Jewel

solace to her touched millions. Her album Pieces of You has become one of the best selling debuts of all time, earning her praise from the likes of Bob Dylan and Neil Young. A fierce independent spirit, her work has spans genres and mediums. This creative wonder lust not to menure. Her lust for life is a parent in the title of her latest record, Free Wheeland Woman, her first collection

of original material in seven years. It's a rich and diverse musical sampling that draws elements of pop and muscle. Shoals are in and there were familiar folks sound. Altogether, the album is a portrait of an artist who says prolific and singular as ever, brimming with optimism and passion. She's about to kick off her summer tour in early June when she can bring you this positivity in person.

But hopefully you'll get a little of that positive energy come with your speakers right now, is you listen in. I'm so happy to welcome Juel. You're an incredibly prolific writer, and you have this staggering cash of of unheard songs. I think I've read upwards of a thousand. But for this album, you said you started from scratch and wrote songs specifically for this record. What led you to take that approach this time around? I'm a glutton for punishment.

I'm not get it. It's like I have sitting there perfectly good songs, and now there was a specific reason I really wanted to this album to be who and what I am now. Um, you know, songs are like little time capsules. Um, it's kind of a complex little narrative, but I'll try and say it really simply. When when I was eighteen and I got discovered, my goal was to be It's ambitious. I know it's a little assible, but my goal is to be one of the best

singer songwriters of all time. I wanted to push myself to be a great writer, and I knew that that was gonna be really hard for me as a woman. Um well, it's just a hard goal period. Um. But when I looked at the steelsa like, who do I look up to? Who has done this as a woman, It's kind of hard. You know, you have luminarums like Joni Mitchelin and Cheetie Jones and Carl Kane, and you know,

the list goes on. We're not shy on talent and the female singer songwriter category, but as the women aged, they never, in my opinion, got to enjoy the same ticket sales and prestige that their male counterparts like Bob Dylan Emil Young. And that's troubling, right because I was a girl wanting to try and pull off something where I haven't seen a lot of women get a chance to pull it off. And there were women in the pop side, you know that had become icons, but that

was Madonna and Share and that's just not who I am. Um. I wanted to do it as a singer songwriter, so it meant navigating and trying to build my career in a way that I hope would foster my writing. You know, where I kept writing, I kept doing things that were for me inventive, that pushed myself, whether they were or weren't in thinks with where a culture was to take risks musically. You know that has to be part of

your plans. But you I still have to head to face this, like, well, what do women in the middle age do with that job? It's not cute, you know, like you see most women in their middle age still trying to dress like they're young and be super cute and hopefully have a really catchy and I just think, I don't know, abysmal to me in a way. If it's who you authentically are, that's awesome, but it just doesn't happen to be how I want to do it.

So me doing this record this way from me with these things one saying, I wanted to push myself to write in a way I've never written before. I wanted to find a new gear and a new muscle that felt fresh, that felt uh like I wasn't just covering ground is covered before. That pushed me vocally in a way I've never been pushed before that, hopefully it was you know, well crafted, um, but it wasn't contrived and reactionary,

and it gets really hard in your middle age. Like, I definitely see why why David Bowie and so many other artists did a lot of drugs at the stays in the care to get like a new sounds, because it's hard to get rid of the old versions of yourself and to get rid of the stuff like you know, as chorus could come thirty seconds into a song or a song to the three minutes, all that just makes

garbage music. Um. And you have to figure out how to get old versions of yourself and bad information out of your head and come from a really new, authentic place. And that's work. It was a lot of work to write the songs on this album UM, to push myself. I think I wrote two hundred songs to get the like UM and it was nuts. It was a Nettie process. Drugs would have been new Years like the silber was hard, um, but I'm really proud of the result. So that was

one aspect of wanting to do it. The other aspect is I wanted this frombody who I was at the fourty seven year old female I wanted it to. So now proud I am because I am. I'm proud. I wanted this album to be empowering. Um, the decisions that I've made, like you know, quitting after Spirits, you know, I quit for two years because I couldn't psychologically adjust to the level of same I got. There was nobody

celebrating that at the time. You know, nobody was like, well, good for her, He's doing this for her mental health. Mental health wasn't a word, and everybody's like, she's already washed up, Like it was really cruel narrative of suppressive and for me to have the courage to do it in way until I tell my label and tell my managers like nope, I am gonna have a pycal break down if I don't figure out how to handle the level of same I've gotten. I make really full decisions

in my whole career that we're not always understood. And so I'm just proud. You know, I wanted this record too. Yeah, I don't know, serve as a sort of I don't know, a glimpse into what it's like to be a female singer songwriter. UM, what it's like to be middle aged and to say, I really believe I'm writing at the heights of my power. I really believe I was singing

at the height of my power. Um and I feel like we think we see talent diminished with time, and you have to fight for that to not be the case. And that's, you know, a thought that I've been aggressive with with myself. So long answer, more experiences, more inside. I mean, it makes sense that you'd be at the peak of your powers. I'm stopping up on the two songs. That is incredible to me. What was the calling process

like for for choosing the songs for this record? Where you did you pick the ones that you felt like reflected who you are in this moment the best, or just purely ones that were your favorite for reasons like you like the melody or something like that. I found out when writing very proficiently. But I think I was writing pretty safe. And I'll honestly, I think that I never wrote the same since everything went down with my mom.

I think that there was some kind of like psychological governor, I guess you could say, And it was hard for me to access a really really deep, raw place with my writing, and I had to fast tackle that and I've never realized that I've written any references them. By the way, Picking Up the Pieces is actually probably a favorite album I've ever recorded. It's a lot of old songs. Um, My new stuff just wasn't as I don't know, chrisp

or Raw or new. You know. It was like, oh, this kind of sounds like something I've already written, and I knew it. You know, nobody else might know it, but I could tell. I could hear it in the writing, and so I just didn't let myself settle until it broke through that and that was a real intense process. Also, you know, writing anything in the same genre is hard. You know, if you sit down, you may not write a good song, probably won't write. I look at it

like mining for gold. You just some daysy get dirt, you know, and some dasy to diamonds. You don't have control over it, so you have to put hours in, you know, to find that magical diamond. Um, unless you're contrived. Right, If I was just trying to write a pop hit, that would kind of be different. Um, But when you're trying to find something just fresh or new, this is sort of it's a collaboration with the unknown you know, you can't control that process. Um, and then getting it

in the same genre. So a good song that happens to kind as via a scene, because when I sit down, I can't control the style. It sometimes comes out countries and then come out full because sometimes comes out rock. I don't always. I just don't have control over that. And so getting things that felt like they were good and new and of a piece, you know, where they made sense together just really took time. And it's funny. It wasn't if I haven't listened to the album since

I made it, which was two years ago. Um, but I heard it the other day and I was like, oh wow, it didn't dawn on me. This is the first album where I finally got all my styles on one record. I thought I was really making an album that felt like of a piece, and hopefully it does, but I didn't realize. Also, like there's straight up folk music,

and then there's country stuff, and then there's real pop stuff. Um. And then introducing you know, and paying homage to an influence I've never had a chance to do before, which is full uh, and those the full style of writing like the Weathers as well as the great singers Oh, I was gonna say, I love the diversity of arrangements

on this It's so compelling to me. I mean, something like Grateful is something right out of muscle shoals, and you've got like the Memphis stax horns from Love Winds and it's and then you've got something stripped back and so delicate like almost. I mean, I love how just the styles and the arrangements are so diverse, And and you hear that in your head as you're writing these songs. You hear the kind of the the vague style that it would take as you're writing it. Yeah, you feel

the mood for sure. Um, Like I knew when I was writing almost that you know, it's like having lace that would dissolve in water, Like that song is so delicate but so sharp at the same time that it's just can't handle production and just know that it's just going to be what it is. Guitar, no voice. Um. Whereas when I was writing Love Winds, like all of

a sudden, I was like, what is this? This is like like and Tina Turner era, like, you know, you start feeling that flavor sort of as you're writing it. You mentioned listening to the album back for the first time in two years since you've made it. Do you ever learn anything from about yourself from listening to your songs? I mean I overuse this analogy, but almost like a like a good dream reading. Do you ever hear a song back that you wrote and actually get new perspective

on on what's going on inside of you? Mm hmm, not particularly. Um, that's my poetry. For me, when I look back and read my poetry, poetry has been the thing I've written consistently, more consistently than any other thing in my life. I don't publish it ever, but I have boatloads of it swimming around. Um. And if I go back and read my poetry and like, wow, I saw the writing on the wall and I didn't even know. I thought, definitely has much more of like a tea

leave thing of like holy smokes. But I don't know experienced my songwriting that way particularly. That's so interesting, I love. I mean, when speaking to people who are blessed with the ability to write music, I'm just so interested to hear what compels them to do it in the first place. And for you, it sounds like this came from a fulfilled a very specific purpose early on, which was kind

of as an exercise in mindfulness. And I wanted to ask you more about that because that's so interesting to me. When I was eight, my parents got divorced. My mom left us, and my dad took over raising us, and he became he started drinking. He was trauma triggering, but you know, the words trauma trigger were not a well known thing at the time. He started drinking to try to mitigate that, and it went pretty predictably um and so he became abusive. Uh. We were singing them bars.

So I was in a lot of pain, is the bottom line. And I was watching a lot of people in pain because I was singing them bars. And when you sing them bars, you know five hours sets, you're kind of seeing the regulars. You're not seeing the person comes in, you know, casually, or seeing people medicate. And I didn't know those words at the time, but I could tell people from pain. I recognized that because I was in it and I noticed this. I was always

just an observant person. I was like watching people and I felt like, Wow, I have this front seat road to people being just like living their lives so out loud because they're integrated right or high, and they have no filter um. And so I watched people drinking to handle pain. I watched people doing drugs. I watched people having sex, not literally, but you know, these relationships that

were wallable and would play out. And I realized, like, oh my gosh, nobody outruns pain, but we're not taught what to do with it. And I wanted to try and handle my pain as it happened, because they I see in pictures, and so I just saw these people had some kind of pain, and then they covered that pain up with a lot of bad choices, and it led to more pain, and then it was suddenly like this mountain that they never could face, and it would have been better if they could just found a skill

or the courage to just face the original pain. You can't outrun pain, was my takeaway, and so I tried to like assess, like what did I have that helped me with pain? And writing help. I was journaling at a really young age. I was trying to write poetry to young age, and I felt better. I felt noticeably better when I wrote, and so I just sort of turned to that as my coping mechanism. I guess, UM

never thinking it would be a job. You know, it was just a way of seeing patterns and of seeing things about myself that I didn't know I saw, of seeing things about my dad, for instance, I didn't know I saw, and it helped me. It kind of felt like a ladder up and out of my pain or myself for my situation and been little did I know how literal that would be. It would be a literal letter out. I mean, you've you've mentioned this. Really, I'm a huge admirer of your mental health advocacy work you do.

You on for the Inspiring Children Foundation and the wellness practices that you have on Jewel Never Broken dot com. Everyone should check it out, especially after the last two years we've had. I've found so many of the practices that you've shared so helpful personally. And you've mentioned the notion of using anxiety as an ally and as an anxious person myself, I found this to be a very

hopeful sentiment. Um And I think, as you mentioned, a lot of us are trying to eliminate anxiety or pain from our lives, which is kind of a fool's errand um And you used writing, I mean, what are some other ways that that you know you you suggest, um turning this anxiety into something productive for people? UM, I guess I just start by saying, you know, mindfulness For me, I would just give a definition. It means being consciously present.

That's it. You know, this is a word we hear all the time, and it's kind of a word we don't really know what it means. So mindfulness is being consciously present. It doesn't mean that will your life will change instantly. It just means you'll be consciously present, which puts you in a position to change your life. I liken it to a car. If your body was a car, your brain isn't the driver. It's like a steering wheel, but it can go on autopilot, a neurological autopilot if

you're not consciously present to drive the car. So being consciously present is like getting off of autopilot and getting introl. Being a neutral won't change your life, but it gets you in a position to get in a new gear. What actually will change your life is what I call mindfulness, and motion is something practicable. Now that you're consciously present, what are you going to do with that? Um? So I notice I'm angry. I stop I take a breath,

I get consciously present. I'm now observing. Okay, I'm I'm angry. Now what do I want to do? That is that gap where you stop and insert a new tool instead of you know, just reacting off of an old tool, right, yelling you're stop in your breathe. Okay, Okay, I really want to yell, but I'm not going to actually going to go right or call my therapist or call of friends. Whatever. The new thing is that changes your life, that actually starts to starve old neural networks and help you build

new ones. UM. And for some reason, I don't know why, but when I was homeless, I I started developing songs and I started developing these tools for myself just to get results, ready to make myself stop feeling, to help myself with panic attacks. And I would tackle it one pain point at a time. Right, I would tackle steeling and that's all I would focus on. Or I would tackle my panic attacks and that's what I would focus on. And so those skills are what I've been able to

share and create curriculums out of UM without therapy. Not that I'm against therapy, it's just that that everybody has access. And so what about those people? You know, what about kids that don't have support systems or therapists or god forbid? What if your therapy just isn't getting you the change you want? Does that mean you're unlucky? You know? Can you still be happy? Um? And so that's what really been striving me. Yeah, these last several years. One of

those concepts is anxiety as an ally. UM. For me, when I figured this out, it just really changed everything. Nothing can change in isolation, right, Imagine it just like chemical chemical or chemistry. Like can we have an atom? It will stay itself unless it's introduced to something new, like fire or something. Now it's chemical composition can begin to change. It happens in relationships. So we try to disassociate from an aspect of our own personality. We cannot

expect it to change. We can only expect it to maybe to not notice it, to do something louder. Right, That's why we get high risk behaviors to drown out the pain of our anxiety. Let's say, but you actually have to invite it closer, because your anxiety is your body's way of saying, you just consumed something that doesn't agree with you. It's a thought of feeling for an action or an interaction. So I started to get excited every time I was anxious and go Okay, then I'd

stopped and I go, what was I just thinking? Feeling or do? And it was hard right to identify the thought that gave me that anxiety, because sometimes we think things without noticing we think them, and our whole body triggers. You know. Um, But if you stay really faithful to that, and you get curious and invite your anxiety closer, and then more importantly, if you can abstain from it, you're

going to make a huge change in your life. You know, if you can say, all right, I'm no longer going to allow myself to beat myself up because every time I say X to myself, I feel crappy. I'm going to insert a different thought and you have to be willful about it. But it really does change. I mean, just getting to the place of actually being excited to experience your anxiety because you know that your body trying to tell you something. I mean, that's that's gonna be

a tough place to get to. I imagine too, because that that takes a certain amount of courage, because it's uncomfortable. Anxiety is thankful. Yeah, And so you know, dysfunction is painful. Feeling is painful, it's hard healing, it's hard work. But at least there's a better possible outcome, not a guarantee, but at least there is light at the end of

that tunnel. Whereas I already know me running from my anxiety doesn't work, you know, so that's a known outcome, and so you do kind of have to be a little bit logical um, which is kind of funny in a mindfulness practice, but you kind of have to go, Okay, I've tried a thing that doesn't work and makes me six. Am I willing to try something new? Am I willing to look at it like an experiment and take notes

and see if there's a difference. And that's where it kind of gets fun is you should see a difference. It's not like, oh I think I think I feel better. It's like, holy smokes, I was able to stop my panic attacks. You know, you start to see real changes and that begins to be rewarding. Like working out. You know, when you start working out, it sucks. So you start like developing an app, and you're like all right, I'm

into it. The payoff. Yeah. Was there at any kind of a lightbulb moment or a moment for you where songwriting went from being sort of an exercise in mindfulness and something that was more for you to being something that gave you a career direction, was something that you kind of wanted to let other people into. Mm hmm. Let's see. I mean I was singing with my dad and bars, and that was like a blue collar job, five hour sets of cover songs. He wrote too. He

would sing some of his UM. I never thought I would be like a professional musician. I ended up homeless because I wouldn't have sex with the boss and you wouldn't give me my paycheck. So I started living in my car thinking I would get a new job, but I didn't. Uh. I had that kidneys and my car got stolen and it was just like a ship show. UM, and I started writing songs. I was writing prior to this, UM, but I was trying to up stealing, and so I was trying to replace the behavior of stealing with a

different behavior, which was writing. And I was a really prolific fief. I became a really prolific writer. Again, not thinking it would uh lead to a career. Um, I don't know. I was just trying to figure out how to quit stealing. And I loved writing. You know, it was really fun for me. I just I guess I thought careers in music were for other people. I don't know. Um, it wasn't until record label started coming to see me when I was homeless stilled it. I was like, holy smokes,

like this could be a career. Like and I. That's something I talked to my kids in my foundation a lot, and a lot of my talks is every time you invest in your character, it seems bleak, right, like me turning my boss down, refusing to have sex with him. How to do back? Just consequence like I had to live in my car and then my car got strolling that I needed a point. That's a really bad outcome.

But it was investing in my character, right. I refused to be leveraged, and I was willing to say fine, all being a really uncomfortant position so that I'm not leveraged. That that investment I made in my character paid off dividends on the characters stock market for something I don't know how it works, but it's magic and every time I've seen anybody do it, refused to compromise their full It paid dividends in unexpected ways. You know, if I

had kept that job it was kept. It kept me very busy, right and barely scraping by, I wouldn't have had time to really write. I you know, it's crazy that it ended up leading me to music, because I don't think I would have ended up there. Maybe I would have, um, but it was an an unexpected side effect of investing in my humanity, in my character, um

and just not believing that lie. You know, a million times in my career people been like, well, we're never gonna be famous if you don't x y Z. Well bullshit, you don't just keep insisting. And that's the thing about me too, I feel like doesn't really get recognized. You can walk, you can tell people to f off, you know, and it's it works out, It will work out. We just don't see a lot of examples in it in our society. I think maybe on some level people are

more free than they give themselves credit for. You can only have a choice, yeah, and that's the really free thing is you know, I figured out how to be happy when I was homeless with nothing, you know, And when I stopped thinking somebody else bothe me, you know, when I stopped thinking somebody else would come save me, and I started going, maybe I owe myself. What am I capable of? My happiness is my own and if

I'm unhappy, I have to be accountable to that. And there was a lot of, you know, things I could make excuses about. I was having a terrible life like that point. I really was lots of reasons, you know what I mean, lots of excuses. But as long as you're making excuses, your life won't change because you're spending all your time on those excuses, no matter how valid

they are. Um. And so for me, realizing I could be happy even when homeless was very powerful because it put me you can't negotiate with a person like that, you know. I was offered a million dollars signing bonus as a homeless kid, and I turned it down, which nobody could believe. Um, and I took the biggest back end anybody had ever been rewarded because I believed that well, that million dollars was alone. I'd have to sell a ton of records to earn back. Right, a million dollars

for the label to recoup. The odds of me being dropped from a label were very high. I mean, I was making a folk album at the heights of grunge, and even though there was a sitting war, I think that was just labeled competing right and getting caught up

in the competition. Um. And so having that type of approach for me was was really important and I was happy to walk And you know, that's always just that's a powerful place, you know, when you're unwilling to compromise when you're saying I value my happiness and my you know, my internal freedom more than I value saying or money. They're going to make better choices. You can't be compromised. And I think it's really served me in my career. Oh absolutely, I mean, and that's a that's a tough

lesson to not only to learn but also integrate. I mean, here's the here's a question with no easy answer. Do you think that that happiness is teachable? Absolutely? That was my big missions. Like when I moved out at fifteen, you know, I knew statistically kids like me end up repeating the cycle, and that just like I had a physical, genetic inheritance that might give me a predisposition for diabetes.

I had an emotional inheritance and it was every bit as real and would affect me every bit as much. It's not more than my genetic inheritance. But nobody was talking about it. But I said, I see in pictures. So I saw like this river, and it was like I was standing in this river and my dad and his dad and his dad, and that emotional current, that emotional language that I was raised speaking, would lead to a known outcome of abuse of addiction in some various way,

shape or form. And that was depressing. You know, it's depressing to be fifteen and go, oh my god, like the odds of me speaking a new emotional language about to me getting out of this emotional river and into a new one, or very spect against me. And there's no school for it. You know, there's needs to put to school for Spanish. But where was I going to go to learn a new emotional weights reflating to the world? Very daunting. So my goal was to see if happiness

was a learnable skill, was it as teachable skill? And that's what set me off on my journey, and that's why I was writing songs like cloth your Soul or hands um. A lot of the stuff I wrote was was me trying to work through this kind of thing and the answer is yes. The slogan on my Jewel Never Broken website is learn to make a habit out of happiness. Happiness is the side effect of choices. You can't just be happy like its impossible. It's a side effect of a choice. And your choices are a side

effect of your motivation. Your motivations are usually the side effect of unconscious prompts, and so if you can start making the unconscious prompts more conscious, which are used by being consciously present, you start to really change your life. And it takes those behavioral components um, which again for some reason I had a knack for creating, and those are on that free website you are Never Broken. There was something you said on the podcast Second Life recently

which absolutely floored me. You were discussing sort of the battle between nature versus nurture when shaping a person in their personality, and you said that you worried that your nurture was so intense for you that you wouldn't get to know your own nature. And I just thought that was such a beautiful way to articulate a concern that I think a lot of people have, which is, you know, will I get to know my own soul and not allow my personality to become a series of reactions to

what I've experienced in the past. I just thought that was a beautiful way to put that, and I just wanted to ask you a little more about that and your journey to sort of knowing yourself and your own nature. I just I thought that was such a really succinct and beautiful way to articulate this, I think real tribal

concern that a lot of people have. Thank. Um, it's so amazing to me that I just spent my whole life murding out on these movie kind of vague, nuanced, strange philosophical threads, and that it's turned into a job. Isn't just like blowing my mind? You know? Um? So the trip for me to hear you say that, Um, yeah, it's interesting nature versus nurture, nurture of conditioning nature is hopefully our authenticity maybe. Uh And if my nurture was so bad, was I screwed? You know what? It keep

me from knowing my authentic self? Because trauma alters us. It does alter us, right, it changes us? And so how do you handle that? You know? I had really really bad traumatic experiences over and over well up into my thirties and forties. Um, the kind that are just life senders, you know, like what happened my mom is just a mind sender. How do you recover? Um? Again?

Because I see in pictures like I saw an orange, which sounds really silly, but an orange has appeal and if all you relate to his appeal, you'd have no idea. There's this the amazing thing inside of it. And that's how I look at nature versus nurture. You know, our nurture is affecting our feel I look at our personality as a series of decisions that you make and choices you make to respond to your environment. You know, if you had a really traumatic environment, your personality would form

as a suspicious person, as a hyper vigilant person. You know, we can start to apply adjectives to somebody based on their nurturing, and that forms your personality. But your personality is fluid, it's not sick. Um. We can lift that skin, you know, that psychological skin of our conditioning, of our nurture, how we formed our personality over time, and we can start to develop a relationship to what's inside of it.

And that again is where mindfulness is really magical. You know, mindfulness should be used to build the muscle, but being consciously present and then once you're consciously present, going down and in our whole culture wants us to go up and out. You know, we're distracted all the time. We're relating to our personality all the time, we think because the way of a feeling, it's gospel m it's just an extension of our personality in a lot of ways.

Isn't always a physic you know, it can just be a conditioned with emotional response to when your nurture make It's a little tricky. Where it gets easier is if you just go down and in um, you meditate, you learn to go down and end. When you're anxious, you learn to go down and end. You go learn to get to a still point in you where you go, how do I feel about that underneath my conditioning, and you start to develop a relationship with a much more

authentic part of you. For me, it's actually why I called the website never Broken. For me, realizing, wait a minute, you know what is my anxiety and my trauma and all my reactions and hyper vigilance doesn't mean something wrong? But what does it mean something's right with me? You know what if every time I'm having neurotic reaction, it means I shouldn't be having that thought or feeling. Can I participate in something that doesn't give me anxiety? Because

my own nature shouldn't give me anxiety? And again that's where our anxiety is Like the most powerful ally, if I had a thought that made me anxious, I was willing to say, what if that thought isn't authentically who I am? What if that's a thought I've learned or been conditioned to have? What other thought could I have? What thought takes my anxiety down? For instance, like the thought I don't know what I'm doing you said, just unravel me. I don't know why, it would just freak

me out. And the truth wasn't you know, the opposite affirmation of I know what I'm doing. That was a lie. I didn't know what I was doing. I was in too many difficult situations. The truth less, I'll figure it out, I don't stop, and I can take that to the bank and having that thought calmed my nervous system down. So that meant that thought was much more in alignment was my authentic nature than it was an alignment too, you know, my trauma. And so it takes a lot

of you know, conscious presence. It takes a lot of uh, being patient with yourself every time you notice yourself have that thought, replacing it with another thought. But it really works, um, it really will change your life. What is your relationship like with with music on a daily basis? Is it something that you incorporate like some people meditate every day and some people jog every day. Is it's something that's

that's a daily part of your life. Not really, Um, I sing every day just while I'm walking or doing things. I'm always kind of practicing and in the background, but I don't sit down with my guitar every day. I think becoming a mom definitely impacted how I relate to that. I do write every day. Uh, Poetry for me has been the most consistent thing, and I I don't think a day goes by very often when I don't write.

I wanted to end by asking about the title free wheel and Woman, and I love the word free wheel, and it just to me it has all the independence of freedom, but with an added dose of just vivaciousness and boldness and enthusiasm. I just think it's such a great word. I wanted to ask you, what does the title free Wheel and Woman mean to you today? I think most of us, with time, become more afraid of love. We become less potent. Maybe I think a lot of us wonder if our magic has gone? Are the best

days behind us? I think we feel ground down and we read from life and I have really fought for my happiness. I have fought for joy. It wasn't you know, something that came easy to be with my life, And so I wanted this album to be a celebration of that, you know, to be able to say, I'm a forty seven year old man in the music business, and I'm happier than I've ever been, and I'm writing better than I've ever written, and I'm singing better than I've ever written,

and I feel like my magic is back. And yes, there was a time when I was worried it was gone, that life was just beating me down, and I fought for that um and I'm proud I'm really proud of it. And I wanted this record to be a celebration of a lot of the odds. Yet I feel like I'd beat that, um as a one of them, a couple three, as a singer songwriter in the industry, and just as a human. You know that has to wade true life like everyone else, UM, who we are and who we

become with time is has to be intentional. Um. So I just wanted it to be as solidation of it and to like I'm I'm proud to be a woman that's made in my own living in my own way in the world with words. I mean, how impossible was that? I never thought that would be the case, But I've made a living them words bring up. So You've enriched so many people's lives, including my own and so many of my loved ones, with your music and everything you've

taught and everything you've said today. It's been such a joy speaking with you. Thank you so much for sharing, Thank you so much for your time today, and most importantly, thank you so much for music. It's been a real honor. Thanks really enjoyed it. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Inside the Studio, a production of i heart Radio. For more episodes of Inside the Studio or other fantastic shows, check out the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcast.