Known for ‘90s pop classic hits such as “Who Will Save Your Soul” and “Foolish”, Jewel Kilcher is one of those artists who is very hard to forget.
However, the success that she’s achieved through her music and iconic voice is just one of the many things we care about when it comes to her. Her tough childhood experiences tumultuous personal life, and mental health struggles, are some of the things she’s dealt with and make her life story all the more inspiring.
So how was Jewel’s childhood and what’s her story with abuse? Does she have a good relationship with her family now? What about her rise to fame, and the struggles that came with it? Keep with us to find out!
Her Beginnings
Jewel Kilcher was born on 23 May 1974 in Utah, USA, the daughter of Atz Kilcher and Lenedra Carroll, and granddaughter of Yule F. Kilcher, a Swiss pioneer in homesteading in Alaska, to where Jewel’s parents moved the family sometime in the late 1970s.
Despite being raised Mormons, Jewel and her two brothers Shane and Atz Lee stopped attending church following their parents’ divorce in the early 1980s. Jewel’s mom Lenera moved away from Anchorage, Alaska, and the children stayed with their father, who according to Jewel, would indulge himself with lots of alcohol.
Jewel’s family situation wasn’t the best, not only because of the physical violence the children were subjected to by their father, but also because of the precarious conditions of their Alaska home, as their homestead didn’t have plumbing or any modern services.
Despite the negative conditions of her upbringing, Jewel found herself developing her music skills by performing alongside her father at taverns in Alaska, a period that strengthened not only her yodeling skills, but also her perception of life and human relationships.
At 15 years of age, Jewel gained a scholarship to the Michigan-based Interlochen Arts Academy to study singing and music. Local people collected funds to help her afford her first year at Interlochen.
Getting Away From Home
While getting a scholarship was a blessing, there was much more to Jewel’s departure from home than just her desire to study music. As she confessed in a 2015 interview, the years after her mother’s departure were spent dealing with a lot of ‘rage’ and ‘yelling’ from her father Atz, whose drinking coping mechanism was also caused by his post-traumatic stress disorder – PTSD – from his service in the Vietnam war.
Later in 2024, Jewel revealed that she had been subjected to sexual harassment from a very early age, during her performances at taverns. The situation became unbearable for Jewel, leaving her no option but to get away from home to live in a cabin by herself at 15 years old. Though it’s known that she worked at a dance studio before getting her scholarship, it’s been revealed that shoplifting was her way of getting food too.
Fast forward to the early 1990s, Jewel was freshly matriculated from Interlochen and moved to San Diego, where she got several small jobs to survive while trying to find an opportunity for her music. Things weren’t quite as easy though, as she was left homeless after going through several tough times, such as suffering sexual harassment and having her belongings and car-turned-home stolen. Around that time she encountered her mother, who eventually became her manager.
Recovering From The Abuse
While Jewel Kilcher’s childhood story is very dramatic due to the trauma she overcame, she took her due time to work towards forgiveness and reconciliation with her father.
As she revealed in an interview with People in 2020, her father Atz’s abusive habits resulted not only from his PTSD, but also from his troubled childhood. While taking to excessive drinking wasn’t the best way he had to deal with his issues, Jewel also affirms that those habits formed part of an ‘emotional inheritance’ that was passed down to her father from his own father, who was abusive as well.
Every tough moment that she endured under her father’s violent behavior, decided Jewel to get away from home with the goal of not repeating those habits, so stopping the chain of violence that was running through her family’s generations. Though it took her a long time to forgive her father, Jewel learned to deal with her emotions through meditation, during the tough times living in San Diego as a homeless person.
Those emotional tools served her in the long run, but it also helped that years later her father Atz became sober. That was the first step for the pair to fix their relationship, which Jewel describes as ‘really authentic’ and ‘great’ these days.
Rise to Fame & Struggles
While Jewel fixed her relationship with her father, the same can’t be said about her mother Lenedra Carroll. Everything goes back to the 1990s, when Jewel’s rise to stardom came with working with Lenedra, who became her manager.
Just as Jewel’s career accelerated, and her songs gained top positions in the mainstream charts in he late 1990s and early 2000s, something bad was happening to the money that was entering her account. According to Jewel, she was 34 years old when she found out that Lenedra had embezzled over $100 million during the time she managed her career.
Though the details about how everything went down are unclear, Jewel revealed to People that Lenedra had left her with $3 million in debt, and the uncertainty of what was going to happen to her from then on. On top of that, her mother’s betrayal also opened Jewel’s eyes regarding her parents’ separation, affirming that her father Atz had done the ‘right thing’ by taking her and her siblings away from their mother, as Lenedra ‘hadn’t wanted to be a mother’.
According to Jewel, her mother had fed her lies about her upbringing, leaving her in a shocked state after discovering that everything she’d believed about her family until then had been ‘fiction’.
As far as it’s known, Jewel and her mother hadn’t been in contact for several years following their bad rapport. Nonetheless, the singer has found many positive ways to cope with the bad things that have happened to her, also building a beautiful family and a career by herself.
What’s Jewel Doing Now?
Despite the bad experiences that the singer has gone through, Jewel has also found many positive ways to cope, such as building a beautiful family and a career by herself, which slowly but surely, she’s has cemented as both a singer and songwriter. Following the strong reaction she caused in the late 1990s and early 2000s with her debut album “Pieces of You” and her Sophomore “Spirit”, she continued releasing very successful and sales-certified albums such as “This Way” and “0304”. She also briefly tried a career as an actress, and even took the reins of her music by moving to an independent label in 2007.
Jewel also produced the 2019 documentary “Lost In America”, which is about homeless young people in the US. Two years later, she won the TV competition “The Masked Singer” as the Queen of Hearts, which preceded her single of the same name. Most recently, she co-headlined a tour with Melissa Etheridge in late 2024, and is shortly to tour again, beginning is April 2025.
Regarding her personal life, she married Ty Murray, a rodeo cowboy with whom she welcomed her son Kase Townes Murray in 2011. The couple separated in 2014, with Jewel keeping details about her dating life under wraps since then.
Besides that, Jewel has rebuilt a beautiful relationship with her father Atz Kilcher, who is the star of the reality show “Alaska: The Last Frontier”. Jewel has openly said that her father is ‘a great grandfather’ to her son, and also remarks on the importance of breaking cycles to heal. All of this demonstrates how far Jewel has come not only in her self-healing path, but also in forgiving others, building a better future for her family, and simultaneously her career..
