Brief Biography of Jewel

3.3 Object of the Study

The objects of this study are some of the songs from Jewel’s albums which have ever been released. This analysis consists of 12 songs. Those song lyrics mostly contain alliteration, anaphora, symploce, anadiplosis, synonym, polyptoton, epistrophe, simile, metaphor, personification, irony. Indeed, those are the main things I am going to focus. Bergs 1989:1090 states that ‘when using a content analysis strategy to asses written prose, researcher must first decide at what level they plan to sample and what unit of analysis will be counted’. He also argues that ‘sampling may occur at any levels: words, phrases, sentences and stanza’. In this study, the sample or the object of the analysis are words, phrases and sentences of the song lyrics.

3.3.1 Brief Biography of Jewel

Jewel Kilcher is a singer-songwriter, actress, philanthropist, and author, better known by her first name, Jewel. Her albums are successful in countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Canada and Australia besides the United States. Jewel was born May 23, 1974 in Payson, Utah to immigrants from Switzerland, and spent most of her young life growing up in Homer, Alaska, living with her father. The home in which she grew up did not have indoor plumbing, but a simple outhouse instead. She and her father sometimes earned a living by singing in bars and taverns. It was from these experiences she learned to yodel, a quality demonstrated in many of her songs. Her father was a Mormon, but they stopped attending the church shortly before she turned eight. During high school, Jewel was known to spell her name Jule or Juel, but she attributes this to simply playing with her name, as teenagers are prone to do. Jewel learned to play the guitar while on scholarship at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan, where she majored in operatic voice. She started writing songs at the age of seventeen. For a time, she was poverty-stricken and lived in her van while traveling about the country busking and doing small gigs. She gained some recognition by singing at the Innerchange Coffeehouse and Java Joes in San Diego, California. Her friend Steve Poltzs band, The Rugburns played the same venues. Jewel later collaborated with Poltz on some of her songs including You Were Meant For Me. He appeared in Jewels band on the Spirit World Tour 1999 playing guitar. It was at these coffee house appearances that she was discovered by Atlantic Records. She cut her debut album, Pieces of You, when she was nineteen and it was released in 1995. Some of the songs on the album were recorded at the coffeehouse. The album stayed on the Billboard 200 for an impressive two years, reaching number four at its peak popularity. Jewels music is noted for what appears to be stark honesty and soulful introspection. However many of her songs are not based on real events that actually occurred in her life despite appearing to do so. This makes the degree to which they are honest or introspective questionable. Her songs resist categorization, but, because of their mostly guitar accompaniment, have sometimes been categorized as folk music or the hybrid class folk-pop. However, her music is mostly recognized as popular music and enjoys wide exposure on a variety of music radio stations, http:easyweb.easynet.co.uk~cmgrovesJewel SongsA.htmlTop.

3.4 Types of Data