Jewel returns to her poetry roots on Picking Up The Pieces

Double LP includes a stunning new duet with Dolly Parton

First new music since 2010’s Sweet and Wild

Jewell self-produced her new 14-track LP Picking Up The Pieces — with her first producer, the late Ben Keith, always in mind — and hired a band comprised mostly of Neil Young collaborators to help her strip away the veneer she’d built up over two decades in the music business.

Jewel describes Picking Up The Pieces as a “bookend” to her Pieces of You debut album released in 1995, one of the best-selling albums of all time, with more than 12 copies sold to date. She’s also preparing to publish a memoir, “Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half The Story” and will go on tour in the U.S. beginning in spring 2016.

It’s been a tumultuous five year period for the singer-songwriter whom John Rich of Big & Rich says “is probably one of the greatest American singer-songwriters we have had.” The composer of mega-hits such as “Who Will Save Your Soul,” “You Were Meant For Me” “Foolish Games” and “Hands” and her husband, pro rodeo cowboy Ty Murray, divorced in 2014 after nearly two decades together as a couple. The pair have a 4-year-old son, Kase. She has continued to pursue philanthropic projects, such as the ReThink: Why Housing Matters initiative. She has also continued to make TV appearances, most recently in 2014 as a judge on the reallity show “The Sing-Off.”

She wrote her memoir, “Never Broken,” and recorded a pair of children’s albums. Picking Up the Pieces captures some of these moments on “Love Used to Be” and “Mercy,” but also gathers longtime unrecorded live favorites like “Carnivore” and “Boy Needs a Bike.” The album also includes “My Father’s Daughter,” a stunning autobiographical collaboration with Dolly Parton.

“This is just me. These are my thoughts. These are my feelings. This is my poetry,” Jewel says. “It really felt like returning to a part of me that I didn’t mean to lose, but with time and relationships and life and surviving and dealing, you take on new things and not all of them are great.”