Talk about a fairy tale.

Eleven years ago, a petite blonde folk singer with a sweet, plaintive soprano arrived on the music scene, plying her spare story songs to a generation obsessed with grunge. Much to her surprise, just a few short years after she’d been living in her car on the streets of California, 20-year-old Jewel’s debut album, Pieces of You, went on to sell an astonishing 12 million copies.

Now 31, Jewel chronicles that otherworldly rise to fame and its lessons on her latest effort, Goodbye Alice in Wonderland, a cohesive folk-pop narrative produced by rock’s Rob Cavallo (Green Day, Goo Goo Dolls). “I’ve had people tell me, ‘I don’t know if this is the happiest record you ever wrote or the saddest,’” she laughs.

In many ways, this latest project is a bookend to her debut, she says. It’s the last of her required six-album deal with Atlantic Records, and both records were created as she was experiencing major milestones in her life, turning 20 and 30, respectively.

But if some artists are intimidated — stymied, even — by the pressures of scoring near overnight success at such a young age, Jewel says instead that it set her free. “I never wanted to be famous, so I didn’t care if I dropped off the map after that,” she says. “So it was just like, ‘Wow,’ I get to make records and follow my muse and challenge myself musically…and push myself in the studio, explore music and really just do it for the kick of it.”

That doesn’t mean the experience didn’t have its ups and downs: “I’m embarrassed to say the rest is rock ‘n’ roll cliché / I hit the bottom when I reached the top,” she sings on the title track, which opens with the narrator on a plane leaving L.A. Wonderland includes plenty of frank references to the trappings of fame, which she says surprised her in ways she didn’t expect. “It’s funny,” she says, “I never though fame would be that fun,” she says. “I’ve seen the underbelly of humanity since I was pretty young, and I don’t feel like what I’ve seen in the job has added to it particularly.”

What was unexpected was her own reaction to the embarrassment of the riches celebrity laid at her feet. So overwhelmed was she by the offers that started rolling in–from publishing a book of her poetry (A Night Without Armor in 1998) to starring in Ang Lee’s 1999 film Ride With the Devil–that she felt like she had to do them all. “I felt so lucky when I started making money doing something I love. And then I felt like, ‘Now I can do a book, and now I can do acting, and now I can do drawing,’” she says. “I was spending all my time working, and it became the same grind as when I had an office job. I worked 365 days a year. I was exhausted all the time–and for what?”

For material, Wonderland mines her upbringing on a farm in Alaska and her relationship with her longtime boyfriend, retired rodeo star Ty Murray. As a result, it’s her most nakedly autobiographical work to date, recalling the confessional vibe of her debut. It’s a distinct departure from her last recording, 2003’s techno-dance-pop 0304, which took a tone more ironic than intimate and received mixed reviews from critics. But despite the fact that her music has seemed to move away from such candor over the years, Jewel says she felt no apprehension about writing so openly on this album.

“I’m cryptic about the things I feel like being cryptic about,” she says. “I’ve always felt safer by telling the truth. When you hide things, it makes people feel like they want to find you out, and they pretty much leave me alone.”

As its title hints, Goodbye Alice in Wonderland is fundamentally about the myths we grow up believing and the process of shedding those untruths as we grow. On the title track, the narrator compares herself to the heroine of the famous fairy tale; a young woman takes a sip from the bottle marked “Drink Me” and is taken on an unexpected journey. Throughout, she experiences the disillusionment of both fame and love: “Growing up is not an absence of dreaming/It’s being able to understand the difference/between the ones you can hold and the ones you’ve been sold.

“I do think that in the entertainment industry…we sell a sleight of hand, and people are told that it’s real,” she says. “There are a lot of girls who are really skinny, and they’re frickin’ cokeheads. You know, there is a lot of illusion being sold but also truth being told. So it’s kind of just yours for the taking and yours to sift through.”

But more than the cult of celebrity, one of the myths Wonderland is most concerned with is the fantasy of Hollywood-perfect love. On the first single and leadoff track, “Again and Again,” the narrator pleads with her lover, “Like a movie I once saw/in the darkness I recall/feeling the beauty and the pain/…Say you feel the same.”

“You watch movies, you read books, and you think, ‘I just need to fall in love and everything will take care of itself,” Jewel admits. “Once I fall in love, everything else will make sense and nothing else will matter,’” Jewel says. “And it’s the exact opposite; your world falls apart. Your heart gets crushed, and you’re so unprepared, really…for that. It’s shocking. It shocks most of us the first time we’re in love.”

The kind of myth-busting that takes place on Wonderland makes it feel darker than her past collections. The sarcasm seems sharper, the narrator more weary of the hypocrisy she encounters and more intent on exposing it to the masses. But Jewel doesn’t like to think of herself as a cynic. “What a lot of people call optimism, I think is actually ignorance,” she says. “And to me [cynicism] is the same thing; it’s still kind of hiding and escaping your feelings. It’s just a cooler version of it. So to me it’s about learning to walk down the middle and seeing the world for what it is…and at the same time to be able to find beauty in it.”

These subtleties probed on Wonderland make it astonishingly mature in just moments. Even as the album chronicles a growing process that often comes only with age, some of its contents were written long ago. “1,000 Miles” is a longtime fan favorite, “Fragile Heart” appeared in a different incarnation on 0304 and “Satellite” was written more than a decade ago, after her first visit to Hollywood. But it’s the biting lyrics about “volleyball, Valium and power bars,” as they takes superficiality to task, that ring every bit as true 10 years later–and it’s easy to see why she thought it would fit the album’s theme. It’s one advantage to having a back catalog that amasses hundreds of songs, which Jewel draws from regularly on tour. “I take requests,” she says. “I don’t really ever write set lists.”

But this is not the first time Jewel has reached way back in her catalog while constructing an album. Her debut single, 1996’s “Who Will Save Your Soul,” was one of the first songs she ever wrote, at age 16. On a break from school, she wanted to hitchhike through Mexico and earn her pocket money as a street singer. The trouble was, she didn’t own a guitar or know how to play one. So she bought one and learned four chords–A minor, C, G and D. She mastered them quickly–but could only play them in that order, she recalls, laughing.

“I couldn’t read music, so learning other people’s songs was way too much work,” she says. “It was just so much lazier and easier to make up lyrics about people who walked by as I sang on the street. So I just started writing about stuff I saw around me, and I just kept writing verses. There are like 300 of them. I’d never write a bridge to the song because I couldn’t switch chords.” That epic, edited down, became “Who Will Save Your Soul,” which introduced her to the world as a folk-pop poet whose observations about society were equal parts sweet and sour.

Since then, needless to say, Jewel’s learned a few more guitar chords. But for her, the songwriting process is still every bit as organic and unfettered as when she was a young troubadour. “Sometimes it’s just as fast as I can write them…it’s like reading a book in your head,” she says. “I don’t really always know what the song’s about. It’s like I’m turning a page in my head and I’m like, ‘I wonder what happens in the next chapter.’ Sometimes I don’t even know what the song’s about until it’s over.”

Boyfriend Ty has told her he can tell when a song’s forming in her head because she gets a certain look. The couple has lived together on a ranch in Stephenville, Texas, since 2000. It’s very much a return to the kind of solitary life she lived growing up in Alaska, and proximity to the great outdoors has always offered her a particular kind of inspiration. “I tend to write more relevantly about social issues if I’m away from society for some reason,” she says. “If I’m out of the noise, I can hear the noise better.”

In fact, the album track “Stephenville, Texas,” boasts some of Wonderland’s most deft–and slightly self-deprecating–social criticism: “So why not follow me, the blond bombshell deity/I’ll sell you neat ideas without big words/and a little bit of cleavage to help wash it all down.” Such lyrics are frequently woven throughout Jewel’s albums. This Way’s “Jesus Loves You” memorably skewers religious hypocrisy, and yet Jewel is not a songwriter with a reputation for biting political criticisms.

“It’s funny what I’ve gotten away with,” she says.”I think I called Hitler gay on [Spirit's "Innocence Maintained"], and I thought I was going to get murdered. I talked about the Midwest and how it makes people ’spread their legs for ignorance.’ It was really lyrically brutal, but I guess the production was so pretty and I sang it so sweetly that everyone was kind of like, ‘Aw, we love her…that sweet girl.’ I was really shocked.”

Jewel doesn’t want to be known as a tedious buzz-kill either. In fact, she makes a point never to be didactic, she says. One year while attending the Democratic National Convention, she got the idea for a song called “The New Wild West.” “You see the ghosts of the buffalo moving both fierce and slow/like glittering prophesies on the edge of the horizon.” She couldn’t seem to finish it without devolving into preachiness, and it wasn’t until years later (when she was assembling This Way) that it clicked into place.

It’s not uncommon, she says, for her to abandon a song halfway through the writing process if she realizes it’s not very good. But she’s also careful throughout the process to understand what a song’s purpose is, and not to try to sculpt it into something it doesn’t want to be. “Goodbye Alice in Wonderland,” for example, is not only the album’s title track but it’s a dramatic centerpiece–and it’s crucial to the album’s message. Clocking in at six minutes, though, it’s not exactly radio-ready.

“Some songs…it’s just not their job,” she says. “The job of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ was not to be a single; it was just to say something I needed to say and it took that long to say it,” “It took three verses before the chorus and it works. Hopefully, it’s like a movie…you get caught up in the world and it passes quickly.”

Much of Jewel’s schooling in song construction came from her father, with whom she performed as a duo act as a child. He taught her tons of rock ‘n’ roll classics, from “Heartbreak Hotel” to “Brown-Eyed Girl.” In some cases, it was years before she heard the original artists’ recordings of the tunes, but the process of learning them and then singing them over and over provided some very specific instruction about musical composition.

“I think it taught me a really instinctual, innate sense of song structure and lyric,” she says. “I was so into words and writing that I was always analyzing, ‘Ooh I like the way that lyric fits,’ or ‘I like the way that melody goes up.’”

As she began to write regularly in her teens, Jewel found that some of her biggest influences weren’t songs at all, but literature, like Plato’s Symposium, a favorite in her younger days. “I was really into the classics–then I got into poetry–which was really good for me,” she says. “It really changed my writing from a dry kind of intellectual crap drivel, to more emotional-based writing.”

Nowadays she counts a lot of Latin poets among her favorites (Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz), as well as English poets like Charles Bukowski and essayist Anais Nin. She still writes quite a bit of poetry on her own, especially at a time like this, when she’s promoting an album and a little tired of talking about music all the time. Rarely, though, do those poems morph into songs.

“Sometimes a line might stand out or work its way into a verse,” she says.

“But generally, I wrote it in that form because I thought that was its perfect form. Otherwise, I would have written it as a song. I’ve never really been able to take a poem and set it to music or anything. It’s like trying to put a building into a fountain or something; they just don’t fit.”

Jewel gets a chance to take a breather from her own music by co-writing, which sometimes brings her to Nashville. Though she writes the bulk of her albums solo, she’s teamed up with other songwriters on tunes for other artists such as up-and-coming country singer Jason Michael Carroll and Australian Idol winner Kate DeAraugo. It’s a process she enjoys immensely, and a breath of fresh air from the promotional grind.

“For me, it’s like I get to write stuff that I wouldn’t necessarily get to do myself…because when you write for your own records it’s all taken so seriously and it says something about you,” she says. “When you write for someone else, it’s just an exercise in writing, for the pure skill of it, the pure love of it. It just lets me stretch out.”

But there’s also some adjustment involved. In Nashville, songwriting is often done by appointment, with a group of people sequestered in a room for hours trying to dream up a hit. It’s very different from the process of her writing her own songs, which can happen any time, any place. She frequently sits down with “just a feeling”–no title, no words, no thought of style or structure–and just lets it come to her organically. But not all songwriters operate that way, especially when they’re working in groups.

“Some writers really hate the unknown,” she says. “They want to sit down with something solid, which is fine…I can totally go with that. But I know that if I start with nothing I’ll end up with something. I’m fine sitting down with a perfect stranger and just finding it–following that invisible thread.”

Part of that philosophy she attributes to having been a songwriter for so long. After a while, she says, you realize that you’re going to go through periods where it’s more difficult to write, or where you’re only writing about one subject, or in one style. As a rookie writer, it’s easy to be thrown by those phases, to be anxious that it’s a permanent shift. But after years at it, she says she’s developed the confidence that it’s a process that ebbs and flows.

“In the beginning it’s nerve wracking,” she continues, “and you think, ‘How will I ever write again?’ You worry. But as you get used to the process, that empty space doesn’t bother you anymore. You know that it won’t be there one minute and the next moment it will. I can’t explain where it comes from; I just know that it will come.”

And when those dry spells lift, Jewel finds herself just as excited about creating music as when she began, even after more than a decade as a full-time musician and songwriter. Much of that is because of her own competitive urge to challenge herself and experiment. Having freed herself from any burden of maintaining her superstardom, she enjoys just testing her own limits for the fun of it and seeing where the process takes her.

“I think it’s really easy to write a really bad pop song that’s going to be a hit, and I think it’s easy to write a really cool, credible song that the press is going to love but is never going to see the light of day. “It’s really hard to write a smart pop song. Something that you feel lyrically has integrity…that you feel like you pushed yourself melodically, that you’re proud of, that also can be a hit. That’s really the Holy Grail, and it’s kept me turned on.”

Though Jewel may occasionally take time out from music to work on other projects, like a cartoon she created for Nickelodeon called Punk Rock Angel Girl, songwriting is the passion that she’ll always come back to.

“I always looked at songwriting as my retirement plan,” she says. “I won’t always want to work as hard promoting records. You know, the big push it takes just isn’t that fun. Hopefully I’ll have a family one day and just concentrate on writing songs and have the studio there in Texas and bring writers in and just do art.” And live happily ever after.