Album of the Month (September 2015): Jewel, ‘Picking Up the Pieces’

Jewel's new album, Picking Up the Pieces, will be released on Sept. 11 and fans are eager to hear the singer-songwriter's newest batch of songs.

Fans voted Picking Up the Pieces Album of the Month for September 2015, and it beat out other exciting projects including Brett Eldredge's sophomore record Illinois, Alabama's Southern Drawl, Mac McAnally's A.K.A. Nobody, Thomas Rhett‘s funky Tangled Up and Don Henley‘s Cass County.

Jewel earned a whopping 53.97 percent of the votes in the Album of the Month poll, with the closest competitor being Henley with just over 15 percent of votes.

Picking Up the Pieces is Jewel's first non-holiday release of new music since 2010′s Sweet and Wild, and although she's released several other projects during the past five years (including a greatest hits album), her album of all-new music took half a decade because of some personal circumstances in her life.

“This CD was a fantastic labor of love for me and took a while for me to finish because I was trying to do my real job, which is to be a parent to my son Kase, going through a divorce with love and grace, which takes a tremendous amount of effort and focus,” she says on her website.

She spoke last year of the album, saying the project -- a bookend to Pieces of You, would be raw and recorded live. It's a concept similar to Jewel's debut album -- for that, she recorded live at the Inner Change Coffee House in Pacific Beach, Calif. This time around, the singer decided once again to cut a live record, and recorded a live show at Nashville's the Standard.

After the live show, she had a few more songs to add, and cut the rest of it live in the famous RCA Studio A building. "The idea was to capture one whole live take of a song and be done with it. No overdubs, no layering tracks, no AutoTune or tricks. Just one live take — and it was a blast! It was emotional and raw and a little messy — but honest. That’s all I wanted," she reveals.

On Picking Up the Pieces, fans will notice it's a project that thrives on being genre-less. Jewel was extremely focused on not settling on any one genre, and instead, focused her energies on the songs themselves.

She says, “I let go of genre, radio, trend, current events and clever strategies. I let go of it all — which was no small feat, as those voices are so deeply penetrating after 20 years of doing this professionally. It took real effort to clear my thoughts and have no rules and just create — going back to my folk/American roots that I began with.”

The finished product? A 14-track record with "no single that will be played at radio," according to Jewel, but one that is "raw, honest poetry that poured out of my bones and my soul." Fans can look forward to folk songs, country songs and even songs that are "just long poems set to music." With this album, Jewel wasn't focused on album sales -- instead, she was dead set on revealing what was in her heart.

Picking Up the Pieces includes "My Father's Daughter," a track featuring country great Dolly Parton.

Picking Up the Pieces is set for release on Sept. 11 and available for pre-order on Jewel’s website.

Jewel, 'Picking Up the Pieces' Track Listing:

1. "Love Used To Be"
2. "A Boy Needs A Bike"
3. "Everything Breaks"
4. "Family Tree"
5. "It Doesn’t Hurt Right Now"
6. "His Pleasure Is My Pain"
7. "Here When Gone"
8. "The Shape of You"
9. "Plain Jane"
10. "Pretty Face Fool"
11. "Nicotine Love"
12. "Carnivore"
13. "My Father’s Daughter" (feat. Dolly Parton)
14. "Mercy"