Interlochen’s Crown Jewel: How a Northern Michigan Arts School Helped Forge a Pop Star
Plus six defining songs throughout the years
Pictured: Juel Kilcher, aka Jewel, at Interlochen Center for the Arts in the early 1990s.
In the spring of 1992, an Alaskan teenager named Juel Kilcher walked across the stage at Kresge Auditorium and graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy. Four years later, she had a top-five album on the Billboard 200. On Monday, August 5, Kilcher—now known better by her mononymous stage name, Jewel—will take the stage at Kresge once more, this time for a sold-out, co-headlining show with Melissa Etheridge.
When you put it that way, Jewel’s rise to fame and success seems like it must have been easy. In the time that many people take to get a college degree, she morphed from high-schooler to pop star, with a massive hit album, an opening slot on a Bob Dylan tour, and a few songs up her sleeve that you have almost certainly heard. In the telling of her own story, though, Kilcher is insistent that while some of it was luck, none of it was easy.
The Road to Interlochen
“I grew up in Alaska, and I moved out when I was 15,” Kilcher tells Northern Express. “To support myself and pay rent, I got a couple jobs, one of which was cleaning buildings.”
One of those buildings happened to house a dance studio, and that dance studio happened to be hosting a two-week workshop taught by a renowned instructor from out-of-state. “I asked him, if I cleaned his studio for free, would he let me attend his two-week workshop, which he did.”
The bargain proved a fateful one. While Kilcher didn’t impress the teacher with her graceful steps—“I was a terrible dancer,” she says, laughing—she did impress with her voice.
“He found that I was a good singer, and he told me that he was a teacher at a school called Interlochen Arts Academy, and he felt like I should apply for a scholarship,” she says. “He helped me get the paperwork done, and I got a $5,000 scholarship.”
Even with a scholarship, Kilcher needed to come up with another $10,000 to cover the actual tuition cost at Interlochen, a task she says “seemed impossible” to her at the time. But a group of six local women caught wind of her story and took her under their wing, helping her schedule a fundraiser and go around to businesses seeking donation items that she could auction off.
It worked: While Kilcher had no original songs yet—“It was all Cole Porter covers,” she says of her fundraiser setlist—her hometown still came out to support her, and she ended up raising enough money to book her spot at Interlochen.
She still didn’t have enough money for the full trip from Homer, Alaska, to Interlochen, Michigan. So, rather than flying to Traverse City, she flew to Detroit and then hitchhiked the 270 miles north. When she finally arrived at her new boarding school to begin her junior year of high school, she was greeted by an immediate culture shock.
“I remember walking onto campus, and all the other kids were staring and pointing at me,” she says. “I got to my dorm building and the woman there tells me, ‘You have to go to the dean’s office.’ So I did, and he tells me, ‘Give me the knife.’ Because I had a really large skinning knife on my belt—which everybody does in Alaska! And I’d wanted to keep it with me, especially because I knew I’d be hitchhiking.”
An Arts Omnivore
Another element of culture shock: Kilcher hadn’t realized her tuition payment wouldn’t cover things like food and books. With no cash in her pocket, she asked the dean to point her toward opportunities to make money on campus.
“One of the things I did—and it didn’t pay a ton of money—was I started modeling for the sculpture class,” she says. “And I was so enamored with the classes that I started asking the teacher all these questions from the podium. After a few classes, the instructor was like, ‘You need to get off the podium and you need to take sculpture.’”
Kilcher had come to Interlochen as a classical voice major, but she was so fascinated by all the opportunities around her—and so certain she wouldn’t be able to afford a second year at the expensive fine arts boarding school—that she didn’t just take sculpture, but became the first double-major/double-minor student in Interlochen history.
“I took on a double major in voice and visual art, and then I ended up minoring in dance and acting,” she says. “The dean called me to his office again and he said, ‘You are doing too much. You cannot do all of this.’ But I told him: ‘This might be my only chance to have this type of education. Please don’t make me stop.’”
The dean relented, though it turned out Kilcher needn’t have worried about her Interlochen fairytale coming to an end after a single year. She ultimately received a full scholarship to come back as a senior.
A Star Is Born
Even with scholarships, Kilcher’s relative poverty meant she had a decidedly different high school experience than her classmates. For instance, when Kilcher’s friends would fly home for school breaks, she’d hatch alternate plans for those weeks when she wasn’t allowed to stay on campus but couldn’t afford to go home.
“We had a two-week spring break, and I decided that I would spend it hitchhiking across the country and going to Mexico,” Kilcher says. Her strategy? Raise money for Greyhound and Amtrak tickets by busking on city streets and scraping together enough tips to make it to the next city. Armed with an acoustic guitar and the four chords a classmate had taught her how to play, she embarked upon her odyssey.
“It was still too hard for me to learn other people’s songs at that point,” she says. “But since I’d been writing poetry my whole life, and singing my whole life—and since I’d grown up bar singing with my dad, and he’d taught me how to improvise so we could make up lyrics about people who weren’t listening to us—I figured I could just improvise lyrics about people as they walked by on the street. By doing that, I was able to earn my way across the country. And by the time I came back to Interlochen at the end of two weeks, I had my first original song.”
That song was “Who Will Save Your Soul,” the opening track and first single from Pieces of You, the debut album Kilcher released in February 1995 under the stage name Jewel. That album would eventually go on to sell more than 12 million copies in the United States alone, making Jewel a household name. Before she could get to that point, though, she had to graduate high school—and go through perhaps the hardest part of her entire story.
The Crucible
“After graduation, I went to Boulder to live with a roommate that I had met Interlochen, and after that, I went to San Diego, where my mom was sick,” Kilcher says. “For years, I didn’t have any jobs related to music. I was just working as a hostess at a restaurant and then answering phones at a computer warehouse. One of my bosses propositioned me, and when I wouldn’t have sex with him, he refused to give me my paycheck. Then I started living in my car because I couldn’t pay my rent, and I became homeless for a year.”
Then, her challenges doubled. “I had really bad panic attacks and agoraphobia. My car that I was living in got stolen. I almost died of a kidney infection in an emergency room parking lot, because they wouldn’t see me because I didn’t have insurance. Eventually, I realized I was going to die if I didn’t change my life.”
Kilcher did two things to make that change. The first was to develop behavioral health tools that she says helped her navigate her panic attacks and get back to a more positive, empowered mindset. The second was to start making music again.
“I found a coffee shop in San Diego that was going out of business, and I said, ‘Can you keep your doors open for one month and give me a shot? And if I bring people in, I want to keep the door money,’” Kilcher says. “The owner agreed, and I started singing every Thursday night, doing these five-hour shows of original material. And four people became 12, became 20, became 50. And then all of a sudden, record label folks were coming in.”
The buzz around Jewel and her confessional singer-songwriter songs was such that the still-homeless teenager ended up the subject of a major label bidding war. One offer even included a million-dollar signing bonus—the kind of money that could have changed Kilcher’s life overnight.
She turned it down.
“I went to the library and read a book about the music business, and it taught me how recording contracts are structured,” Kilcher says. “I learned that this ‘bonus’ was not just a gift; it was an advance that I would have to recoup in album sales. I did the math and realized how many albums I would have to sell to pay that back, and it was astronomical. So, I turned down the bonus, and instead I took the biggest back-end any artist had been awarded up to that point, and I bought my art some freedom to fail. And that ended up being a good choice, because my album did fail for quite a while.”
Pieces of You came out on Atlantic Records in 1995 and failed to chart or generate much attention at all for its first year. But a tour stint opening for Bob Dylan and some slow-burn radio attention for “Who Will Save Your Soul” eventually gave the album a second life.
A 1997 re-release turned Pieces of You into one of the preeminent blockbuster albums of the 1990s, despite its bare, mostly unproduced voice-and-acoustic-guitar arrangements. “Who Will Save Your Soul” peaked at No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100; the follow-up single, “You Were Meant for Me,” made it all the way to No. 2.
Homecoming
Kilcher will bring those songs and a career’s worth of others to the stage at Kresge on August 5, marking only her second return to Interlochen since she graduated and her first in almost 20 years. She’s excited to come back to a place that ignited so much of her artistic passion—and that once felt like home.
“I have fond memories of sneaking into Kresge at dusk, and sitting cross-legged on the stage, just singing and refining ‘Who Will Save Your Soul,’” she says.
“Interlochen is just such a special place. I’ll never forget how the dean kept finding ways to make things work for me, or how the teachers just helped me learn to level up there. Even though I didn’t have much of a dream at the time that I could do this professionally, just being around the kids that were so dedicated, it was all so inspiring. I’m really looking forward to coming back.”
Six Defining Songs
At this point, Jewel’s career spans 13 albums and nearly 30 years. Where should you start if you only know the singer-songwriter’s two most famous songs? Here are six tracks to get you started.
1. “Foolish Games,” from Pieces of You (1995)
The third hit from Jewel’s debut album, “Foolish Games” has a big, dramatic chorus that gets even extra oomph in a poppier version re-recorded for the soundtrack of 1997’s Batman & Robin.
2. “Standing Still,” from This Way (2001)
Jewel made a pivot to country music on the 2008 album Perfectly Clear, but she had already hinted at that direction on this big, yearning hit single from 2001. Jewel wrote the song about her experience in the music business, and about how the touring lifestyle “can really cause your emotional life to stand still.”
3. “2 Become 1,” from 0304 (2003)
The purest pop album in the Jewel discography is 0304, which spawned the mall-pop smash “Intuition.” Where that song was a clear departure from Jewel’s folk roots, “2 Become 1” pulls off more of a balancing act, dressing up Jewel’s trademark scene-setting songwriting with shimmering pop production.
4. “Till It Feels Like Cheating,” from Perfectly Clear (2008)
Speaking of the country pivot, this track shows off just how well-suited Jewel’s voice is to Nashville twang. She penned the song with legendary country songwriter Liz Rose, a master best known for her work on Taylor Swift songs like “Tim McGraw,” “You Belong with Me,” and “All Too Well.”
5. “Love Used to Be,” from Picking Up the Pieces (2015)
Picking Up the Pieces was hailed upon its release for returning Jewel to the sparse acoustic folk sound of her debut, with the title even gesturing back to Pieces of You. Sure enough, “Love Used to Be,” the album’s meditative opening track, puts the spotlight back on the things that made Jewel famous in the first place: the voice and the poetry.
6. “No More Tears,” from Freewheelin’ Woman (2022)
Jewel’s newest album, Freewheelin’ Woman, was largely inspired by the music recorded at Alabama’s legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, where artists like Aretha Franklin, the Staple Singers, and Joe Cocker made records famous for their swampy, soulful R&B sound. That sound is all over “No More Tears,” a rousing gospel-tinged duet with Darius Rucker —another recent Kresge Auditorium headliner!