Interviews with Alanis...

SPIN Mag.-interviewer- Kim France
Arguably the most famous Canadian female musician of all time, Canada's Alanis Morissette is about to unleash another album on the world. The highly anticipated "Jagged Little Pill," follow up "Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie" is an extention of what she started on her first album.

Before we move ahead, any mention of the "first album" is referring to "Jagged Little Pill." By now, we all know that Alanis was the Debbie Gibson of Canada during the late 80's, but she says that wasn't who she was. Hence, she calls "Jagged Little Pill" her debut album.

On "Jagged Little Pill," we were introduced to, quite possibly, the most pissed off woman in the history of music. Alanis made Sinead O'Connor look like a stand up comedian. On each track you could literally hear the anger and feel the rage coming through the speakers.

Sure, there were a few light moments (One Hand In My Pocket) but all in all, this was a sexually charged, heart on the sleeve, confessional. Alanis has said "It's a journal of my adolescence between the ages of 14 and 21."

Growing up in Ottawa, Alanis wrote songs by age 9. As a teen she was on the Cerned, because they move stealthily, like Secret Service details. Quickly, quickly, Morissette and party are directed in the door, up the stairs, past journalists and cameras and segment producers for whatever the French version of Access Hollywood is. Then they scoot, scoot, scoot through the second-floor sort-of-VIP bar into a smaller, more exclusive room where pallid bowls of guacamole and chips decorate the center of several round tables and the scent of hot-dog-left-too-long-on-the-steam-table perfumes the air. The glamour!

The Hard Rock is hosting a press conference for tomorrow's Amnesty International concert to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is, in fact, humanitarian rock concert week: Shania Twain, who is here too, will hitch a ride tomorrow night after the show on the jet Morissette has chartered to get to Oslo for the Nobel Peace Concert. Morissette and Twain have never met, but are nonetheless made to stand with each other and chat while a TV crew shoots footage. A home viewer might see two celebrities talking at a press event and imagine they are sharing some kind of privileged, intra-celebrity information, such as directions to the secret all-famous-people sex party later. Here is what they really say: "Um, so, when did you get in?

" Because the 24-year-old Morissette has not been on the media circuit for a while, and her new record, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, was recently released, she is the star of today's proceedings. Tracy Chapman, a couple of the Radiohead guys who aren't Thom Yorke, and a few other of tomorrow's performers sit silently by as the press pitches Morissette stultifyingly open-ended softballs. "Alanis Morissette! How does it feel to be here?"

She replies that it's good to be here and a privilege to be able to express herself as an artist on behalf of a cause she believes in. "Once again, in French please!"

When you become a big rock star and are worshiped as a god, your life can go in one of two directions. You can go wild and become hedonistic and behave as though you are in fact a deity. Or you can see the effect you have on people and feel guilty about it for a while and then decide that if people are going to worship you anyway, perhaps it would be wise to put your talent to good use. Interestingly, we rarely reward those who make the latter decision: Among the smirking classes, it is seen as very Sting to believe that a musician can make a difference in the world (the Beastie Boys get away with it because it runs so counter to their bratty image). And the fact that Alanis Morissette does her bit to support such broad, boomer notions as world peace and freedom from political persecution makes her an easy target.

"I feel like I've gone from repression to explosion to contemplation," Morissette says of the last two years of her life. "I always believed in black and white; something was either great or horrible, including myself. And now it's just gray." It is late morning in Paris, and Morissette has kicked off her sneakers and curled up in a big chintz hotel-room chair, a cup of herbal tea warming her hands, her hair still wet from the shower.

So does the fact that Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie is such a disarmingly earnest record. The lyric sheet reads like an extended journal entry, and much of the soul-searching throughout is about as boilerplate rock-star-in-the-aftermath-of-the-first-wave-of-massive-success as it gets. (India? Check. Self-acceptance? Check. Resolution with parents and old lovers? Check.) It's also, in its own way, cannily of-the-moment: Just as Jagged Little Pill's first single, "You Oughta Know," capitalized on the angry-young-woman zeitgeist of 1995, Supposed's first single, "Thank U," seems tailor-made for the current nouvelle yogic environment. On the face of it, lyrics like "The moment I let go of it was the moment / I got more than I could handle / The moment I jumped off of it / Was the moment I touched down" make "Thank U" almost unbearably I'm-OK-You're-OK. But to read these lyrics without listening to Morissette sing them is like sitting in the front row at one of her shows with your eyes closed. Her weird fluttery cadences-"thank you dis-i-llu-sion-ment"-provide the ache and the electricity that the lyrics sometimes lack. "I feel like I've gone from repression to explosion to contemplation," Morissette says of the last two years of her life. "I always believed in black and white; something was either great or horrible, including myself. And now it's just gray." It is late morning in Paris, and Morissette has kicked off her sneakers and curled up in a big chintz hotel-room chair, a cup of herbal tea warming her hands, her hair still wet from the shower. There is no shortage of evidence to support the notion that Morissette is a casualty of the New Age. In conversation, she speaks frequently of the need for "closure." Of saying or doing things "from a place of love," and of being able to "connect" with people through her music. She has spent time at a nudist colony, an experience she describes as "beautiful." She has sat at the feet of gurus, studied Ashtanga yoga, and traveled to India. She reads self-help books. On tour, before each flight, she makes her crew and band pick out an angel card-little inspirationals that have words such as faith and beauty and hope on them, which are supposed to be adopted as the bearer's mantra. She meditates. (In a cruel irony, she is allergic to tofu and scented candles.)

But all of this exists simultaneously with a no-nonsense straightforwardness. She does not assume a false intimacy with strangers, but rather is focused and direct-a person who was taught the value of a firm handshake and good eye contact. And as befits American celebritydom in the '90s, Morissette's spiritual curiosities prove oddly in sync with her Madonna-sized ambitions. One does not become the best-selling debut artist of all time at the age of 21 without being driven by something more forceful than a hearty dose of Canuck can-do spirit. You don't move to L.A. alone at 18, with nothing but two cheesy Canadian pop records as your calling card, get mugged right away, and decide to stick it out anyway unless the option of not becoming a big success is flat-out unthinkable.

As a kid growing up in Ottawa, she says, "I had this insatiable desire to create and express and sing and dance and act and paint and draw and write poems. I just couldn't help it, it was dying to come out." Her teacher parents, Alan and Georgia Morissette, encouraged her. But Morissette wanted more than a creative outlet: She wanted an audience. "I was very intrigued by what celebrity status, fame, adulation could bring me," she says. "It was touted as something that would raise your self-esteem and provide you with eternal happiness. Food would taste better, people would be more exciting, relationships would be great." She was perplexed at the time that her twin brother, Wade, and older brother Chad didn't want to be famous. "The concept of fame was so obviously an illusion to them," she says, "that I just wondered how they knew before they had experienced it themselves."

When Morissette was nine years old, an Ottawa DJ sent her demo tape to Toronto A&R guy John Alexander, who passed on it. But five years later, Alexander saw a homemade video of her performing and set up a dinner. She struck him as a focused young perfectionist. "I had the feeling that if this girl wanted to be a bricklayer she was going to be the best bricklayer around, "he says. "If she was going to be a short-order cook she was going to be the best short-order cook around. But she happened to want to be in music. And I had a feeling I'd be making a mistake if I didn't get involved." So he signed her to a publishing deal at MCA and recorded two albums with her.

Maverick Records, which signed Morissette in 1995 amid zero competition, has not exactly made copies of those early discs available to her public, and it's easy to see why: They are as prefab and un-rock as your worst imaginings. But Morissette remains fond of those records. And she bravely takes full responsibility for them, even though there is a fair amount of evidence that she needn't. "When people say those first two albums were a different kind of music-well, they were," says Alexander. "But we were kind of telling her what to do at that time. She was the talent, but she was singing other people's words." Shortly after the second Canadian album failed to ignite, Morissette had a talk with Alexander. "I remember very well," he says. "She came up to me and said, 'John, I don't think I want to do this style of recording anymore. I want to write and sing my own words and my own feelings.'"

After Morissette found her muse, met Wilson Phillips and Aerosmith producer Glen Ballard, and released Jagged Little Pill, she got fame on a scale neither she nor anyone around her could have anticipated. But she claims that by that time she knew that, fame itself wasn't the answer. Morissette says she recently read something that made a great deal of sense to her: Most people operate on the assumption "that if we do something or have something that we then can be something, as opposed to us being something and that resulting in us having something or doing something." This it's-the-journey-not-the-destination kind of thinking, she says, is something that has helped her a great deal. "I wish people could achieve what they think would give them happiness in order for them to realize that that's not the way that happiness can be found," she says.

It is pointed out that she has the luxury of saying that from the rarefied position of having reached the destination; that people's reaction might be, "Easy for her to say."

"I get 'easy for her to say' all the time. It is much easier for me to say."

Morissette claims not to care how well Supposed does, and it's hard not to assume some disengenuity in this sentiment. At the same time, it seems practical, if one's American debut sells 28 million copies worldwide, not to bet the farm on its follow-up topping that number-which, so far, it hasn't. The main way in which Jagged Little Pill influenced Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, she says, is that this time around, Morissette knew people would hear the songs, so she talked to a lot of the people that she wrote them about. On the album's second single, "Unsent," Morissette addresses various real-life exes with real-life details from the relationships (the names have been changed). If "You Oughta Know" was songwriting as primal scream therapy, "Unsent" is songwriting as group therapy: She called all of the guys in the song, some of whom she hadn't spoken to since she became famous. "It was hard," she says, "but it was beautiful. I took responsibility. It wasn't just me pointing the finger. I really don't want to write another song where every night I sing it I feel a knot in my stomach." This, she says, happened every time she performed "You Oughta Know" on tour, because she hadn't confronted the man it was about. "I kept thinking about him and the relationship and I would return to the same place I was when I wrote the song."

The video for "You Oughta Know" was the usual mŽlange of quick cuts and blurred close-ups that are employed to build up a "Who's that girl?" intrigue for a new artist. But in her third video, for "Ironic," she mined a sweet Ali-MacGraw-in-Love-Story vein, and each of the following videos zoomed in closer and longer; the album's final clip, for "Head Over Feet," was an extreme close-up of her unmade-up face. Morissette followed this self-exposure theme on Supposed even more literally, curving naked around the CD itself, and appearing starkers in the "Thank U" video. The CD picture is graceful and sexy, but the video is neither of these things. She looks odd standing in the middle of the street staring straight ahead; sitting on the subway, decidedly not trying to pose herself in the most flattering position her body will hold. It is a brave display, made even more so by the fact she could easily have filmed the naked parts on a blue screen and have the extras added later. But that option didn't occur to her. "Part of what I was communicating was the vulnerability and the empowerment that comes from [being naked]. And I don't know how vulnerable it would been for me to be in front of a blue screen."

Nakedness is the album's figurative theme as well. On "That I Would be Good," the weepy, spare slow-dance ballad that could well turn out to be the record's "My Heart Will Go On," Morissette plays a wrought flute solo that calls special attention to the sounds of her inhalations between breaths. It's trembly moments like these that Morissette hopes are taken to heart: a young woman unafraid to show her seams and imperfections; an artist whose talent is indigenous and hard to tame; an independent thinker who is not simply the product of a producer's vision.

At 17 songs, Supposed certainly doesn't feel like bloodless corporate product. It sometimes meanders. "It wasn't what I expected, but I didn't know what I expected," says Morissette's longtime manager Scott Welch. "I thought she was bold. I don't know many people who would just open their life like that." Liz Phair, who opened for Morissette for the first ten dates of her current arena tour, was similarly struck. "Let me put it this way," she says. "I really respect her process of music-making and that's what I hear on the record. There's this sense that this is a gift that we need. It's not just to please other people; it's a way to navigate our own lives."

But while this new outlook is clearly making Morissette a happier person, whether or not it will be good for business is unclear. Subtlety is not always a useful tool in the making of a rock song, and the millions of teenage girls who not only made her a star, but also helped establish a massive new market in her wake, may be more interested in the Morissette who had fewer, more clearly demarcated dimensions. Supposed has already been certified triple platinum, but at press time has dropped to No. 31 on the Billboard album charts. And while "Uninvited," her phenomenally popular contribution to the City of Angels soundtrack, proves there's still a considerable audience for her-in addition to which, most bizzers predict that the record's sales will reignite on the strength of "Unsent" and "That I Would Be Good"-the public's early reaction has been chillier than anticipated. Scott Welch says that in light of the tremendous build-up, there was no way there wouldn't be some cool-off: "There was such anticipation for the record the first week of 'Thank U,'" he says. "And that's what scares me, because you'd go into a market like Houston, and it was on five different radio stations in five different formats. So instead of the record having the opportunity to grow, people got hit over the face with it. And after a while it was like, 'Okay, we've had enough.'"

The scene backstage at the Amnesty International concert at Bercy Stadium is like an exhibit from the Living Museum of Rock'n'Roll History. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant are ho-ho-ho-ing around, back-slapping and hand-shaking various industry types, as Bruce Springsteen chats up the fashion designer Stella (daughter of Paul) McCartney. Charlie Watts, looking ancient and impeccable, kibitzes. A dozen or so people are watching Youssou N'Dour and Peter Gabriel perform on a video monitor. Morissette ventures out of her dressing room and takes an admiring look. "He's still following his muse," she says, nodding in Gabriel's direction. She feels a distinct rapport with male rock stars of a certain age, and thinks of them as career role models. She has met Neil Young on a few occasions, and says that "I think that we're on the same page on a certain level. I just feel like he has my back." Over the last few years, she says, "[When] there were certain decisions I had to make, I would think 'What would Neil do?'" Much later that evening, when it is time to head for the airport and on to Oslo, there will suddenly be a surge of concern among the crew when Morissette cannot be found; she is finally located in a quiet corner, having a heart-to-heart with Springsteen. The guys in her band drift in and out of their dressing room, picking at the usual array of out-of-season fruits, champagne, beer, soda, and candy bars. There have been some personnel changes: Bass player Chris Chaney and guitarist Nick Lashley, who were on the Jagged tour, are back; drummer Taylor Hawkins famously decamped for the Foo Fighters and has been replaced by Gary Novak. Guitarist Joel Shearer, formerly of the band Super 8, and keyboardist Deron Johnson are the other new guys. They are a uniformly low-affect and friendly group, the type of nice fellas who carry around pictures of their dogs in their wallets and buy sweaters at Prada to bring home to their girlfriends. They are beer-rather-than-liquor drinkers. Echinacea abusers. For fun, they incite a food fight, hurling Bounty bars across the partition to the dressing room where Morissette and her assistant Patricia Fuenzalida are hanging out; a seven-minute hailstorm of citrus fruits, potato chips, and cookies ensues.

This is about as wild as it gets. On the Jagged Little Pill tour, however, it was another story. Playing to adoring arena audiences for the first time, Morissette allowed herself to indulge the chick rocker myth. "It wasn't to the point where I'd be drunk every night, but I definitely partied," she says. "And I had so much fun, I have to say. Just running around drunk on sake in Tokyo at four in the morning with the guys in my band. Going out to clubs and dancing, all of us as a posse and just ripping up the dance floor. Staying up all night. It was very rock'n'roll."

A half hour before her Oslo set, Morissette and Fuenzalida-an affable 36-year-old former record company employee-settle in to select a stage outfit. Morissette has become interested in fashion lately, and Fuenzalida had fun going to designers and stores to pick out clothes for her before the tour. Now she opens a trunk and unpacks pants, skirts, and tops in reds and purples-filmy and luxe in a rich hippie sort of way-and lays them out. Morissette dresses in a purply-black skirt-over-pants ensemble, and sits down to apply a thick layer of sparkly eye shadow and glossy lipstick. "I'm so excited to be able to wear makeup and glitter and shoes with heels," she says. "I hadn't bought shoes with heels in five years."

On the last tour, she dressed like the guys in the band, in jeans and oversize T-shirts, and reveled, she says, in "being really masculine." It was a far cry from-and, safe to say, a reaction to-her days as a teen pop starlet back home in Canada, when she had big mall-hair, and wore makeup, miniskirts, and heels. This back-and-forth between extremes has defined much of her life so far, she says. "The pendulum swings from my being really feminine and sort of stereotypically adhering to that stereotype and [then] going 'fuck that' and going to the other end. And realizing that the other end was kind of equally unfulfilling." These days, she adds, "I feel like I'm kind of dangling on the middle where I can balance."

Like too many other perfectionistic young women, Morissette spent the better part of her adolescence struggling with eating disorders, and there are references on Supposed to a difficult relationship with her body that will sound familiar to any woman who has ever faced down a compulsive relationship with food. "I would fluctuate between moments of feeling as though I had anorexia and moments of feeling that I was bulimic, but not really sticking to any of them," she says. "Just bouncing between both. And not being happy at all." As she has whenever she's wanted to figure out a problem, she read self-help books. "There were books saying it was an addiction, there were books saying it was a control issue, there were books saying it was a distraction from focusing on things in my life. There were so many reasons, and I think some applied more than others. There were times, especially during my teenaged years, where I was obsessed with perfection. It was all just very confusing, very sad."

She doesn't feel like the problems really went away for good until she got off the road and started training for triathlons. "Having struggled with my view of my body for so long resulted in my having a kind of toxic relationship with exercise," she says. "When I was younger I just loved running and biking and swimming and playing," she says, "but as I went through the teen years and my relationship with my body became so confusing, my relationship with sports became confusing too. It was so liberating to do a triathlon and do it for the reasons I used to play sports when I was 12."

Morissette is also enjoying the best relationship of her life, with an actor named Dash Mihok (he played Benvolio to Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo in Romeo + Juliet and was onscreen for a few moments in The Thin Red Line). They met on a big celebrity junket to Cuba last year. "All I can reveal is that it's very healthy and communicative. It's great. It's the first one," she says. Mihok is exactly one week older than Morissette which is a much narrower margin than she is used to. From the age of 14 until about three years ago, Morissette was always involved with older men-15 or 20 years older. "It might sound like it was darkly unhealthy, but it was exciting for me because I could have the kind of conversations with 40-year-old men that I would never be able to have with people my age," she says. Finally being able to have a relationship with a peer has been an important shift. "I don't need the person I'm dating to be the person that motivates or inspires me solely," she says. There is something of the music-world outsider about Morissette: She's not the type to be seen popping a cork on Puffy's yacht. She does not, in fact, have much in common with her contemporaries in the business, or have much invested in trying to impress them. Which is probably a good thing, given that few artists have been quite so thoroughly reamed, by critics and colleagues alike, as she.

"When someone says something very cruel, it hurts," she admits. "But when someone says something that is obviously so far from the truth, how can it really hurt that badly? It can't, because it's so obviously about them. So whenever someone asked me about artists who are very public about not liking me or my record, I've already dealt with it. That's why I can have this kind of peaceful answer, because I've already contemplated it in a song."

She is equally unapologetic about another accusation that has dogged her: that she doesn't have any influences to speak of. Most artists, when asked about musicians they admire, can rattle off a laundry list of names, and it is startling Morissette doesn't. "I would much rather have written a song than heard one," she says casually.

But what would she say to people who accuse her of not understanding rock-who say that you have to understand what came before you in order to be an artist? "I would say, 'Apparently not.'"

(12/21/98, 1 p.m. PST) - Her latest album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which is No. 16 in its sixth week on the chart, may not be performing as well as the record-setting Jagged Little Pill, but you can still expect Alanis Morissette fans to turn out in droves when she launches a world tour on Jan. 30 in New Orleans.

Before heading overseas, Morissette will focus on the U.S. in the tour's first leg. Supporting Morissette for the first eight days of the tour, Jan. 30-Feb. 13, will be fellow acclaimed female rocker Liz Phair. After Phair's stint, Garbage will hold the opening spot for 25 shows, Feb. 15-April 7.

Morissette's tour is expected to last through December 1999 with stops in Europe, the U.K., Canada, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the Far East.

To coincide with the opening of the tour, Maverick Recording Co. will release "Unsent" as the follow-up single to the No. 1 hit "Thank U."

The 1999 world tour follows Morissette's club tour of North America and her appearance at Amnesty International's concert to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, which was held Dec. 10 at Bercy Stadium in Paris. The following day, Morissette appeared at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo.

(10/15/98, 6 p.m. PDT) - Alanis Morissette is currently on the road playing intimate theater dates, but some lucky VIPs got an even more up-close-and-personal performance Wednesday afternoon at the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank, Calif.

The special concert for employees of Warner Bros., Reprise, Maverick, WEA Corp., and Warner Music Group was billed as "Alanis On The Lot." On a stage constructed on the film studio's Hennesey Street, Morissette and her band played a brief six-song set featuring the current hit "Thank U," "Are You Still Mad," and other songs from Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, her new album, which is due Nov. 3.

For those not lucky enough to catch Alanis on the Warner Bros. studio lot or on a date on her theater tour, sit tight. Today in an interview with modern rock radio station KROQ Los Angeles, the singer said she will launch a full-scale tour in January.

While Alanis is gearing up for the release of her new album, all is not well at the Maverick Recording Co., the label that struck platinum 16 times--that's for sales of 16 million copies in the U.S. alone--with Jagged Little Pill.

An article published in business section of the Los Angeles Times confirmed the long-rumored rift at the label. Co-founder Madonna and young A&R hot-shot Guy Oseary, who has signed such successful acts as Alanis, Prodigy, and Candlebox, want to buy out the label's other co-founder/ CEO, former Madonna manager Freddy DeMann.

Although such inter-company turmoil could have the potential to hurt the promotional campaign behind Supposed Infatuation Junkie, it looks as if Maverick and Alanis are doing just fine. "Thank U" continues to burn up Billboard magazine's airplay charts. It's No. 5 on the Hot 100 Airplay, No. 8 with on the Adult Top 40, No. 9 on Top 40 Mainstream, and No. 13 on Modern Rock Tracks charts. Even more impressive, it's No. 5 on the Big Picture chart, which takes into account airplay on various radio formats.

(4/20/98) - Director Kevin Smith (Chasing Amy, Mallrats, Clerks) has cast Alanis Morissette as God in his next film.

Dogma, currently being filmed in Pittsburgh, is a comedic take on the Bible starring the Oscar-winning team of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as two angels who are banished from heaven to Wisconsin. Morissette blocks the gate to heaven when Affleck and Damon try to re-enter.

Chris Rock, Alan Rickman and Salma Hayek also star in the film, which was written by Smith before he filmed Clerks in 1994.