Eilen Jewell Has Arrived

Eilen Jewell meets me on Friday afternoon at Smelly Cat, one of those funky coffee houses you find in artsy urban neighborhoods -- in this case the North Davidson or "NoDa" community in Charlotte. In several hours she and her band will play a late gig, opening for Raleigh country rockers the Two Dollar Pistols at the Evening Muse, a nightclub one block away. They park their gray van on the street in front of the cafe and when I meet them at the door, Jewell apologizes for arriving late. We're scheduled to meet at 5:30 and it's now 5:35.

Jewell is 27, a slight-framed woman. She wears a simple black dress and cowgirl boots. Her blonde hair is fine as thread, her features delicate. Her eyes are wise and Western-sky blue. The three guys in her band flop down around a nearby table, and Jewell sits across from me at a narrow booth, leans her forearms on the wobbly tabletop. She smiles with her whole face, and chuckles often. Her demeanor is easy and unguarded, but she projects a certain wryness, suggesting a young woman who has begun to realize that she's already lived a lifetime of unusual experiences, and is only getting started.

In July, Signature Sounds released Jewell's first nationally distributed album, the compulsively listenable Letters From Sinners and Strangers, of which I can only find positive reviews. Since the release she has toured unremittingly. Her opening set for Loretta Lynn in September brought the audience to its feet. In the past month alone, Jewell has played in Great Britain and the Netherlands, returned to the U.S. for a scattershot East Coast tour, played an Americana Music Association showcase in Nashville, and two days ago in Philadelphia she taped a performance for the NPR program World Cafe, by itself a mile-marker event. Her website lists many future bookings, as far out as next August.

I ask how her sudden arrival in the music world compares to expectations she might have formed as a girl, growing up listening to tapes and CD's, to her old blues records, a fan staring at album covers.

"In some ways it's easier than I thought it would be," she says. "Easier and less glamorous. I thought that if you had a record it would mean you were famous, and that you'd go to every show and you'd have one of those mirrors with the lights around it and everything. Every now and then you'll play a place that has one of those mirrors, but the closest I [usually] come is, we have one of those in the van. It's on the visor that pulls down."

Eilen Jewell's singing voice is smoky and languorous, with the effect of sounding lower in octave than its actual pitch. She seems to laze around her melodies, even the up-tempo melodies, as if riding a slow winding river, which disguises her deftness of phrasing in folksy authenticity. This quality, and the dry earth colors of her country ballads, lend her music to the easy reference points of Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch. But Jewell and her band overlay so many shades of Americana -- Jazz Age blues, surf and spaghetti Western, 60's folk-rock, lounge, swing and Sun rockabilly -- with their own fresh personalities, that the longer you listen, the more difficult an honest parallel becomes.

"I think I just really lucked out finding these guys," Jewell says, gesturing to her bandmates. "We're a good dynamic team. We can produce records together and not kill each other over it, and we're all on the same page for the most part."

The guys are drummer Jason Beek, doghouse-bass slapper Johnny Sciascia, and the flashy flat-pick guitarist Jerry Miller. All three are fixtures in the Boston country-folk scene, Beek as the host of the American Primitive radio program, Sciascia and Miller as members of scrappy Western swing group The Spurs. While Beek has played with Jewell for years, she hired Miller and Sciascia as session musicians for her self-released debut album, 2006's Boundary County.

Pick any of that record's tracks for a fine example of Jewell's aching vocal style, or for her talent at painting a dreamy Western landscape and the regret-weary characters who wander its highways -- but as an album Boundary County suffers for its sameness of tone, its dedication to middling tempos.

"Because of that record, we started touring around and getting much tighter as a band," says Jewell. "And I started to learn what it means to be in a band, and what that entails. By that time, I was starting to get cues from these guys about what we need next in the repertoire, what works for us, and what doesn't."

Her new conversance with the band dynamic figures largely in the success of Letters From Sinners and Strangers, beginning with its writing. Based on her experiences playing live, Jewell says, "I felt like we needed more up-tempo numbers that were also originals. So I worked hard to put a couple of those in there. Like 'Blue Highway' and 'Heartache Boulevard' were written with the band in mind. Also Jason kind of gave me an assignment to write a song about summertime. 'Cause he said everyone loves a song about summertime, which is true. So that was 'Too Hot To Sleep.'"

The record's production, by Jewell herself, also accommodates the band's singular character. Each player occupies a roomy niche in the arrangement from which to assert his or her personality. "I knew when I was writing I wanted to hear Johnny playing the bass with a rhythm that was unlike what we'd done before. So that was also why 'Too Hot to Sleep' became a rumba. I definitely think about what these guys sound best at when I write now." She considers that and adds, "Which, I mean -- they're not really limited."

Jewell was raised in Boise, Idaho. At seven, she started piano lessons, which required that she perform in recital once or twice a year, which she calls, with a laugh, "completely awful things, really traumatic." She was unaccustomed to the attention of an audience, she says. "I just didn't know what to do or how to act with everyone looking at me. I guess maybe it just didn't feel like it was a natural thing."

As a teenager she felt drawn to the big-voiced blues of Bessie Smith and Billie Holliday. Her parents' Bob Dylan records led Jewell to the guitar, and as a college student she began busking, first at New Mexico farmers' markets and eventually at California's Venice Beach -- the busking big-time. Since that summer, she says, "I haven't really been able to busk anyplace else. I got spoiled."

Singing for cash on the streets before a transient audience, rather than performing for her recitals' gathering of hushed, expectant authority figures, "eased me out of the stage fright thing," she says. "I wasn't on a stage, but yet people's eyes were on me, and I was performing. I didn't have that intimidation factor of the stage. Then when it came time to actually play on a real stage it was much easier than it had ever been before."

Still, when the summer was over, Jewell had not settled on music as her vocation. Unable to find a job at home in Boise, she drifted to western Massachusetts in search of work and the company of friends. She languished awhile, occasionally playing open-mic nights. "I felt like I was spinning my wheels," she says. "I wanted to kind of throw myself into a music world, and everyone in that part of the state said, 'Boston is the best music town.' I didn't really know a music town ... I wouldn't know it if it bit me, you know? At that time. And so I kind of took everyone's advice and I moved there."

Jewell describes Boston as a "musical boot camp," home to thousands of college bands, all vying for billing in the relatively few nightclubs. She established a presence in the city's prominent roots music scene. And she recorded an album -- which was promptly destroyed in a fire that burned down the recording studio.

When told that her first album was lost, Jewell says, she felt relief.

"It was so funny, it was interesting to watch myself react to that because it was like, 'Oh. Oh, O.K. Well, you know. That's the way the cookie crumbled.' It wasn't like I was disappointed at all." She had not clicked with the musicians or the producer, and she had taken a passive role in the recording process. It was not, she says, her best foot forward. So the album's loss was an opportunity, her second chance at a first impression. And how often does that happen?

Her eventual debut, Boundary County, is a Springsteen-like assembly of characters who struggle with homesickness, frustration and missed opportunities. The song "Hey Hey Hey" is possibly the starkest musical evocation of the sensation of regret that I've heard. Jewell nearly whispers, as if from beneath her blankets, I never seem to catch things as they’re coming my way. / I go chasing them down, crying, "Hey, come back, hey."

By contrast, Letters From Sinners and Strangers is largely about folks who, while acknowledging the yokes they tote, have taken hold of their own reins. They are unashamed seducers. They leave on the early morning train, celebrate their progress down an endless highway. Or, if left behind, they toast their liberty rather than bemoan it.

Her new songs seem to reflect Jewell's own blooming assertiveness. "I'm getting better now," she says. "If I don't like something, I don't just let it slide. If I have a really particular thing in mind, I don't just ignore it. I go after it."

That night a good-sized crowd gathers at the Evening Muse. At 10:30, Eilen Jewell and her band take the stage. Arm around the neck of his bass, Sciascia with a Western shirt and greased-back hair counts off -- "One! Two! Three!" -- and the band launch head-first into "Rich Man's World," a Dylan-gone-elecrtric style rock tune that also swings hard, heralded by Jewell's train-whistle harmonica and propelled by Miller's virtuoso guitar attacks.

Jewell picks her acoustic guitar in a clawhammer style, like Maybelle Carter -- thumbing out the bass line and flicking the chords with the backs of her fingers. On stage, her voice musters all the warmth and sensitivity of her studio performances. The band are hot. They trade some of their studio nuance for straight-ahead rockabilly fury, and several people in the crowd literally howl in approval. The 30-minute set flies by. An audience member calls out a request for "Back to Dallas," a tune from Boundary County.

"Dallas?" Jewell says. "Aw, do we have a fan in the audience?"

Someone else calls out, "More than one."

Back in the coffee shop Jewell told me that, whatever glamor her music career lacks so far, "Now I just feel like this is what I was meant to do." Which is surprising -- that this is a new feeling for her. Because watching her on the stage, bobbing happily and belting her blue melodies to a welcoming audience in a nightclub hundreds of miles from her home, it's easy to think: Well of course Eilen Jewell was meant to do this, if ever anyone was.