Jewel Pieces Of You - 25th Anniversary Edition CD

"From the very beginning… Jewel's lyrics reflected the America she lived in, with her conversational, poetic touch." – Neil Young

"One of the best singer-songwriters since Joni Mitchell" – The New York Times

GRAMMY®-nominated singer-songwriter, New York Times best-selling author, actress, poet, philanthropist, and mental health expert, Jewel, today announced the release of a special reissue of her landmark, 12x platinum-selling debut album, Pieces of You, in celebration of its 25th anniversary. The collection tells the complete story of the album and this time in Jewel's career, documenting both her studio work and riveting live performances that led to her breakthrough. Together, it reveals the full process of an artist honing her work into one of the biggest, most definitive albums of its time.

The Pieces of You 25th anniversary package will be available via Craft Recordings. A limited-edition box set comes housed in a 7" by 10" hardback portfolio book, offering expansive new liner notes by music journalist, Alan Light—with new insights from Jewel herself—plus lyrics, poetry, rare photographs, and never before seen content. Across four compact discs, the box set will include the newly remastered original album, a disc of rarities, B-sides and outtakes, a disc of demos, as well as live recordings captured at Jewel's formative Inner Change coffeehouse sessions from 1994.

Also available will be Deluxe 2-CD and 4-LP editions, each comprising the remastered original album plus a selection of outtakes, rarities, and B-sides. The new vinyl edition was cut by Bernie Grundman at Bernie Grundman Mastering. Additionally, a 25th anniversary digital album will be available in time with the physical formats, offering the complete audio content from the 4-CD box set release.

The story of Pieces of You is as tangled as it is unlikely. Performing alone with an acoustic guitar at the height of the grunge movement, Jewel was the subject of a major label bidding war. When the record was released, it failed to chart, only to catch fire almost two years later after earning the support and endorsement of icons Bob Dylan and Neil Young, and eventually becoming one of the best-selling debut albums of all time.

"It was a really simple record and I went out and worked hard for it," Jewel elaborates. "I knew it was going to be a slow process, but I also saw a change in the zeitgeist. Grunge was a tectonic shift in the culture, but you can't live in cynicism forever. The culture was in pain, but then what? And I happened to be a little ahead of that curve in my own life—I was thinking about what do I do with pain, how do I stay sensitive?"

Pieces of You stands as a distinct chapter in Jewel's career, which this collection allows fans to examine in full, from beginning to end. The recordings range from some of her very earliest
compositions, including "Don't," to an unreleased outtake from the live sessions for Pieces Of You, which she wrote when she was 16, to the lullaby "Sov Gott," which started life during a road trip from San Francisco to Colorado when she was 17 and she asked her traveling companion to teach her some rudimentary Swedish. Some of the demo songs for Pieces of You have never been released before now, while others were re-recorded over the years for subsequent Jewel albums, including "His Pleasure is My Pain" and "Nicotine Love" on 2015's Picking Up the Pieces.
"Listening back to these songs," says Jewel, "I hear a lot of courage, though I didn't feel that at the time. I was really raw, but I wanted people to feel what I was feeling as intensely as I was."