The inspiration for the title track off Eilen Jewell's 2009 album, Sea of Tears, came to the alt-country songstress while she was sleeping.
"I had this dream about these two people in a marketplace, an open air space, and for some reason, they happened into each other," Jewell explained to me via phone as she was gearing up for a co-headlining tour with friend and fellow Boston-based roots music rocker, Sara Borges. "He pretended like he didn't see her, and she was saying these things to him, and he wasn't really hearing her, either. When I woke up, I wrote down the words she'd said to him."
Jewell stripped away the surreal details of her nighttime vision to reveal the stark, embittered emotion of a woman spurned by her man and trying to make sense of it in a crooning serenade: "You won't even look my way / Is there nothing I can say / to make us how we used to be? / You won't even notice me." Resigned to her imminent loss and loneliness, she declares, "It's gonna be a sea of tears for me / it's gonna be a life of misery," her sultry, forlorn vocals set against vintage rock 'n' roll with measured rhythms and the twisted twangy notes of steel guitar. Jewell credits the aesthetic of the Seeds' 1967 single "Can't Seem to Make You Mine" with influencing the sound of "Sea of Tears" and providing the perfect rhythmic fit for her lyrics. "The song kind of just wrote itself."
While 2007's Letters from Sinners and Strangers was considered her breakthrough LP, the delicate pale-haired beauty has made true believers of Americana audiences with her third; Sea of Tears held a Top 10 position on the Americana Radio Charts for more than seven weeks.
Not really surprising. She has an enchanting drawl and a velvety rich vocal tone that's gotten her comparisons to everyone from Billie Holiday to Nancy Sinatra. She can sing robust and throaty, or soft and silky, or husky and haunted, convey a sense of intimacy or languid confidence. Her music is dark and melancholy, her songwriting unflinching and informed by the imagery, landscapes and classic Western themes of the region where she spent the majority of her formative years. "I find homesickness to be pretty inspirational. Particularly, the idea of place or someone's place in the world is intriguing to me, 'cause it's something I've been trying to figure out since I left home. What is home? And where is home?"
Jewell was born and raised in Idaho. She says she knew early on she wanted to play music — she started piano lessons at 7 — but she was always a rather shy girl. "It took me a long time to admit to anybody, mostly myself, that I wanted to play in front of people."
She got into singing at 15. "I wasn't in any choirs and didn't have any vocal instruction or anything," she says. But she enjoyed it and got comfortable with it and picked up guitar so she'd have something to back her up. The harmonica followed. "Once I started listening to Bob Dylan and I saw him playing it [the harmonica] with the rack, I was like, 'What's that like?'"
She started playing out during her last year of college in Santa Fe, N.M., mostly at farmers' markets around town. She re-located to LA after graduation to try her hand at busking and save money to move to Europe. She set up every day on the infamous Venice Beach boardwalk, performing her one-woman vox-guitar-harmonica show alongside creative types of every ilk. Jewell says it was a lot of fun, and she was spoiled by the laid-back atmosphere and pristine weather. "I was literally on the sand, the sun was shining every day, everyone was really friendly, you didn't have to get a permit — pretty much anything goes on Venice Beach. Although, sometimes that was a little too much, 'cause it was always a bizarre scene, like a guy juggling chainsaws next to me or something."
When her plans for Europe didn't work out, she briefly returned to Idaho, then moved in with a friend in Western Massachusetts. Her evolution from street busker to gigging musician "happened as the result of being somewhat desperate to do something with my life. I never really grew up with a clear image of my future in mind. I knew I wanted to do something really fulfilling but I didn't know what it was. I just kind of always just took it essentially a day at a time, or a week at a time … so the idea of choosing a career was really a struggle for me."
In Massachusetts, she says, "I realized music was the only thing that made me feel really happy and I needed to pursue it more actively." Around that time, she met drummer and local radio show producer Jason Beek, who introduced her to his musician friends, exposed her to Boston's folk and roots scene, and turned her onto a wellspring of new artists. By 2003, she was performed solo and with rotating personnel, and eventually formed a band with Beek (now her fiancé) and a few other like-minded musicians — electric, acoustic and steel guitar player Jerry Miller, and upright bassist Johnny Sciascia.
Jewell and her band were among the surge of high-caliber roots revivalists, all coming from different places with different ideas about how to bring their own fresh feel to the sounds of bygone eras. Jewell's music draws from folk, vintage rock, country, Western swing, blues and jazz influences. "But I don't tend to favor pop stuff. Mine's a little weirder, a little darker, a little less radio-friendly, maybe, a little less mainstream — I mean, none of it's really mainstream…"
Jewell self-released her debut, Boundary County, in 2005, and was signed by Signature Sounds for her second, 2007's Letters. Extensive touring followed in '07 and '08, and Sea of Tears was written in bits and pieces on the road. Jewell's band recorded it live in the studio "just the four of us," with little post-production on the end result and without the guest musicians that had appeared on the previous two albums.
"The past couple of years, we've become so tight as a group, as a family essentially, with the music, we thought it would be interesting to record what we sound like together." Sea of Tears also found Jewell trying her hand at Hammond B3. "It was kind of like returning to my roots. I never played organ before, but my grandma was an organist, she would play along to silent movies, so I thought, in a way, the decision to play it was dedicated to her."
Jewell's favorite part of being a musician is "When somebody comes to our show and they're a big fan, and they sit right up front or they stand right up front or they dance right up front, so I can see them really well — it makes it all worthwhile to me. It's actually some pretty sad material I write and sing about, but sad songs make me really happy, so I'm really glad when I can pass that happiness to other people who share it."
After the latest string of tours, Jewell tells me, "I'm going to lock myself in a cabin in the woods in Idaho in December and write some songs. And hopefully sometime next year we'll make a new record. I can't believe I'm already saying that but … maybe a live record. That'd be really fun."
This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2009.