Jewel's new single, "Upon Meeting the Goddess of Love," from her forthcoming album, is out Thursday, April 16
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The four-time Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter opens up to PEOPLE about love, dating, her beliefs and hopes for the future
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Also a painter, Jewel teases her upcoming art exhibition Matriclysm: An Archaeology of Connections Lost, which opens in Venice on May 6 and runs through Nov. 22
A recent lunch withJewelbegins, fittingly, with a small act of care.
The "Who Will Save Your Soul" singer makes sure there is plenty of food — glazed ribs, chicken salad and more — for an interview with this PEOPLE reporter at a West Hollywood hotel. It's a quiet, telling prelude to a conversation about nurturance, and how rarely the world makes space for it.
For Jewel, 51, that instinct — toward care, toward reflection — has become both subject and medium. Her latest creative chapter includes a new single, an evolving body of visual art and a philosophical inquiry into what she calls “the feminine principle.” Not femininity as aesthetic, but as action: the ability to nurture, to connect and to remain in relationship with others, with the self, even with discomfort.
“I started asking myself, what does femininity actually mean in my life?” she says. “What does it mean in my relationship with my mother, with my son, with the earth? And how have I divorced myself in my own life from the ability to nurture or to be nurtured?”
The question is deceptively simple. The answer, she suggests, is not. In her view, modern life has eroded our capacity to sustain relationships, replacing curiosity with certainty, dialogue with division.
"We're not great at nurturing relationships with our community or with people we don't agree with," she says.
She touches on that in hernew single"Upon Meeting the Goddess of Love," a song that feels less like a traditional release and more like an emotional thesis. Love, in Jewel's telling, is not a fixed destination but a destabilizing force, one that reshapes identity in ways both ecstatic and painful.
“We are changed by the people we love,” she says, her voice catching slightly. “It almost makes me cry. It's that powerful.”
And yet, in her own life, romantic love has taken a quieter role. After meeting rodeo starTy Murray in 1999, and after nearly a decade together, they tied the knot in the Bahamas. In July 2014 thecouple announced their divorce,and the singer says she fell into a major depression while navigating being asingle mom to their son Kase, 14. Since then, she's found fulfillment elsewhere.
“It hasn't been a big priority,” she says of finding a romantic partner. “I love my life. I love running my house. I love making my own shots.” She pauses, then adds with a giggle, “But I'd be open to it.”
It's not a rejection of love, she says,, but a reframing. Where once romance might have been centered, now it exists alongside a broader, more expansive definition that includes friendship, community and self-trust. “I don't feel empty without it,” she says.
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"I really am in love with my life," she continues. "And not to say that love couldn't come into that, but yeah, it's not something where I feel like I'm searching it or I'm not whole without it. I mean, falling in love is such a consuming thing. Did it save me? I don't know."
That perspective is rooted in experience. Jewel speaks candidly about the contradictions of her early career — which began more than three decades ago — and about navigating a music industry that often demanded more than talent. “I've paid the price of people not paying me because I wouldn't have sex with them,” she says. “We live in a pretty predatory world.”
Those experiences, along with a lifelong negotiation with body image, inform her art's sharper edges through her new collection calledMatriclysm: An Archaeology of Connections Lostat the Salone Verde in Venice, Italy runs May 6 to Nov. 22. In one piece, she references the overlooked and often disturbing history of women's medicine and birth control in which she's painted herself floating with an IUD.
At the center of the exhibition isHeart of the Ocean, an eight-foot kinetic sculpture that transforms real-time ocean data into sound and light — turning nature itself into a living instrument.
The show avoids conclusions in favor of questions, most provocatively in a painting inspired byKim Kardashian's sex tape with Ray J,which Jewel reframes not as scandal but as a study in narrative control: “It's meant to shame you,” she says of the tape, “but women learned how to take that narrative back.”
If that sounds like a manifesto, Jewel insists it isn't. She resists the idea of telling people what to think, preferring instead to create space for reflection. “Nothing's more unattractive than someone trying to change your mind,” she says with a laugh. “If you can touch someone's heart, they'll make their own choices.”
That ethos extends beyond her art and into her broader worldview. She's wary of a culture that prioritizes opinion over empathy, argument over understanding. “An opinion without heart is a weapon,” she says. “And we're in a time where we bludgeon each other with opinions with no heart.”
Her goal, instead, she says is softer. She'd like to create environments where people feel safe enough to ask themselves difficult questions and foster connection rather than division. To reintroduce, in her words, “a relationship with relationship.”
Motherhood, she says, has only deepened her commitment to it. “It's awesome being a mom,” she says, smiling. “I love it so much.”
The role has expanded her understanding of love, not as something singular or finite, but as something layered, evolving, and, above all, communal. Love, she seems to suggest, is not something to solve. It's something to stay in conversation with.
And for now, that's enough for her.
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