IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT

the way the band and I have performed them.

I’ve been doing a lot of exploring in my personal life.

From the ruins of 2020, Eilen Jewell has written her most personal album to date – and you’ll hear some of it when she and her band return to Australia for the first time since 2018. By Jo Roberts

The havoc that the pandemic wreaked on many a musician’s career is well documented. Tours shelved, new albums of work lost in the dust of inertia, incomes ripped away – careers and ways of life upended overnight. When it hit in early 2020 for Idaho-based singer songwriter Eilen Jewell, she was touring her eighth and then-brand new album, Gypsy. The same sad and cruel story unfolded; her income was gone, along with the relentless touring lifestyle she had immersed herself in for 16 years. But for the country artist known as the Queen of the Minor Key, the cost became even greater – her marriage also broke down not long after. “It was everything I knew,” she says. “My whole life fell apart.” Jewell’s now ex-husband was – and remains – her bandmate, Jason Beek. “He was always in the band with me; my drummer and also my manager,” she says. It’s not something Jewell has really spoken about, so the news comes as a sad shock when I ask about the life experiences that have informed her just-completed ninth album, after she has described the record as “very personal, with all that’s happened over the past few years”. “I haven’t told anyone really,” says Jewell of her divorce. “It hasn’t been very public yet. And I just kind of feel like, well, enough time has gone by, it’s time for the world to know, and especially with the new album coming out.” Get Behind the Wheel is the new album, though it’s not slated for release until May 2023. After we speak, Jewell very kindly shares a preview stream with me. Fans will be treated to some glimpses from it when she tours Australia’s east coast in March to play a string of theatre and club shows, as well as the Port Fairy and Blue Mountains folk festivals. The title track comes from a line in the cathartic opening song, Alive, as a nearprimal scream to self to regain control, as a stark new reality ‘comes alive’. For those who have compared Jewell at times to Lucinda Williams, it’s safe to say she out-Lucindas Lucinda in gravitas, grit and raw emotion in this remarkable opener. “It’s a very open hearted, very big, lots of big feelings, big emotions … yeah, it’s a very personal album,” says Jewell. “Autobiography is kind of new to me. I used to kind of sing other people’s stories, but with all that’s happened over the past few years, I just really felt like what was important to me was to sing about what I was experiencing on different levels.” Jewell’s well of experience ran deep, as she also suffered family losses during the same period – “not even COVID related but just one after another. It was just like, ‘I can’t believe I lost another person and another thing that was dear to me’.” “And in all of that, it kind of showed me what really is important in life. And yeah, my heart broke for sure, but it also kind of broke open and I feel like I’m sort of more real as a person now as a result of all of that.” To that end, says Jewell, Get Behind the Wheel “feels more real to me than previous albums”. “I wonder if others will hear it this way, but to me, this album sounds really free,” she says. “There’s a lot of freedom in the way that I’ve written the songs and the way the band and I have performed them. I’ve been doing a lot of exploring in my personal life. So yeah, I hear this [album] kind of like, I’m letting myself out of the box I’ve been putting myself in for so long. There’s a lot of joy and triumph in that.” Jewell hasn’t been to Australia since 2018, so can’t wait to return with guitarist Jerry Miller, new bass player Matt Murphy and Beek, with whom she seems to have found a new ‘normal’ after almost two years of divorce. “We’re friends still, and we’re co-parents to a beautiful little girl.” Their daughter Mavis (named after Mavis Staples) is now eight and is already showing her parents’ inclination towards music. She’s writing songs – “I’ll hear her singing something and I’ll say, ‘what’s that song, that’s amazing?’ and she’s like, ‘Oh, it’s just something that I wrote’ “ – and inviting herself up onstage with her parents. And although she has been to Australia before, this time Mavis will remain in Idaho with Jewell’s mother due to school commitments. “School’s really important to her and she hates missing it,” says Jewell. The death in October of country music titan Loretta Lynn also hit hard; Jewell’s love for Lynn was writ large on her 2010 album of Lynn covers, Butcher Holler – the name taken from Lynn’s Kentucky hometown. In 2007, around the time of the release of her second album (Letters from Sinners & Strangers), Jewell had a “dream come true” when she got to not only support Lynn at a theatre in Massachusetts, but to meet her. Although Lynn had been unwell, when Beek told the star’s tour manager that he and Jewell also had a Loretta Lynn cover band called Butcher Holler, the delighted manager granted an exception to the ‘no meet-andgreet’ rule.

“She was just so gracious and sweet and kind,” recalls Jewell of meeting Lynn. “And then, as we were getting our picture taken together, she said, ‘all right everyone, now say whiskey’. And we were just laughing so hard, because I guess we didn’t expect her to say whiskey. So now every time I get my picture taken with someone, I always say, ‘say whiskey’. It’s more fun than cheese.” Jewell has plans for another album in 2023 “as a way of saying thank you” to Lynn – a re-release of Butcher Holler featuring additional material. Butcher Holler Revisited will have some live versions of songs already on the original, but also a version of Lynn’s fearless call for women’s liberation through contraception, The Pill. The song’s inclusion is timely, given the United States Federal Court’s recent reclamation of women’s reproductive rights; in June 2022 the court sent shockwaves around the world when it overturned the 1973 ‘Roe vs Wade’ ruling that had entitled women to legal abortions in the US for almost half a century. “We never recorded it before. I don’t know why I never thought to do that one,” says Jewell of The Pill. “She wrote all the songs on this album [1975’s Back to the Country], or cowrote, and I guess maybe I just wasn’t aware that she had actually written The Pill. So once I found that out, I was like, okay, well we have to add that.” “It’s such a hot topic right now and I want to amplify that message, for sure.” Jewell brilliantly addressed gender equality herself in the song 79 Cents (the Meow Song) on Gypsy, the 2019 album she will now finally get to showcase here. A proud Democrat living in the deep ‘red’ state of Idaho – or “left-wing swine” as she calls herself in the song – brings her whip-smart, acerbic observation on gender inequality and the pay gap to the song in deceptively cheerful ditty mode. “The heart of your home, works her fingers to the bone, for her 79 cents to your dollar”. Its alternate title is a swipe at the previous occupant of the Whitehouse and his leering ‘pussygrabbing’ boast. Fingers crossed it will be in her live set when she finally returns to Australia. We’ve been a regular destination for Jewell and her band since the released of her third album 2009’s Sea of Tears, and her debut Australian tour on the back of it in 2010. She has enjoyed wording up new member Matt Murphy – who has never been to Australia – about what to expect. “We’ve been singing the praises of the people,” says Jewell. “We’ve been talking up [people in Australia], how they just love live music and they’re so sweet and friendly and they seem to have, compared to a lot of places in the US, a really high quality of life, and it shows. And the wine is really good and the food is lovely. “And we try to steer the conversation away from spiders and snakes, because he’s very afraid of them. So he’ll say, ‘but yeah, but everything down there can kill you’. And we’ll say, ‘no, it’s great. We’ve been there many times. We haven’t died yet’.” Spoken like a true survivor.

Eilen Jewell kicks off her Australian tour on Friday 3 March at the Archie’s Creek Hotel. Details at lovepolice.com.au. Her album Gypsy is available through Signature Sounds.