Jewel has opened up about the challenges of being a woman in the music industry. (Photo: Duane Prokop/Getty Images for The Wellness Experience by Kroger)
Jewel’s history has always been that before she became a successful singer/songwriter, she lived in her car. In a new interview with Stereogum, the Who Will Save Your Soul artist explained that the reason she lived there was because she refused to have sex with her boss.
“My entire career, the bias that the media gave it, was through a really, dare I say, patriarchal lens,” said the Masked Singer winner. “You’re thinking about my origin story, right? The whole world knows I lived in my car – they think because I fought for my dream of music. This is an absolute misrepresentation of what happened.”
Jewel said the unnamed boss would not pay her in retaliation.
“I refused to be leveraged and he didn’t give me my paycheck and I couldn’t pay my rent and I started living in my car,” she said. “And then my car was stolen and I was homeless because I wouldn’t hit a boss.”
In fact, Jewel, whose album Freewheelin’ Woman is due out April 22, said she wasn’t even keen on making albums or winning Grammys at the time.
“I never even thought about being a musician. I’ve been trying to figure out how to stand up for myself and refuse to be pressured for anything or anyone,” said Jewel, whose full name is Jewel Kilcher. “It was an active resistance, it was an act of courage. It cost me a lot, but it won me myself. It earned me my humanity. I’m so proud of that decision. It was so funny to put it that way to see a cute fluffy little, ‘Aw, she fought for her dream.’ I didn’t even have a dream. It’s not what I did.”
Even after deciding on her career path, Jewel encountered a lot of sexism. She remembers that male journalists were often condescending. In 1998, MTV’s Kurt Loder appeared to mock her book of poetry and corrected her speech live on the air.
“I was so angry. He was just f***ed. What an ass to show up like that,” she said. “It was almost like feeling sorry for someone — it’s like, ‘Wow, here’s a grown man doing news for kids, on a kids’ network, for teens.’ Yes, you are bitter.”
The story goes on
Yahoo Entertainment reached out to Loder for comment.
Jewel said her negative experiences with male journalists included another asking her, “How do you do a frigging job with those frigging teeth?”
Then a disc jockey started her interview by talking about her body.
“I remember South Carolina, live on the air, ‘Hey, you may have heard me describe my next guest as a big-breasted woman from Alaska. Jewel, how are you?’ I said, ‘You must be that man with the small penis that I’ve heard so much about in South Carolina,'” Jewel recalled. “Escorted by the radio station. Such was life. Such was life.”