Jewel continues to polish her craft, plays in Modesto on May 15

If a rose by any other name still smells as sweet, it stands to reason that a Jewel by any other genre still sounds as good.

The artist, who burst onto the scene in 1996 with the hit “Who Will Save Your Soul,” gained international acclaim over the years for her intimate and earnest music. She has sold more than 30 million albums worldwide, with a catalog of almost 1,000 songs. Which genre those songs have fit in, however, have varied.

“I’ve never understood this whole genre debate with music. Like, I don’t get it. I guess I get we need words to call things. But music to me is just an extension of my being; it’s who I am. I’ve never once written music as a contrivance trying to be one thing or another,” said the 41-year-old singer-songwriter from Nashville, Tenn., before hitting the road for her new tour. “I’m been blessed to be prolific, and I don’t judge the songs. They just come out how they come out.”

While her early years were spent singing a style of a folky pop-rock that fit perfectly into the Lilith Fair era, the performer has since branched into dance pop (with her electronica-laden 2003 album “0304”), children’s music (with 2009’s “Lullaby” and 2011’s “The Merry Goes ’Round”) and, more recently, country western (with 2008’s “Perfectly Clear” and 2010’s “Sweet and Wild”).

“I look at music the way a lot of people probably look at their closets – our clothing is sort of an outward expression of our personality. We are in different moods on different days. On some days you want to wear a really cute sundress; other days you want to wear sweatpants and comfy clothes; other days you want to get dressed up and be very fancy,” she said. “So, for me, that’s what it has been: it’s been an authentic extension of my mood and what I was wanting to express in my life.”

Now Jewel, born Jewel Kilcher, has gone back to her basics with an album called “Picking Up the Pieces.” Critics have called the September 2015 release a bookend to her 1995 debut “Pieces of You.” Jewel called it time.

“For me it was just time to make this record. I had always intended to follow one of my mentors, Neil Young. So I’d always intended to make a record the way ‘Harvest’ and ‘Harvest Moon’ were for him,” she said. “I wanted to strip away all the pretense – everything I had learned over 20 years that probably didn’t belong to me as a human or as a musician, in a very holistic sense.”

Jewel was also going through a divorce at the time, from her longtime partner and pro rodeo rider Ty Murray. While the album has duets with country greats like Dolly Parton and Rodney Crowell, overall it has more of a folk, Americana feel. She is now on tour behind the release, offering fans a solo experience. The shows are just her with a guitar, telling stories, performing poetry and, of course, singing with her soaring voice.

She will make her Gallo Center for the Arts debut on a tour stop Sunday, May 15.

“I feel really blessed that I get to do something I love for a living. For me, the best part of my job is that I get to do something that I’m very passionate about. What I love and am passionate about is the spontaneity and connecting with people, and storytelling,” she said. “So, for me, I don’t ever write set lists. I do a different show every night. I take requests. I talk a lot, and I talk a lot with the audience.”

That storytelling has extended to stories of her own life, more than once. In 1998 she released a best-selling volume of poetry called “A Night Without Armor.” And last fall she published her memoir “Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story.” The book was written at the same time as her latest album, and is a companion piece of sorts. She considered it a way to exorcise and explain how she defeated some of her personal demons.

While so much of Jewel’s life story is well-known – growing up in Alaska, facing abuse, living out of her van – she said she wanted to write about how she came through her various adversities.

“I wrote the book because a lot of people have asked me how do you go from an abusive background, moving out at 15, being homeless and be OK. I actually shared a lot of things I never talked about. How at the heights of my fame I experienced some of my biggest betrayals and setbacks,” she said. “At 15 I knew statistically that girls like me end up repeating the cycle we were raised by. Statistically I should have ended up in an abusive relationship or on drugs. And I wanted to see if I could beat those statistics and beat those odds. So that’s what my life’s journey has been about, and music has been an extension of that.”

Time magazine called “Never Broken” the “perfect celebrity memoir” and Vogue deemed it “equal parts tell-all and self-help.”

“In my book, my goal wasn’t to be salacious or do a tell-all. My goal was to show people enough of what my challenges were to overcome so how I overcame them had any significance and relevance,” she said. “What took me 40 years and a lot of pain to learn, if I can help someone else get to those tools quicker in less time, then that would have made my book worth sharing.”

In conjunction with the release of the memoir’s paperback edition this September, Jewel plans to launch a website where she discusses some of the techniques and practices that have helped her face her challenges, such as agoraphobia and panic attacks.

“I am aware how many people suffer and feel like they are passengers in their own life instead of the driver or the architect of their life. I am very passionate about helping people understand they always have a choice to be happy,” she said. “In the back of the book I talk about the paradigm shift that really helped me to retrain my brain and teach me new habits so I could have a new outcome for myself.”

That kind of singular focus, to create the outcome she has wanted for herself, applied to her approach to her music career as well. Her goal, she said, is always to continue to grow as an artist.

“When I got signed, I knew my hope was to be a great singer-songwriter,” she said. “To me that meant committing a lifetime to a craft. So I tried to make decisions that supported being an artist more than it supported fame. Authors seem to write their best work in their 50s, but songwriters tend to only write their best work in their 20s. And I attributed that to lifestyle. I think fame and hubris can become very distracting to growth.

“Ultimately, to be a great artist, you need to continue growth. So I made lifestyle decisions – I took years between records; I pushed myself musically. Hopefully, when you hear this most recent record, you hear my craft.”

This story was originally published May 3, 2016 at 8:59 PM with the headline "Jewel continues to polish her craft, plays in Modesto on May 15."