It seems Jewel has turned pain into art on her new album and predicts that a lot of songs will be blamed on her now ex-husband Ty Murray, and some songs are written about him. She is clearly fully aware of both her own star-power and the way that fans like to read into the lyrics, as well as their perchance to hinge onto a scandal. While the divorce was announced a year ago on sites The Daily Mail and others, it appears that everyone is still looking for a juicy tidbit.
Jewel claims that while some of the cuts on the fourteen track album Picking Up The Pieces were inspired by Murray, even more were written prior to their marriage, many as far back as fifteen years ago! The couple spent a total of sixteen years together and she claims that track "Everything Breaks" was written in the first year of their relationship, when the couple was still relatively new considering the longevity of their time together.
She told Billboard, "A lot of people will think this is a break-up record. And it is in a lot of ways. I wrote some of it going through a divorce. Though I wrote 'Everything Breaks' 15 years ago, I felt everything I was going through when I sang it. But, a lot of them aren't written about him... but some of them are."
While perhaps not all of the lyrics were specifically about Murray, it is an emotion-riddled album with standout cuts being "Carnivore" and "It Doesn't Hurt Right Now," a duet with Rodney Crowell. It's clear from the music that as she said, Jewel was definitely in pain and turned it into art as any good singer-songwriter would.
On that hurt she said, "There's things I let go of that I feel compromised me. That was an intense and personal journey that lived itself out in the writing of the record and I learned to do this archaeological dig and peel away the things that I don't feel added to me and might have covered up a light of mine that I burned brighter in some aspects."
Burning the candle at both ends is never a good way to go, but it's great to let your light shine as you move on, which is what Jewel has done on Picking Up The Pieces. The album is out and available for purchase now.
