After a somewhat reckless youth&mdashshe grew up singing with her dad in Alaskan cowboy bars and performed on street corners for train fare during
a solo adventure across Mexico&mdashJewel landed in California to be near her mother, who was ailing with a heart condition. She found an apartment and got a job at a computer warehouse. But she lost both in rather short order after declining the amorous advances of her boss, she says. “My rent was due. I went to get my paycheck the next day, and my boss wouldn’t talk to me,” she says. “I got kicked out of the place I was living, and I didn’t have the first or last month’s rent to put a deposit down on another. I was broke. I thought I’d live in my car until I got another job and I’d get another apartment.” Then a kidney infection came along, depleting the cash she’d been saving to get off the streets. A vow to help “It was a real vicious poverty cycle,” recalls Jewel, now 34, who spent all of her money to buy antibiotics and doctor-ordered bottled drinking water. “I had to drink about a gallon a day, which I couldn’t afford. And I thought, ‘If we can’t drink clean water in America, what’s happening in the rest of the world’ I decided if I ever got in a position to help, I would. And as fate would have it, I got in a position to help.” But that position didn’t come along overnight. Even after she was “discovered” at 19, her problems didn’t vanish. Jewel, who dropped her last name when she started performing professionally, laughs when she recalls that her “instant” celebrity initially meant being jetted off for a record-company dinner in New York, only to come crashing back to the reality of her VW home. Still, she says, “I’m pretty lucky. My life’s exceeded all expectation.”
Now, she works to pass on some of her good fortune to those less fortunate.