Talking with EW later, Smith sounds so smitten you might wonder whether he was even kidding. "It's kind of hard not to fall in love with her," he evangelizes. "She just has a serene presence about her, such a calming effect on everything and everyone. A lot of people have a lot of special skills, but she is the single most unique persion I've met. Truthfully, I usually kind of downplay everything surrounding my work, for fear something won't live up to my expectations-but Alanis, she's the closest thing to the divine her on earth."

        But there's a bigger, less messianic burden being placed on the 24-year-old Morissette's silken shoulders. In a time when it seemed not a single rock act of consequence can replicate, commercially or critically, their biggest successes(check those dimishing returns from Pearl Jam, the Smashing Pumpkins, U2, R.E.M, and the rest of the alt-revolution)-and with rap, kid acts, and soundtracks ruling the market-it's now left to Morissette to prove that it is still possible to sustain a thriving career in rock & roll beyond one album. Which is to say, a music industry in stasis looks to her for...well, if not salvation, at least a sign.

        So, on the heels of the best-selling long play of the decade, 1995's Jagged Little Pill(28 million worldwide and counting, 16 million of those certified in the U.S.), her new release, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie(on sale Nov. 3), is regarded in some circles as nothing less than a possible you-know-Who-send. But can even God herself ward off the sophomore jinx?

        With so many so curious to know just what kind of attitude characterizes Morissette's second album-banshee? blissed out?-here, without further ado, is a sample chorus: "Look at me, I'm a girl that some may preconceive/Why do they try to generalize, why are they antagonizing me.../I wantcha/You know I'll never stop 'til I've gotcha/You'll never be quite the same when I rock yah/I'm not the kind of girl that you thought I was..."

        Evidently not. Oops: That was from Morissette's first second album, 1992's Now Is The Time, an out-of-print disc from north of the border, released when she was still an overly made-up, severly bejeweled Canadian teen star using the mononym of Alanis. Encouraged by her Ottowa schoolteacher parents, the moptop spent a season getting slimed on Nickelodeon's You Can't Do That on Television! at age 10, cut her first single shortly thereafter, released her first hit album at 16, and had a nervous breakdown at 17, before professionally regaining her last name and starting from scratch. Jagged Little Pill, set down in the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest-selling debut ever, was actually her third album, if a career starter in spirit.

        Chris Rock, who stars as the apostle Rufus in Dogma, says he and Morissette(whom he's taken to calling "Lanny Love") bonded on an off day while taking in Spike Lee's He Got Game, the story of a basketball prodigy under too much pressure at too tender an age, which resonated all too well. "You remember that scene where the uncle is talking to the kid and asking when he's gonna get his?" asks Rock. "Alanis just turned to me and said, 'That's my life.' And I said, 'That's mine, too!' And we hit it off from there...After you talk to her for a while, and then somebody tells you she's only 25, you're like, 'Get the f--- out of here!' She's got it down, man."

        Before anyone bets against her longevity, then, it may be instructive to recall that by virtue(or vice) of growing up in public, Morissette had the chance to get most of her mistakes out of the way before her second coming. Rather than shirnk from any unflattering memories of a frothily misspent youth, Morissette sympathetically memorializes her prefab teen self in a new song, "UR," which describes her prepubescent introduction to show business, charting her progress-from "naive you are" to "terrified you are" to "ruthless you are" to, finally, self-forgivingly, "precious you are."

        Oh, and "precocious you are"-that, Morissette most emphatically still is. Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie( see review on page 84) is the remarkable, almost relentless confessional journal of a woman age 24 going on to 39. Raging it's not, except in memory.(The one truly angry song, "Pollyanna Flower," has been relegated to a B side, probably for fear of giving anyone too easy an excuse to revive "You Oughta Know"-era stereotypes.) Ironically, perhaps, irony hardly figures into her guileless palette either. The details may be overtly autobiographical in many instances, but the themes in the sharp and earnest veritable soundtrack to The Drama of the Gifted Child will be recognizable to just about anyone who ever reckoned herself an overachiever, professionally or emotionally. Certainly it'll polarize critics an music fans to the same degree her previous album did: It's as easy to image cynics thinking "Get over yourself, Alanis" as they pore through the conversaitonal self-analysis of "I Was Hoping" or "Unsent" as it is to picture those more empathetically inclined getting weepy as she pays homage to her mother in "Heart of the House" or counsels a suicidal friend in "Joining you." Listening to the 17-song set in a straight shot, you might even find yourself indulging in both reactions.

        The real commercial strength of the album can't be gauged before next year, but right now the buzz centers on how many sales Junkie will score its first week, and if it will set a record. Odds are strong that it'll best the '98 mark now held by the Beastie Boy's Hello Nasty, which came out of the box with 681,000. An even loftier goal would be the first-week sales record sinces SoundScan's inception in 1991: the 950,000 copies Pearl Jame's Vs. sold in 1993.

        Not that you'll get anyone at Morissette's label, Maverick or its distributor, Warner Bros.(which, like Entertainment Weekly, is owned by Time Warner), to comment on that-or anything else. Morissette's manager, Scott Welch, has actually imposed an unheard-of gag order on execs at both lables, in what could be considered either a bizarre control-freak power play or a savy anti-jinxing measure. (Further compounding the corporate reticence are the delicate negotiations to renew Warner's profitable partnership with Maverick-complicated by the rumored imminent buyout of cochairman Freddy DeMann, who's reportedly been feuding with his former management client Madonna and Guy Oseary, the A&R wunderkind who signed Morissette.)

        Privately, though, many of these folks will allow that there are certain expectations. "People are hoping that it will sell a million copies, or close to a million, the first week," says a source closely involved with the project. "The feeling that it could be the biggest first week ever. I think everybody believes that, industry-wide." A more disappointing figure would be in the area of 600,000, the source acknowledges, "but dissapointment is a relative term."

        One believer at the retail level is the usually more curmudgeonly Stan Goman, executive VP and COO of Tower Records, who's "buying more than we are for other superstar sophomore records. It's more than we're buying for Jewel. I think the music is there. We haven't had any decent records all summer, and it's coming out before the onslaught of crap in November.... This record I'm not skeptical about."

        But retailers might be alarmed by the less-is-more approach Morissette and her manager are taking toward promotion; they've lined up just half a dozen interviews with American TV outlets and periodicals this year, and her just wrapped mini-tour hit small halls and clubs in only 13 cities, with a more substantial 1999 tour not yet announced.

        Moreover, before she returned to the studio with Pill producer and cowriter Glen Ballard in early 1998, she'd been almost completely out of the public eye for the better part of two years. When photographers did get her in their sights last year, it wasn't at a Hollywood premiere or nightclub but at a triathlon held northwest of L.A.(Once an overachiever, always an overachiever.) Her other public appearances have been on the humanitarian-interest circuit-Tibetan Freedom benefit concerts, a trip to Cuba, a sojourn in India(which, besides getting a name drop in "Thank U," inspired the less grateful "Baba," her equivalent of the Beatles "Sexy Sadie").

        London's Daily Telegraph last month estimated Morissette's worthy of $50 million or more, thanks in large part to an unusually high royalty rate of roughly a dollar and a half per album that was negotiated before Jagged's release. But the singer is said to live unostentatiously with actor boyfriend Dash Mihok(the subject of Infatuation's uptempo love song "So Pure"), in Brentwood, Calif., where she cooks, paints, and eschews Dolce & Gabbana in favor of proletarian twenty-something haunts like Urban Outfitters. Acquaintances speak of her, if not in the divine terms favored by Smith, as living with her fame swetly and gracefully-which, give the temptations afforded her, may count somewhere next to godliness.

        "Now, she's a business story, and that's not great for music, because the public doesn't like to think of themselves as being part of a commodity," says Mercury president Danny Goldberg, chief at the Warner label when her last album came out. "Record companies do the best job when they're invisible, and I think [Maverick's] doing a good job of that." Says MTV music programming senior VP Tom Calderone: "The last album was not forced down people's throats. When I was in radio and was delivered the song ["You Oughta Know"], I was like, Wow, what is this? There wasn't this big hype machine six months before the record came out. And no one has seen a 'reinvention' on her with this record; it's just getting delivered via video and radio. Music fans, no matter how old they are, always want to feel they've discovered something. And to some extent, Alanis still feels like a secret."

        Morissette's beleaguered publicist, Mitch Schneider, has a mantra he's compelled to repeat probably dozens of times a day: "She just doesn't want to be overexposed."

        Tell it to her video director.

        It's just a few letters from God to Godiva, after all. Stephane Sednaoui, the director who helmed Morissette's multiple-personality "Ironic" clip, is explaining how he came up with the story line for "Thank U," which would have her as a sort of stranger in a strange land, moving freely among the people, occasionally touching and being touched in a nonsexual, healing way. "If you listen to the lyrics of the song," says Sednaoui, "she's talking about being completely with no protection. It's about trust and being completely open and comfortable, ready to receive and ready to give.... When I went to Alanis with that concept, she liked it very much, and she said that that point, 'You know what? I would love to be naked in that video.' And I said, 'Wow! Fantastic! That's great.'"

        Well, naturally. But didn't anybody tell them you can't do that on television?

        Evidently not. MTV and VH1 are delighted to finally have a video that is, like in days of old, prompting discussions at the water cooler. And though Sednaoui claims that he and Morissette had not the slightest thought of overt provocation-let alone an attention-getting jump start that might render the rest of her nonexistent promotional campaign irrelevant-the stir the video is causing is evident on America Online, where on day last week the Morissette message board collected a staggering 2,300 new posts, a good percentage of which concern the video(or various body parts therein).

        To answer a few prevalent Net questions: Yes, that is her body. No, they didn't shoot her on a set and digitally superimpose her on the street scenes; the clip was shot over two nights on the deserted streets of downtown Los Angeles and in a nearby subway and supermarket. Yes, she really was buck nekkid, except for two-inch latex patches over her nipples(to comply with local laws) and a patch over what the French Sednaoui charmingly refers to as "her sex." And no, Morissette never felt nervous about wearing her birthday suit for the all-night shoots. "She really felt dressed up," the director says. Oh, go now! "No, really. Psychologically, when you wear very strong makeup over your body, many women do feel a bit dressed."

        One last question: Is she supposed to be, like, God, or what?

        "Oh no. We didn't want her to be a Madonna or divinity. We didn't want her to be unreachable. In the video, she's a human being who just chooses to go a bit further for all of us."

        Mortal? That might be blashemy to the likes of Kevin Smith(we sense a theologically based MTV Celebrity Deathmatch coming on).

        "I know it sounds like a publicity stunt, or me casting a crush, but it was an uphill battle," says the Dogma director, who put Morissette at his movie's celestial center after Oscar winner Emma Thompson dropped out of the project. "Finally, the powers that be [at Miramax] relented.... I guess some people were wondering why I cast her: I guess I owe it to [Dogma costar] Linda Fiorentino," who was well aware of Smith's infatuation with the singer: "One day Linda was in her makeup trailer and said, 'I met Alanis.' I said, 'Yeah.' And she was like, 'So, God is who you love, isn't it?' And that's exactly it."