrix for myself.

Bob Dylan mentored you.

I was doing over 1,000 shows a year.

I was killing myself, opening for goth bands and grunge bands, getting stuff thrown at me, going into radio stations where DJs were like, "Jewel, how do you give a ... with that messed up mouth of yours?"

Oh, my god.

Yeah.

And I'd be like, you know, "I can fix my teeth.

How will you ever fix being stupid?"

I was escorted out of the radio station.

My label was like, "Jewel!"

I'm like, "Sorry."

Wrap it up.

It's very hard to leverage somebody that can figure out how to be happy homeless.

Like, you can't leverage that person.

You can't leverage me that way.

I didn't want to be leveraged.

And what I'd really learned is that every time you invest in your character, when you invest in your humanity, it's the best stock market.

It pays dividends, and it creates magic in ways that you can't anticipate.

But yes, during that, Bob Dylan asked me to tour with him.

He took a real interest in my writing.

He went over my lyrics with me.

He gave me books to read.

Wow.

He gave me music to listen to.

He really believed in me at a time when I was just absolutely losing faith.

And then Neil Young jumped in and told you something so important.

Yeah.

I was opening in Madison Square Garden, and I must have looked green.

I was walking through a common space, and he saw me and he's like, "What's the matter?

You look nervous."

And I was like, "Yeah, I am."

He goes, "Why are you nervous?"

And I was like, "Because this is Madison Square Garden, "and you're Neil Young with Crazy Horse, and they're gonna murder me out there."

And he got so serious, and you put his finger in my face, he goes, "This is just another hash house "on the road to success.

You get out there and you show them no respect."

Ha!

[Laughs] And it was them believing in me that really started... Yeah, just gave me the conviction to keep going on the first album.

I never thought I'd actually be able to make a living doing something that I love and travel around singing.

I never thought I'd be on the same stage as Neil Young.

So I want to thank you guys for being here.

And then finally the tide started to shift.

And once it started to shift, it picked up a momentum that was insane.

It took on a life of its own.

And I...

I think I went from selling 2,000 copies in two years to selling a million albums every single month for over a year.

You had such a hard road with your mom Nedra.

She was your manager for a long time.

She took 50% for her troubles.

And then at some point you woke up and realized that not only was the money you thought you had gone, but you were $3 million in debt.

Yeah.

How did you process that?

It took years.

I canceled a tour that I really needed the money on, but I knew I would have a breakdown if I did it.

And so I just chose my happiness over the money.

And I have so much to say.

It was really a beautiful process, incredibly painful.

But I learned so much.

Like, one of my favorite things I learned is that anxiety doesn't mean something's wrong with you.

It means something's right with you.

It's like a car alarm going off.

Like, why would you get mad at a car alarm?

It means there's a burglar trying to break into your car.

Your anxiety is your body's way of saying something you're thinking, feeling, or doing doesn't agree with you.

And if you pay attention to it and you invite it closer, it should make a difference in your anxiety, and it does make a difference in your anxiety.

So the level of skills that I was able to learn through that were just life changing.

And it definitely is a process.

But I have to say I'm happy and I can trust and I can love.

And I think that the best revenge is a life well lived.

I feel like I want to say that you've come to this really generous place with your dad.

But I think now, having talked to you, you would probably characterize it just as a true place, and that you're both striving for the same thing, which is to be accountable.

Yeah.

You know, I never thought I'd have a real relationship with my dad when I left.

My dad in his sixties decided to become sober.

Then he decided to figure out how to really heal.

And the amount of healing and shame that he had to work through is staggering how he did it.

I think it's so inspiring for anybody watching, you know, no matter what age you are.

My dad chose not to die not understanding how to be happier.

He and I have a very honest, truthful relationship.

My son gets to know an incredible person who's such a man's man, who's so capable of doing things in the world, but who's learned to be soft and to understand when he's sad and to be vulnerable.

It's incredible.

Like, not the ending to the story I would have ever thought, and I feel grateful.

I remember you emerging in my life.

Yeah.

And it was such a funny time for someone like you to emerge with, like, your sweet country waltz when it was grunge or Spice Girls.

Yeah, it was a weird time.

I think that grunge was about saying, I don't feel good, right?

But you can only not feel good for so long before you kill yourself.

I mean, we lost Kurt.

It's so tragic what we lost in that era, what we continue to lose.

And we don't have systems for helping people go, OK, but now what?

You know, my whole life was about solving for pain.

Music helped me with pain.

And so radio really disliked me because I was sincere and I was earnest.

But I don't think they realized how much culture was going to have to shift.

I want to live.

But now what?

What do I do differently?

And I personally think that's why my music became so successful.

And now that's really your obsession.

I mean, you've made 12 albums, so the music never stops.

And "Freewheelin' Woman" is awesome.

Ahh.

But really a huge piece of your mindshare is going towards teaching other people mindfulness and that whole umbrella of ideas and practices.

Yeah, after I got a divorce at 40, I really realized that I'd gotten a lot of things to change in my life.

From that, I had to develop a whole new set of strategies.

So I realized around 40 that I was in pain, now what?

And that the whole culture was still asking that question.

Except we all got worse.

Suicide was at an all-time high.

Historic.

Anxiety and depression, historic highs.

We're the most technologically advanced society in the history of our species, and we're killing ourselves at unprecedented rates.

We can't call this success.

Like, we just can't.

Something clearly we've missed.

And I personally think it has to do with how we solve for pain, how we solve for overwhelm.

And why is it that our own lives are producing so much anxiety?

Are there tools that work for people that don't have support systems the way I didn't have support systems?

Is that what your foundation is really all about?

Yeah.

Inspiring Children was founded 20 years ago to see if the tools that I developed could work for other people like me, where we work with kids with suicidal ideation, extreme anxiety, or just economic disadvantage.

And can you give them skillsets that make them more joyful and want to thrive and want to live?

It turns out it's very possible.

We have unprecedented numbers.

I'm so proud of these kids.

99% of our kids earn their own college scholarships.

In past years, we've had like 74% of our kids earn them into Ivy League schools.

And we're the number two tennis academy.

So I have learned you can create highly-performing humans in a very healthy way.

And so what I've been doing the last 7 years is figuring out how to get this curriculum into the workplace to work with adults more where adults are.

We have a thing at "Tell Me More" where we ask each person to shout out a Plus One, and it's somebody who's been instrumental to your work or your thinking or your well-being.

Who is your Plus One?

I think my Plus One would have to be Cheryl.

She came through our foundation.

I met her when she was 14.

She had just had a second attempt on her life.

She was very, very, very sick in the hospital.

Watching her choose to transform has been one of the most inspiring things I've ever seen.

She has learned to become so wise.

To this day, if I have a parent with a kid who's struggling, I would have them talk to Cheryl.

She's such an expert in what it is to heal.

She is in her second year at Stanford, and I just can't wait to see what she does in the world.

It's an interesting name for your foundation because when I first read it, Inspiring Children, I thought that you were doing the inspiring.

But when I'm listening to you talk about Cheryl, I'm thinking, "Oh, no, that's the descriptor of the children."

It's the descriptor of the children.

And I think when you have suicidal ideation, you think that how you feel now is forever.

You don't know the idea of emotional impermanence, that everything in physics changes.

It's the name of the game.

And that you can be inspired by life again, that you can want to live.

It's impossible to think when you're in these really dark places.

And I remember telling Cheryl, I was like, "You're going to have a day where you weep tears of joy because you're so happy to be alive."

And I remember the day she called me just weeping with joy.

She's incredible.

What else do you want to do?

I want to be able to scale these tools for adults.

I want to make happiness something that's democratizable.

Wellness is for everybody.

Learning what to do with pain is for everybody.

We shouldn't be sitting here trying to hunt down the world's best experts in any given city.

You know, this-- this information exists.

It's out there.

It works.

We need to make it more available.

OK, Jewel Kilcher, this is the "Tell Me More" speed round.

Are you ready?

Yeah.

First concert.

Bon Jovi, Hawaii, eighth grade, nosebleed seats.

The last book that blew you away.

I just read a book of love letters from Nabokov to his wife, little puzzles and all their notes back and forth.

Very inspiring and very clever.

Uh-huh.

When was the last time you cried?

Oh, my gosh.

Last night.

You did?

Yeah.

I cry all the time.

If you could say 4 words to anyone, who would you address and what would you say?

It would be to my future son if he ever is worried that he's done something that makes him feel beyond love, I would say, "I love you still."

Aw.

That's nice.

We'll save this for him.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you.

It's such a joy to be with you.

I can't thank you enough.

Likewise.

Thank you.

If you liked today's episode, you'll love our conversations with Jennifer Garner and David Byrne.

You can watch everything on pbs.org/Kelly.

To listen to every episode, go to "Kelly Corrigan Wonders" wherever you listen to podcasts.

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