14 DAY TRIAL // Singer (and new mom) Jewel wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Stopping by The Today Show to promote her latest release, a kids’ album, the star talks about a time when she wasn’t famous – and nearly died because she didn’t have insurance.
Jewel and husband Ty Murray live at a ranch in Texas and, because she’s determined to be a stay-at-home mom and wife, she hardly gives interviews – which only makes this all the more special.
You can see it below, in the video embedded at the end of the article.
After gushing about her son Kase and how much her husband adores her, Jewel gets down to more serious business, talking a bit about her life before she became a star.
She recalls a time when she lived out of her car and was very sick but could not get treatment because she didn’t have insurance.
It was a hard time for her and, she says, if she hadn’t been discovered by a record label, who knows where she’d be today.
“I ended up homeless because my boss propositioned me and when I wouldn’t sleep with him he didn’t give me my paycheck. I got kicked out of where I was living my rent was due that next day,” the singer says.
“I thought ‘Well, I’ll live in my car for a minute… get back on my feet,’ but I had bad kidneys and I never could hold down another job because I got sick so often,” Jewel continues.
“I didn’t have insurance and ended up almost dying in the parking lot of an emergency room because they wouldn’t admit me because I didn’t have insurance. I ended up homeless for about a month and I went back to singing,” she says.
She started singing locally to make money, not even for a second thinking she could ever become a household name.
Luckily, a radio station played a bootleg version of one of her songs and it caught the attention of the right people at a record label – the rest, as they say, is history.
Jewel has now a new album out, “The Merry Goes ‘Round,” her second to date. She says she hopes to help children learn about various music styles through it.