Jewel Kilcher

[no audio] [no audio] - How the artist Jewel will save your soul, this week on "Firing Line."

♪ Who will save your souls ♪ ♪ When it comes to the flowers ♪ - [Margaret] She was just 21 years old when she released her 1995 debut album, "Pieces of You," that made her a household name.

[Jewel yodeling and laughing] Growing up in Alaska, she was Jewel Kilcher, a girl who first performed on stage at five with her father.

Then as a teenager, had enough of his physical abuse and moved out.

- I had a choice of living in a cabin with somebody that wasn't very kind to me, or just living in a cabin.

- [Margaret] She suffered from panic attacks and became homeless, but her trauma also became the inspiration for some of her most famous lyrics.

- I used writing as a survival tool.

It was my coping mechanism.

And the the first song I wrote was me struggling with the concepts that I cared the most about.

Who will save my soul if I won't save my own?

♪ If you won't save your own ♪ - [Margaret] The four-time Grammy nominated artist who has sold more than 30 million records is now an advocate for mental health.

- Hi everybody, I am Jewel.

- [Margaret] And the force behind a virtual reality platform to promote mindfulness.

- It dawned on me one day when I was about nine.

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

Everyone's in pain and nobody's talking about it.

[Jewel wailing] - [Margaret] So who will save your soul if you won't save your own?

[Jewel wailing] What does Jewel say now?

- [Announcer] Firing line with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Fairweather Foundation, the Tepper Foundation, the Asness Family Foundation, Charles R Schwab, and by the Rosalind P Walter Foundation, and Damon Button.

- Jewel Kilcher, welcome to "Firing Line."

- Thank you.

- You performed in public for the first time when you were five years old.

You were a yodeler, and you performed with your father and your family in hotels in Anchorage, Alaska.

40 years later, you've sold more than 30 million records worldwide.

And I wonder if you could give your five-year-old self advice, one piece of advice, what would you tell her?

- My five-year-old self.

I think I might say that the most heroic attribute is steadfastness and curiosity.

- Why did she need to hear that?

- Growing up in the household I grew up, and like many of us do, we think we have to be more or extra, something other than what we are.

And it's very hard to trust that you have an innate ability, and that some of the things you hold innately are actually the best tools you have to navigate life.

I was naturally curious.

I was naturally steadfast.

And if I had known that I could rely on those two things like the bones in a body, if I could relax into those things, knowing those would carry me, it would've saved me a lot of energy on a lot of stuff I spent my time trying to be or trying to do.

It just would've saved me a lot of energy and effort.

[chuckling] - You didn't have anything to nurture your natural curiosity?

- You know, I don't think curiosity or steadfastness are considered very sexy attributes in the world, and I often think the things that really help us through our life are much more humble than the things that get touted in culture.

- Like what?

- A motto that served me well in my life was hardwood grows slowly.

Not a very sexy life motto, but growing up in nature I knew that softwood grew quickly and fell over, and these hard trees took quite a long time, but they lasted forever.

And so for me, that was a role model of what type of career I wanted to be or to have.

It was what kind of woman I wanted to be, that my root system were my values, and that the more I could identify and be very clear about what my values were, if I acted in accordance to those values every day, I would grow.

I would grow into the shape that I wanted to be.

And that fruit is a phenomenon that takes care of itself.

And I would say that the fruit in my life was a magical side effect of being very loyal to growth.

- You just mentioned the kind of woman you wanted to be, and I'm so struck that you spent much of your childhood in your family's homestead in Alaska.

It lacked plumbing, many modern conveniences, but you credit much of your success with the pioneer spirit of the women in Alaska from whom you learned you were not part of a weaker sex.

How did that lesson serve you?

- I didn't know what a gift it was to have been raised how I was raised.

The land demands things of you, and Alaska demands things of you, and you either find a way to survive and live or you perish.

And so it's very clear, it's very practical, it's very pragmatic.

And so I was raised by a very practical, pragmatic culture and family that also had a very philosophical bent.

And so I kind of had these two sides that really served me and again, helped me know what was real in life.

The men and women in Alaska, there aren't the gender roles.

At least how I was raised, whatever needed to be done you did, and you were expected to figure it out no matter what.

You just had to figure it out.

And so that gave me a resourcefulness, a reliance, a sort of natural trust in my own ability not to know what I was doing, but to know that I could figure it out if I applied myself.

- What about the pioneering female spirit served you?

- I grew up with women and aunts that shoed their own horses, that fell their own trees, that were incredibly adroit with chainsaws, incredibly diverse, independent, smart, charismatic women that were raised by my grandmother, who was, I think, one of the first women in my life to really denote that she wanted freedom.

She wanted liberty as a woman to experience life how she wanted it.

And her struggle was of a generation where that was very uncommon.

- So how did that serve you in your career?

- I never, ever once thought I was less than or less intelligent because I had ovaries.

It was not part of my life.

It was ridiculous to think that.

And so when I came to the states and I saw women weren't taught, women weren't taught how to change tires, women weren't taught how to do things, you're at a real disservice.

Suddenly you need other people to do things for you.

It's the illiteracy of common sense.

It's, it's the literacy of practicality.

And again, when you know you can do things when you know you can figure them out, it's hard to leverage a person like that.

- You were describing your family as having a philosophical bent.

What was that?

- My grandfather came from, they were born in Switzerland, my grandparents, they were living in Germany, late 20s, early 30s, and he had been studying in Geneva.

He was studying the rise and falls of civilizations.

And he had a theory that when a population reached a certain index, it would fail.

He believed this so much that he talked a bunch of other artists and philosophers into leaving Europe, convinced that somehow Europe was on the edge of some kind of doom.

So everybody agreed for two years to study medicine, canning, how to live off the land, and to go to Alaska, where they were giving free land as part of the Homesteading Act.

So they all followed this very enigmatic, charismatic, philosophical young man to Alaska.

And that's how my family ended up there.

So that kind of philosophical bent, my family was well read.

We were a bunch of hillbillies in Alaska, but that read a lot of books, and so had this balance, and that's kind of an uncommon blend I found out later.

- Your parents divorced when you were eight years old.

Your life changed.

You write in your autobiography, "Never Broken," how your father's abuse impacted you greatly.

You write at one time his physical abuse had you believing you might not survive it in one episode.

But as an adult you also write about how you've developed a loving, nurturing full circle relationship with your father.

How did you get to a place where you were able to forgive him and start anew?

- I left home when I was 15 because I had a choice of living in a cabin with somebody that wasn't very kind to me or just living in a cabin.

So I chose just living in a cabin and it meant I had to pay rent and it meant I would be on my own.

And so I did take that very seriously.

I wasn't honestly concerned about my relationship with my dad because I felt like I had my work cut out for me surviving.

Statistically, kids who move out on their own at that age don't do well.

They end up repeating the cycle.

And so it would've been futile for me to try and leave a home to get away from a bad situation to do no better.

So I needed to have a plan of why would it work out better for me if I moved out?

That's a real job.

That's a real problem.

That's a real dilemma.

- You knew that at 15?

- I did.

Yeah, I don't know why, but I did know that as much as I had a genetic inheritance that gave me a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease.

Abuse went back generationally.

My dad was horribly abused.

I'm gonna only assume my grandfather had been.

And so I realized that actually I had to learn a new emotional language.

And that was exciting to me.

That felt like a really clear cut ambition, a real clear cut job that I could kind of try to make some plans around and experiment with.

And that took all my energy.

I'm gonna say something that might be a little radical about forgiveness.

I think it's kind of a man-made concept.

I don't see forgiveness in nature, and I use nature as my role model.

I don't think it had anything to do with healing.

Letting go of resentment, letting go of anger, those have a lot to do with healing.

And for me, that became where I found the most use in my focus and my energetic energy of where am I gonna invest my emotional energy was letting go of that.

My dad was his own human.

He was gonna live his own life.

I was now my own human and I had to figure out how to live my life.

And the best, quote unquote, revenge is a life well lived.

I wanted to understand if happiness was a learnable skill, if it was a teachable skill.

And that inspired me, that excited me to live.

Whereas being angry or resentful did not inspire me to live.

- Music was passed down in your family from generation to generation.

You write quote, "Songs are my history, the story of us.

Where there was pain in our family there was also a song not far behind, and healing."

I've heard you describe music as a mindfulness tool.

Tell me more about that.

- Music was a huge part of my family's life, art was.

We were raised without a television and so was my father.

And so being taught to sing, to play instruments, was a lot of how we entertained ourselves and related as a family.

My dad wrote a book, and I think a line in it was, "I was given the illness, but I was also given the cure."

And that has a lot to do with the fact that we were raised with creativity, and creativity is very healing.

We were also raised in the raw, beautiful, wild land, and it is incredibly healing.

People often wonder about my dad and I's relationship.

How did you heal?

I really think it's because I chose to heal.

I chose to learn how to be the best version of myself, to let go of anger and resentment, irrelevant of what my family was doing.

And my dad in his 60s got sober and decided to do that for himself.

And so we got to meet as two healed people.

And that's a gift I never thought I would be given.

My son gets to know an incredible man, and so that's been a real gift.

But I think it was because we both just chose to heal.

- Which brings me to your first full song you wrote, which is, "Who Will Save Your Soul."

♪ Who save your souls ♪ ♪ When it comes to the flowers now ♪ ♪ Who will save your souls ♪ ♪ After those lies that you told, boy ♪ - You wrote this well backpacking through Mexico on spring break in your junior year of high school, and you describe feeling that the magic just happened.

The song and the lyrics started flowing from you.

Your songs draw deeply on these personal experiences from being homeless, "Hands," forgiving your father, "My Father's Daughter."

What is it like to perform in front of and to connect with millions of people, these deeply personal lived experiences?

- My life was a desperate struggle to be happy.

And kids like me aren't taught.

I wasn't taught how to be happy.

It wasn't taught in my household.

It wasn't taught in my dad's household.

So what about kids like me?

What happens to kids like me?

You have two choices.

You decide to quit, and you take your life.

Or you decide to do something different today than you did yesterday and see if there's a result that works.

And I can't tell you why in my life I chose the latter.

It has been the best decision over and over and over in my life.

I don't know why I was so stubbornly insistent that I would not leave this planet until I figured out how to be happy.

It's the best commitment I made to myself.

And I'm really proud to be a 49-year-old woman and to say I've never let that commitment to myself down.

I have never been waylaid by fame or power.

The singularly most important thing in life is, are we functioning and happy?

And that's what I was obsessed with.

And so, you mentioned my parents got divorced.

My mom left.

My dad became abusive as eight.

My dad became an alcoholic.

I was suddenly in a lot of pain.

Now I was bar singing with my dad, five-hour sets in bars.

I was watching people in pain.

And it dawned on me one day when I was about nine, why aren't we taught what to do with pain?

Everyone's in pain and nobody's talking about it.

And I was seeing people do drugs, heroin, drinking, sex addiction, volatility, anger, in bars, and nobody was taught what to do with it.

And so for me, that became the singular focus of my life.

That was a major question that I posed myself, I need to learn what to do with pain.

And when I wrote, it helped me process pain.

I just noticed it took the edge off.

It's very noticeable to me.

When I wrote in my diary I just felt a little less pain.

And so I kept trying to move toward the things that made me feel better.

I tried to move away from the things that made me feel worse, which sounds so simple, but disciplining yourself to do that is a lot of work.

And when I learned that the buffalo was the only animal that moved into the heart of a storm because the quickest way was through, I remember writing that in my book.

The quickest way is through.

And writing took me to my pain, it brought me closer to it.

It brought me in relationship to it.

And so I used writing as a survival tool.

It was my coping mechanism.

It's the thing that kept me grounded on the earth.

I never thought it would be a job.

And the the first song I wrote was me struggling with the concepts that I care the most about.

Who will save my soul if I won't save my own?

Why are we being hypocritical?

Why are we giving this job to other people and taking no responsibility for our own happiness?

And can I take that amount of responsibility on myself with no excuses as to why I shouldn't be happy?

Because there's lots of excuses of why I shouldn't be happy, but I'm the only one that suffers.

So am I willing to be responsible for it?

- You have struggled with mental health throughout your life, throughout your childhood.

And you only started formally engaging with therapy in 2015 when you began writing your book.

Could you have used formal therapy sooner?

- I like therapy.

I don't think therapy is readily enough available to enough people.

And so when I was 15, I didn't have access to therapists, I didn't have access to support systems.

And so I wanted to find systems that still worked.

And so I began developing behavioral tools, what today would be called behavioral tools, for myself.

And I knew they worked.

I saw my life change.

I began to have a change in my panic attacks, in my agoraphobia, in my shoplifting.

And so each time I created behavioral exercises that I could practice every day, practice, practice, practice.

And so about 22 years ago I wanted to see if they would work for other kids like me that don't have access to therapy.

There's so many people that don't have access to therapy.

So that's been my life's mission.

That's what I started doing at quite a young age.

I did go to therapy when my husband and I were going through a divorce.

I think it was very helpful for the both of us.

I don't currently go to therapy again, not 'cause I'm in it.

I just have developed systems and support groups that really work for me.

- What has it been like to speak so publicly about mental health and about your journey with mental health?

- I don't find talking about mental health hard, I never have.

My music's always been really vulnerable.

People have always asked, how do you share such personal things?

It's never seemed very difficult to me.

For me, the commitment started when I was 18.

I was homeless.

I was just about to start singing in a coffee shop, and I was very lonely.

And I realized I deserved to be, 'cause I didn't tell anybody the truth.

That's very isolating.

It's in the guise of keeping yourself safe, which I understand why I did it, but it no longer was keeping me safe.

It was keeping me from connecting.

And we actually need connection.

And most of our coping mechanisms keep us isolated.

They don't help us connect.

And so we die within this armor of safety and isolation.

And it was enough.

And so I decided to sing very honestly, to write very honestly, and I was rewarded for it.

I stepped on stage and people cried, and I cried and nobody rejected me.

They just said, I didn't know other people felt that way.

And the truth is, there's only so many human emotions and we feel all of them.

We all feel rejected, we all feel isolated.

We all feel like we're not good enough.

We all strive to be more connected.

There's nothing novel, or you know, different or unique about anything I'm saying.

And so the fact that we don't talk about mental health is ridiculous to me, because we talk about hygiene.

I'm not embarrassed to tell you I floss.

So why am I embarrassed to say I'm sad, and I'm so sad I'm starting to get worried about it, because it's not leaving?

What do I do about it?

- Last fall, you launched Innerworld, a virtual reality mental health platform.

How does Innerworld work?

- Innerworld is a virtual community.

It's like playing a video game.

You can do it in headsets or not.

And you come in, there's a live guide 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It's a safe environment.

There are not trolls.

There are not negative people.

There's nothing, no dangerous people are allowed in.

We have many systems we've built in place for that.

Our guide is not a therapist, so this is not one-on-one therapy.

This is taking cognitive and dialectical behavioral tools in group settings where the connection alone is very healing.

And you are also now gonna be given tools to to train with.

And for me it's about teaching skills, being faithful to skill-based, and then tracking outcomes and making sure what we're doing is working.

And I'm really proud of our results.

- We've recently learned about the death of Tina Turner, who like you, suffered physical abuse from her husband, Ike Turner.

What is your reaction to her passing?

- Tina represented courage, the journey towards self-realization, towards self liberation, independence.

She was such a trendsetter.

We all know Mick Jagger stole all her moves.

He'll tell you.

What an icon that also moved toward healing and beauty.

- Did she influence you in her personal journey?

- Absolutely.

I didn't know a lot about her healing journey until much later.

But her ability to own her femininity and her sexuality at all of her ages, it's uncommon in our business.

You see women keep trying to be younger, where she just embraced with such a authenticity and a boldness who she was at every phase of her life.

- This program, "Firing Line," is actually a renewal of a program that aired for 33 years.

In 1980 in the original "Firing Line" with William F. Buckley, Jr., Buckley interviewed jazz pianist Billy Taylor about the art of making jazz.

Take a look at this clip.

- Jazz is a way of playing, and it deals with extemporaneous compositions, creating something extemporaneously on a harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic level as the mood comes to you.

But you have to know the language, so you have to have to be basically instilled with the language.

- You say that improvisation is a key part of your process.

How have other forms of music influenced your creative process?

- I find there's two types of musicians, and really two types of people.

People that clinging to a game plan, cling to kind of having a perfect strategy, and they'll be very loyal to that strategy.

And then there's people that don't like to have a strategy, that feel hindered by it that want to know, like he said, the mechanical parts, where you are, the language of it, but then want to invent every time.

I'm of the latter.

I like to invent every time.

I don't wanna do the same thing every time.

I like to sing with a lot of courage.

I like bands with a lot of courage that are willing to abandon, because I think you can only plan to be good.

I think you have to let go of a plan to be great.

And you're not guaranteed great.

You just get to risk it all in the pursuit of great.

And so for me, that's why I've never particularly liked doing the same thing twice.

It's why I've never stuck to a genre.

Things that I'm sure really annoy people about me.

But this is about me, it's my music.

And so for me, I have to be learning.

I like what David Bowie said is, "I wanna be at the very very tippy of my toes, almost about to drown."

That's my sweet spot.

- Your most recent album, "Freewheelin' Woman," was released last year.

You have already had a much longer career than many artists who emerged in the 90s.

You've released 13 albums, written bestselling books, started companies, appeared on television programs.

What is next for you in your creative journey?

- I think the thing that I started out with of, I actually almost didn't sign my record deal when I got discovered, because I knew with my emotional baggage that if I ever got famous, that's a real recipe for being a statistic, for becoming a drug addict, for maybe not surviving.

A lot of my counterparts in the 90s didn't survive.

So the only reason I signed my record deal was because I made myself a promise that my number one job would be to learn about happiness.

I actually wrote in my book, "I want to be a happy whole human, not a human full of holes."

And that I needed to find a way to fill the holes I had not with applause and not with drugs, and that I had to have metrics and a real plan around that.

And that my number two job was to learn how to be a musician.

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

And the great privilege for me in my life has been taking huge years between records, which hurt my fame, which hurt my career, but built my happiness, because I had a dramatic life.

I had crazy stuff happen and I had to figure out how to heal.

I didn't have to figure out how to be more rich or more famous, that would take care of itself.

And so again, just that steadfastness to that commitment as I look back and talking to that five-year-old, that's what saved me, and I never would've known that in the beginning.

- Jewel Kilcher, thank you for joining me on "Firing Line."

- Thank you.

[light music] - [Announcer] "Firing Line," with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Fairweather Foundation, the Tepper Foundation, the Asness Family Foundation, Charles R Schwab, and by the Rosalind P Walter Foundation, and Damon Button.

[light instrumental music] [light instrumental music continues] [soft music] [soft music] - [Announcer] You're watching PBS.