articles
"What winds up happening before I'm writing a record is that I don't really listen to anything, perhaps for fear of being overly influenced. There's an element of having to be in your own reality when you're about to write about it. But now the record is done; I went out and bought Lauryn Hill and the new Liz Phair because I feel I can let go of anything I've created and move into a less self-absorbed world, which is extremely exciting now."
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NEW YORK -- In one of her recent songs, Alanis Morissette expressed a simple wish: "That I would be good."
Tuesday night, in her debut on the
dramatic
stage, in an off-Broadway
production of Eve
Ensler's play "The Vagina
Monologues," her wish
was granted, with interest.
Before a small crowd of 300, which
included
many of her fans (including one woman
who said
she travelled from Ottawa especially
for the
show) and her parents Alan and
Georgia, the
Ottawa native proved she
was good, and then
some.
Although the production is the
singer's first shot
at stage acting, it's not her first
dramatic role. As a
teen, she
performed slapstick skits on the kids
show "You Can't Do That On
Television," and
during her first brush with fame as a
dance-pop
diva, she appeared alongside Corey
Haim in a
probably best-forgotten high school
cross-dressing comedy known variously
as
"Anything For Love,"
"Just One Of The Girls" and
"Boys Will Be Girls."
More recently, she appeared as a
beatific, mute
God in Kevin Smith's irreverent
"Dogma," and
has taken a shot at acting in her own
videos. So
Morissette is not a complete novice,
but "The
Vagina Monologues" is her first
shot at serious
acting, and although
expectations seem to have
been managed down -- there was no
advance
press beyond an initial announcement
and no
flashy opening night festivities --
this is New
York, and the tiny basement Westside
Theatre is
just a few blocks west of Broadway's
Times
Square epicentre, so the stakes are
high.
Early in the production, it seemed
Morissette
was to be consigned to junior partner
status,
edged out of the heaviest dramatic
portions of
Ensler's text by her two more seasoned
co-stars
-- Tony Award winning stage veteran
Shirley
Knight and Second City alumna Andrea
Martin.
Yet by the end of the 90 minute
performance, it
was Morissette who provided the
evening's most
powerful and affecting moments,
something that
bodes well for her planned foray
further into
acting.
"The Vagina Monologues" was
created by Ensler
in 1997, based on hundreds of
interviews with a
wide variety of women -- everyone from
a
six-year-old girl to women
in their 70s --
speaking on the topic of their
vaginas. Although
that sounds like a recipe for an
evening of
squirming in your theatre seat, the
piece is often
riotously funny and deeply poignant.
The play
casts a different trio of actors every
couple of
weeks. Knight, Martin and
Morissette replace
Cynthia Nixon, Rita Moreno and Marlo
Thomas,
and will themselves be replaced in the
coming
weeks.
The austere production -- three
chairs and three
microphones, actors barefoot and
dressed in
black -- doesn't allow the cast enough
latitude to
ham it up or chew scenery, and that's
a good
thing. Ensler's text provides plenty,
and credit
should probably go to director Joe
Mantello for
some superb choices, dividing up the
parts among
his three actors, casting to their
strengths and
against type.
Knight -- the senior member of the
cast -- was
believable speaking in the voice of
the
six-year-old (who believes her vagina
smells like
snowflakes) and as an older woman who
has
come to think of her sex as a
padlocked, musty
basement. Her
show-stopping turn, though, came
when she articulated (I'm not kidding)
the "angry
vagina," enumerating the
indignities visited upon
women, and eliciting the kind of
response from
the audience usually reserved for
gospel
preachers.
Martin's comic timing and gift of
mimicry is
well-known to SCTV fans, and the
ensuing years
have only sharpened her talent. She
conjured an
appropriately stuffy British accent
for an inhibited
woman who discovers the
wonder of her own
body during a hopelessly new-agey
"vagina
workshop." She was at once tragic
and hilarious
recounting the story of a homeless
woman's
gradual sexual awakening and delivered
a fiery
monologue about pubic hair.
But Martin's piece de resistance came
as she
portrayed a lesbian sex worker who
enumerated
the different sounds women deliver
during sex --
the elegant moan, the right-on-it
moan, the
mountain-top moan, the machine-gun
moan and
even the Alanis Morissette moan,
customized by
Martin from Ensler's original text,
which labelled it
the Grace Slick moan.
For much of her time onstage,
Morissette
seemed content to wring laughs out of
her lines
with deadpan delivery. But the play's
most
emotionally challenging monologue, a
Bosnian
woman recounting her time in a
"rape camp," fell
to her. As she haltingly described to
the hushed
audience the woman's experience of
being raped
by a soldier's rifle barrel,
Morissette wept and
then loudly sobbed, making her
character's
unimaginable agony almost tangible.
Later, she recited a monologue from a
woman
intent on reclaiming ... let's just
call it the "C"
word, and Morissette luxuriated in the
character's
relish for the very sound of it,
milking it for all its
phonetic and linguistic potential.
When Morissette
concluded by loudly, repeatedly
declaring the
word in question with orgasmic elan, a
clearly-impressed Knight
announced: "That's it.
I'm going home!"
The two monologues highlighted
underappreciated aspects of
Morissette's talent.
The latter demonstrated her skill at
phrasing and
her undervalued ability to use her
voice as an
instrument (something she occasionally
uses to
great effect on her records).
The former echoed a
performance Morissette gave at a small
Ottawa
club, just before "Jagged Little
Pill" was released.
"You Oughta Know" was then
a fresh song,
undiminished by saturation airplay or
a million
copycat singers and songs. That night,
Morissette
tore into the number with palpable
fury, and by
the end of the song, she seemed to
likewise be on
the verge of tears.
She is an artist who seems incapable
of resisting
climbing way out on an emotional limb
and is
happy to run the risk of seeming sappy
or
melodramatic (which occasionally
happens). The
same courage to abandon herself to the
peformance, to put herself emotionally
on the line,
charges the best of her work.
What audiences responded to then, and
what the
audience for this
opening performance of "The
Vagina Monologues" likewise
responded to, is
Morissette's fearless honesty.
**********************************************************************
She
has sold 37 million albums, played God in a motion picture, and shot a
music video in the buff. So what more could Alanis Morissette do?
Well, she could talk about
vaginas, for one thing.
And that's just what the
rock star from Ottawa did
on Tuesday night when
she made her stage debut
in The Vagina
Monologues, an
off-Broadway production
at the Westside Theatre in
Manhattan.
Appearing alongside veteran actresses Shirley Knight and Andrea
Martin of Second City fame, Morissette moved a sold-out crowd to
cheers and tears in playwright Eve Ensler's gripping 90-minute show.
Cheers rained down on Morissette after a side-splitting monologue
about a pejorative, four-letter word for vagina that begins with
"C."
Her
animated and profanity-laced performance brought the house down
-- and caused Knight to pause before beginning the next reading.
"OK,"'
said Knight, who has won one Tony, two Emmies and one Cannes
Critics' Award. "I'm going home
now."
Tears flowed during Morissette's reading of My Vagina Was My
Village, a monologue about a Muslim woman who was raped in Bosnia
by soldiers with a rifle, bottles, sticks and the end of a broom.
Morissette choked out the words as she sobbed on stage in the middle
of the reading, and tears were streaming down her cheeks by the time
she finished. The audience cried with her, moved by the evening's most
poignant moment.
With the exception of a few nitpicks -- she seemed nervous at the start
and suddenly abandoned a Bosnian accent early on in the rape
monologue -- Morissette did a terrific acting job with very difficult
and
diverse material.
Culled from more than 200 interviews conducted with women of various
ages and races on the subject of their genitals, The Vagina Monologues
is alternately hilarious and deeply disturbing. Readings jockey back and
forth between the silly -- If Your Vagina Got Dressed, What Would it
Wear -- and the serious -- genital mutilation, sexual abuse and
childbirth.
A sensation from the start, the show premiered in a small theatre in
SoHo in 1996 as a one-woman production starring Ensler. It was
expanded to include teams of three
actresses, each working two weeks,
when the current run began on Feb. 8.
She joined the audience and laughed heartily at her own expense when
Martin adlibbed during a monologue that ends with a series of
impersonations of the exaggerated moans that accompany lovemaking.
Martin threw in an "Alanis Morissette moan'' -- a rock singer
shouting,
"Yeah, yeah, yeah" over and over again.
Although nervous at the start, the singer, who was dressed in jeans and
a
long-sleeved shirt, became much more comfortable as the show wore
on. By the end, she was sitting barefoot atop her red, velvet chair,
cross-legged in a yoga position. The audience, which was curious about
her being cast in the production, responded with a huge ovation at the
end.
Fans, many of whom had traveled quite a distance to see her, were
gushing afterwards. Trisa Ziegler took a 3 p.m. train from King of
Prussia, Pennsylvania, to get to the show on time. "I only came
because
she was in it," said Ziegler, 22, a college student who came with
her
friend, Phil Ceccola, a photographer from Bridgeport, Pa. "I didn't
know
what to think when the show started, but as it went along I really
enjoyed it.
Once it was over, two dozen fans waited for more than an hour in the
lobby for Morissette. They had flowers and stuffed animals to give to
her, photographs and CDs for her to sign. Martin and Knight eventually
emerged and obliged, but Morissette didn't. For safety's sake, she
couldn't really, because there were also at least 100 people waiting for
her outside, and they would have rushed the front doors.
************************************************************************
My Teenage Years in Hell
by Alanis Morissette (Rolling Stone)
Alanis Morissette (1987-1994) If you'd have met me in high school, you would have thought I was happy-I seemed outgoing and confident. But inside there was a kind of terror. The whole era was me searching for who I was and who I wasn't. I felt that I didn't look the way I was supposed to look: I was suposed to be rail thin. Every girl was. I was a perfectionist and tried to please everyone around me and wanted to be the person society wanted me to be. Therapy and reading books and talking to people and questioning society helped. The more conscious we become of society's messages, the less power it has. <p>I was confused about why I couldn't sustain a relationship for longer than a week. I'd date men who were much older than I was and be intellectually inspired and excited-but I also feel emotionally young and awkward. I tried to date people my age, but I felt like I was their older sister. I spent alot of time alone. I wrote poetry, but there was no way I was willing to share that pain with anybody, so a lot of times I would finish a diary and burn it. There was joy in high school too; I don't want to falsely portray it as being a one-dimensionally horrible time. My parents had instilled something in me that made me realize that there was another side to the hell, that there was the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, which many of my friends didn't see.
Morissette pointed out in a written statement that listening to Amos' Little Earthquakes as a youth in Canada was a moving experience that she hopes to continue through their touring relationship, noting, ''I look forward to playing with a woman whom I will be touched by nightly on a musical, intellectual, spiritual and emotional level.''<p> Amos downplayed the serious expectations of a tour populated by songs of introspection and occasional rage, adding, ''Bringing two visions together to make one show can be tricky, so obviously, it takes a lot of mutual respect and a load of gear.With that in mind, Alanis and I are bringing two trucks just for ourselves: one filled with wine, the other filled with lip gloss."
************************************************************************
Shirley Manson (Garbage) Tour Diary
Friday, April 2 (San Jose, CA)
Ok...so I know what you are all DYING to ask! What is Alanis really like? Firstly...I have to warn you...my mum has always said, "If you don't have anything nice to say then don't say anything at all," and although I have rarely taken her up on that advice, I have to confess...even if I HATED Alanis, it is unlikely that I would say so here. I mean, first off, she could kick us off the tour and then I'd be really up shit's creek without a paddle trying to explain the reason behind such an action to my bewildered bandmates. But all that aside...Alanis (in my more than humble opinion) is a fine woman. She's smart, funny and couldn't be more charming if she tried, yet seems to posess a quiet inner steeliness and brutal strength that is extremely impressive. Now, I have had many heated arguments with people I love and respect over this very topic. Many see the success Alanis has enjoyed as vulgar and undeserved. They believe her to be a charlatan or a manufactured puppet. But I would be willing to bet my life that Ms. Morissette will be around a lot longer than many of her detractors think she will. It is almost irrelevant whether you like her music or not. She is a fine woman. And all smart girls should acknowledge a kindred spirit. ~Shirley Manson
************************************************************************
She's the oddest female star of
recent years, a titan of high seriousness, musical ambition and lyrical angst.
So what do you do: you ask her what was the biggest thing she ever ate. Meet
the cheeky buggers, Alanis Morissette. Sometimes, when Alanis Morissette's in
the room, a calm hangs in the air. In this hotel suite, six floors above a
Paris street, silent apart for the rumble of traffic below and the clicks and
whirs of the Q photographer's camera, the prime Canadian export of the '90's
hunkers on the inner lip of the window's narrow balcony in battered red
corduroys and sandals, revealing the toenails of either foot varnished in
glittery blue and red. Her famously Rapunzelesque hair is approaching a metre
in length. Someone asks her what she
uses on it. "I jump around," she replies. Picturing some daft,
head-banging hair-wash ritual, Q genuinely enquires: Why? Does it make it
curlier? "Oh no!" she gasps, collapsing into a giggling heap. "I
mean I jump around from shampoo to shampoo"
When Alanis Morissette laughs, it's an explosion of teeth and hair. In the flesh, she is Kylie-tiny, pretty, and less strong-jawed and angular than in photographs. Parking herself on a red velvet chair and favouring the Evian over the Camomile tea, she turns to face the interrogation of the Q readers warmly, openly (to a point) and-hey, this is Alanis after all-with a generous pinch of psychobabble.
You've sold 30 million albums, Does this equate to $30 million dollars in your arse pocket? Be honest now. Anon, Liverpool Hmm, thirty million in my pocket & I'm trying to think. (carefully) It all depends. It all depends on taxes and commission's and what's been spent on touring. All the money goes in and out all the time, so it's not a fixed amount. A lot of people in the UK are very interested in how much money has been made&more so than any other place. I find that interesting.
What have you spent the money on? Emma Henderson, Tyne & Wear
Hmm, I bought a house, I bought a house for my parents. I travel around and I fly my friends around a lot. First class mostly, yeah, especially my grandparents. And I give money to charaties, just of my own accord. Give money to people when they don't expect it from me.
Tori Amos said Jagged Little Pill would make a dogs ears hurt. Is that a crushing disappointment since she was your saviour? Jamie Richards, Burnley
I didn't really consider her my saviour, but I was very inspired by her. Inspired by her empowerment through her vulnerability. I'm still a fan of hers, I'll always be a fan.
Everyone has their opinion. Weather they love my record or hate it, I just think being in the public eye and sharing music is an amazing way for people to define themselves and we define ourselves in accordance. We define who we are by what we love and
what we hate. People loving it or hating it, I just take it in the same way. Other people's relationship to what I do doesn't really affect met hat much, although I love inspiring people or (laughs) repulsing them.
Playing God in Kevin Smith's move, Dogma. A tough role? Rebecca Smythe, Darlington
Uh. Tough if I had to play God in the conventional sense of how God is seen. But his and my take on God is just that God is us. So I didn't really have to do anything. I just had to be. Run a myriad of different emotions and be myself. So it was simple But
there's no way up after that, yeah, which I guess is the point.
How do you feel about the fact Radiohead call you Alanis Moris? Tim Tremlett,Cambridge
Oh I love that. They've never called me that to my face, no, but I love it. I call myself Alanis too, so it's OK.
What car do you drive and so you ever break the speed limit? Gregory Ash, Bury St Edmunds
I drive a Wrangler jeep and I definitely muscle along on the speed. I've had my share of tickets, though I've calmed down since then. Progressively I get calmer and calmer as the years go by. I'm figuring at some point I'll reach the stage where I don't speed anymore. The worst accident I had was when I rolled my car off the freeway in Toronto in a snow storm. That was scary. I wasn't going fast but my tyres weren't able to cope and they slid all over the place. Everything kind of froze for a minute& it was
very slow motion. I was in shock and I drove home with my windows all smashed.
India - any trouble with "Delhi Belly"? Jemima Forrest, Darley Dale
Um, definitely got sick. That's when I saw my life flash before my eyes. I got very shaky in India. I think I was allergic actually to the malaria pills that I had started to take. I just started shaking uncontrollably. Shaky and wanting to pass out. I don't think it was a stomach situation, so it wasn't Delhi Belly, but it was life flashing before my eyes.
Where do you live? And what is it like? Sam Parnes, Dartmouth
I live in Los Angeles for now, though I'm thinking
of moving to New York. I've stayed at the beach for a while in Malibu and I
love it. I play volleyball. There's sort of a commune vibe where I live, which
is great 'cause I missed out on that for a long time. Los Angeles isn't very communal, it's very spread out, but I love
the ocean. I love being able to drive two hours and be in Joshua Tree or
Yosemite.
What makes you laugh? Lillian Greaves, Kendal
A sadistic sense of humour. A couple of my closest friends are really sick. Not necessarily perverted, just crazy. Self-deprecating humour.
Have you ever felt sexually attracted to a member of the same sex? Karen Webber,Bristol
(Brightly) Yeah. Mmm. Every once in a while, yeah. Anyone you'd know? No. Any more to add? (Breathless laugh) No
I have a friend who can get a whole loaf of bread in his mouth. What's the biggest thing you've ever eaten in one go? Ernie Dobbs, Barnsley
You didn't write this, right? We had this competition that I used to do where you stick as many crackers as you can in your mouth. I can't remember how many I put in but it was about half the pack. Once your done and you can't fit any more in, you have to try not to laugh or spit it all out. No, I wouldn't win. I'd be a runner-up.
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MTV:Your about to if I continue with this.
MTV:Have you heard of any of the cheesy remixes of your songs?
Alanis:Sure, yeah I love them.They
are amazing. Oh yeah. No worries.Everyone needs to dance!
MTV:What did you have hanging on your wall when you were younger?
Alanis:Kirk Cameron
MTV: Favorite TV Show?
Alanis:Three's Company
MTV:How do you get the dreads to stay in on your album cover?
Alanis: You twist it and fill it up with gunk
MTV:How do you get the Nickolodean slime out of your hair?
Alanis:You stand in the shower
for an extended period of time
MTV:Guys: Are you more likely to go for a father figure or little boy type?
Alanis:Neither(laughing)It was
alwys the father figure and then to compensate I went to the little boy figure,
and now I'm somewhere in the middle
MTV:Beefy guys or skinny guys?
Alanis:(laughing in hysteria)It
doesn't really matter to me.
MTV:How has your diet changed?
Alanis:It is more conscious. The
new rider is alot healthier than last tour. There will still
be nacho chips.
MTV:Do you ever have trouble remembering the words to your songs?
Alanis: YES. Sometimes I use notes on the floor,especially
if it's a new song I've never sung before. Or I just make some stuff while I'm
up there
MTV:What's with the antibiotics line?
Alanis: I was on antibiotics and I
was shaking and kinetic and freaked out. Glen t's with these antibiotics",
and then we wrote the song about 10 minutes later. I’m off them subsequently.
I'm anti-anti-biotics.
**********************************************************************
What do you do if you've made the biggest-selling debut album ever, amassed a fortune, given birth to a new genre of angst-ridden rock, and you're still only 21? You go backpacking in india, of course on the eve of her highly anticipated new album, alanis morissette talks to him de isle about god, gurus, love affairs and why she's no longer afraid of pink
THREE years ago, a young singer-songwriter from Ottawa released her first album on the international market. With a couple of hits as a teenager behind her, she was the unpromising combination of a has-been in Canada and a nobody everywhere else. Her American manager set a sales target of 250,000 copies, 'to establish a base'. It seemed a little optimistic. Then something happened, not suddenly or dramatically, but gradually, inexorably and globally. The sales target was not merely surpassed: it was multiplied by 100.
Twenty-eight million copies later, Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette is one of the bestselling albums of all time; still some way behind Michael Jackson's Thriller (45 million), but closing in fast on Saturday Night Fever (30 million). At the age of 21, Morissette had made the most popular album ever released by a woman. By comparison, Madonna's latest, Ray of Light - this year's bestseller by an individual act - has sold seven million. (But don't cry for her, Argentina: she owns Maverick, the record label that spotted Morissette.)
An unwritten rule states that all the really huge records have to be inoffensive. Morissette blew that idea away like a cobweb. Her sound is full of fury, signifying plenty. The words are the thing, and instead of the usual slogans and formulas, they offer raw candour, shards of autobiography. When an ex-boyfriend struck up with another woman, Morissette didn't get even, she got mad and wrote You Oughta Know, a fabulously uninhibited diatribe which became her signature tune and gave birth to a whole new rock genre - angsty young woman. Her tone of voice left a lot of rock looking awfully polite. But that was the words; the music, traditionally the more important ingredient, was uncomplicated, almost masculine - big, beefy and built to be belted out by crowds of thousands in football stadiums. She was half Sylvia Plath, half Bruce Springsteen.
Now, at 24, Morissette is a multi-millionaire. Her manager may not be a clairvoyant, but he was shrewd enough to accept a low advance in return for a high royalty. Morissette will have been paid about a dollar-and-a-half for every copy of Jagged Little Pill sold: total $42 million, or £25 million. Take off 15 or 20 per cent for the manager's cut (she has also made millionaires of those around her), but put it back again to allow for videos, singles, T-shirts and tour programmes; throw in radio royalties, and you have a grand total that must be more than $50 million.
The price Morissette pays for that - or one of many prices - is that she now has a formidably hard act to follow, and there are plenty of people who would be delighted to see her fall off her pedestal. With the release of Jagged Little Pill came mutterings that she was a phoney, barely recognisable from the disco moppet she had been at the age of 16. (Morissette's convincing response was, 'I'm not that clever.') But it is fair to say that her music is easy to dislike. On the Internet, where she looms larger than anywhere, one of the 93 websites devoted to her is called the Coalition Against Alanis Morissette.
To add to the pressure, Jagged Little Pill, her third album, was promoted as her debut on the grounds that records not released in America don't count. It sounds absurd, but it has worked: there she is in the new Guinness Book of Records, under Biggest-Selling Debut Album. The downside is that the follow-up counts as a second album - and is therefore vulnerable to Sophomore Syndrome, one of rock's deadlier diseases.
At Warner Brothers in Los Angeles, which handles marketing for Maverick, security is tighter than a guitarist's trousers. Record companies are paranoid about privacy and no album this year will be more bootleggable. The title has been announced - Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, very Morissette - but the actual CD can on no account be let out of the building. The same even goes for the lyric sheet. Two things are instantly clear when the album is played: it sounds like an Alanis Morissette record; and it doesn't.
The trick in rock, as in any artform, is to develop a distinctive voice without repeating yourself. When I interviewed Morissette in mid-ascent, early in 1996, she was irritated to be asked whether she was going to be able to find inspiration in feelings other than anger. Here, she proves it, cutting back on the wrath but maintaining the rawness. Her lyrics continue to show a healthy disrespect for the traditional parameters of pop. Eating disorders, mother-daughter relationships, psychotherapy, fame and fortune, hypocrisy, Western attitudes to Eastern religion, power struggles between lovers, sexual boundaries between colleagues, condescension towards women by men if her generation agonises about it, Morissette sings about it.
Musically, she and her co-writer, the well-travelled producer Glen Ballard, have moved on. The rugged settings and the big choruses are still there, but the 17 songs span the spectrum from a scream to a whisper. One track, That I Would Be Good, is a gentle folk song, ruminative and beguiling - startlingly so, from the woman best known for You Oughta Know. On several songs, there are even strings.
Morissette is installed in a hotel for interviews. Back in 1996, it was a drab three-star establishment in New York. In 1998, it's the Bel-Air, nestling in a tropical garden that is to most of LA roughly what heaven is to hell. Last time, Morissette sat bolt upright at one end of a sofa and looked me in the eye only at the end of each answer. This time, she parks herself suavely in a pink armchair, feet tucked in under her hip, and seldom loses eye contact. Her Medusa hair is tied back in a bun. She wears a grey V-neck jumper that could be from Gap, well-worn jeans that could be from anywhere, and a thin string of wide-spaced beads that could be from India. (The whole outfit must have cost at least $80.) She seems more at ease in her own skin now, and talks at one point of having accepted the shape she has been given, which is more womanly than you might expect from her long, thin face.
Rock stars giving interviews tend to be either jokey or earnest. The record for earnestness in the presence of my tape-recorder was held for a long time by the young U2, but it has now passed to Morissette. (Her seriousness, like theirs, is relieved by a ready laugh.) An ex-boyfriend has described her as 'very introspective, but at the same time a bright and happy person', which rings true. She speaks in long and winding sentences, which bear the traces of her past like lines on a face: of the fact that English was not a first language for either her French-Canadian-Irish father or her mother, who fled Hungary as a child in 1956; that both parents are teachers; that she herself is a voracious reader but turned down a university place; above all, of the time she has spent in therapy, following a nervous breakdown at 16, brought on, she says, by the pressure of 'trying to control myself to be what other people [the industry] wanted me to be'. In conversation, as on disc, she likes to pack a lot in. Never has superstardom been accompanied by so many relative clauses.
Morissette is the classic case of the overnight sensation who is nothing of the kind. When she was nine, her parents took Alanis and her two brothers (one is her non-identical twin) to California in the family camper-van. They bought a 'star-map' and made their way to Olivia Newton-John's house, where, the story goes, the young Morissette pressed the intercom and said something like, 'Olivia? I don't know if you can see me. But if you can, I'm going to be big like you some day.' The tale is so corny it's hard to believe, but when I mention having come across it in one of the books about her - there are already a dozen - Morissette corrects only one detail: it was her parents, not her, who bought the star-map. These days, to make the circle even neater, she herself lives in LA, and hopes to escape the attentions of the star cartographers.
She was still nine when she made her first recordings, performing songs by Madonna and one she had written herself, which was released as a single. At 10, she was a regular on a children's TV show; at 16, she was making hit singles and winning a Juno award (a Canadian Grammy); and, at 21, she was an international sales phenomenon, with four Grammys and two Brit awards on the mantelpiece.
Where on earth do you go from there? Answer: India. After coming off the road - 245 concerts, twice round the world, trying to keep pace with her own popularity - Morissette did what middle-class people do when they are under 25 and have some time off. She went backpacking.
She did it slightly differently from her contemporaries. At the start, she was joined by her mother, her aunts and a few girlfriends, all of whom flew halfway across the world at her expense. 'It was my Christmas gift to them. My business manager said to me that every one of his clients has one thing that they spend their money on, and mine is flying people around the world.' In August, she paid for her mother and grandmother to return to Hungary, where her grandmother had not been since 1956.
India raised the awful possibility of Morissette finding peace and losing her bite. She did fall for the place, and she would like to show you her photos (they're on her new website at www.alanismorissette.com, along with some poems). And she has put some sitars on her album, George Harrison-style, and written a song about the religious communities - but it's a scathing one. 'A lot of the environments that were touted as being very safe and nurturing and spiritual were in fact very competitive and judgmental,' she says. 'There'd be competition as to who was more spiritual than whom Human ego and human frailty permeate everything, every community.' On the page, this will probably look sanctimonious, but her tone remains amiable. She is the kind of girl who could give self-righteousness a good name.
On another song - the first single Thank U (out on Monday, into the charts at No 1 next Sunday) - Morissette sings, 'Thank you India thank you disillusionment', and she confirms that she was very disillusioned: 'In a great way, though, in that it further confirmed the fact that I don't have to travel anywhere, or talk to a specific guru or person, or go to any church, to be able to see who I am or feel my connection with God. Really, the more I encountered it, the more it confirmed what I had always believed.' Spoken like a true semi-lapsed Catholic.
Back in America, she settled in her new house in LA. Strange that the woman who has given rock a shot of reality should choose to live in a place that feels so unreal. 'I love California - wintertimes in Canada were so cold. And there's an inspiring energy in this city. The very fact that you're with a lot of people that you're not at all like, it very much defines who you are.'
But isn't it an alienating place? 'It can be. It can also be very beautiful. I brought my Canadian culture and now I truly believe that I have the best of both worlds, because LA has so much to offer and what it's sorely lacking is the safety and the nurturing and the communication - it's a very judgmental city.'
And somewhat obsessed with celebrity, I suggest.
'There's a lot of fear, a lot of people feeling as though celebrity status somehow will make them feel whole, raise their self-esteem, make them a "better person". And there's a part of me that wishes somehow that they could all have what they think will give them this, in order to see' - a small triumphant laugh - 'that it exactly won't.'
Good idea. Give everyone a little dose of celebrity. 'Yuh! That'd be great!'And what would we discover?
'That everything is the same, only more so.' A bigger laugh. 'I do know of a lot of people that become celebrities and are intoxicated by it, and they would probably vehemently disagree with me that it's not all it's touted to be. It's very drug-like - if you need a drug. If you don't take drugs, it's pretty transparent.'
Not the least of her achievements is that she largely eludes the paparazzi. 'I can sneak in and out of places I don't court it and I'm not fodder.' The word makes her giggle. 'I don't feel very fodderish.'
Morissette has fewer friends now than three years ago, 'but better quality'. Inevitably, people treat her differently. 'And at first I saw it as the bane of my existence, the concept of fame and people's reaction to it around me. But I quickly realised that it was a great gauge for me to see what kind of people I was dealing with. It's one that you wish you could turn on and off, but it's served me well so far.'
She also experienced a low of sorts after the high of success: 'The low was more that I wasn't able to process it and be objective about it. There was a gradual healing of certain wounds - not just wounds that I had discovered over the last couple of years but from a way back - that I finally had the time and energy to delve into, as opposed to constantly being distracted by what I saw as ambition, and all kinds of things that can distract us from who we really are. For a long time I had had a kinetic, driven lifestyle.'Asked if she is still ambitious, she takes a rare pause. 'No. I feel very inspired, very passionate, but not at all ambitious.'
Drive like hers doesn't disappear, it just goes in different directions. In the gap between albums, Morissette went to Cuba, Canada and San Francisco as well as India, and took up the triathlon - the pastime for advanced masochists which involves an 18-mile bike ride, a 1.5-mile ocean swim and a five-mile run. She also tried to re-think her priorities, or re-feel them: 'I used to intellectualise my feelings and rationalise them and explain them. I reached a point finally where I could just feel them and enjoy them and not have to explain them, which was a big turning point for me because I had always erred on the side of being intellectual and slightly denied myself the youthful, exuberant, visceral emotions. I would write about and feel my visceral emotions, but it would always have to be filtered through my head.'
The turning point came when the supposed former infatuation junkie fell in love. 'It was when I met the person that I wrote So Pure about,' she explains. This is a track on the new album, a fast love song that conveys the headiness of the early days of an affair. 'He's very heart. And, of course, there was an attraction just because we were such complementary forces - that which he had denied in himself, I had an abundance of, and that which I had denied in myself, he had an abundance of, and so we just it's the classic romantic, seemingly inexplicable attraction - but it's quite explicable, really.'Just as I am thinking, 'And this is what she is like now she has stopped intellectualising her feelings', she giggles, more girlishly than before, and says with sudden softness, 'He's really cute.'
It was only this April, after more than a year off, that she returned to work. She had avoided music to the extent of not listening to records. 'There was so much music when I was on the road, oftentimes very loud. [After that] I literally would opt for silence, in a way that would frustrate people around me.' She spent two weeks writing songs, an aspect of the job which takes more out of her than performing. It didn't work: the pressure got to her and she felt 'overwhelmed' by her own success.
So she took another month off, played tennis, did her yoga. Then she wrote That I Would Be Good, and found that she had come to terms with 'the fact that truly I don't need to write a record, ever - I don't need to do anything'. The first line of the song, delivered in a still, small voice of calm, is: 'That I would be good even if I did nothing'.
There was one last metamorphosis for her to go through. Having given the world one of the anthems of feminism, she found herself moving on. 'I grew up in an environment that was' - she adopts a choosing-words-carefully voice - 'slightly patriarchal. I was conditioned to feel that the more powerful aspect of myself was my masculine side. There was a slight amount of chauvinism, and I felt that I had to match the men, or mirror them even. That's changed. I've moved through the feminist movement into sort of a humanist movement. I'm welcoming back the feminine part of myself.' Hence the all-female trip to India. 'I now accept my mother and all the female forces in my life so much more than before.' And the result is a more feminine record. 'Yes,' she says, from the pink armchair. 'I'm less afraid of pink.'
Alanis Morissette's album 'Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie' (Maverick/WEA) is released on November 2. Her single 'Thank U' is released on Monday.
************************************************************************
I didn't exactly take three years off. I was touring for over 18 months, and I couldn't record. Then after the touring I needed another 18 months to relax, to get a grip on things and deal with what has become of my life, to lick my emotional wounds, wounds caused by the situation, by the status I had all of a sudden.
Is being a
celebrity so terrible?
Imagine it, all of a
sudden complete strangers put you on some sort of pedestal and they worship you
just because you're successful. It's good for the ego--but only on a short-term
basis. I couldn't deal with it. I don't need it. I went to India and it helped
me a lot. Of course, the pressure is still there and it would be really naive
to believe that it would disappear all of a sudden, but I had a bit of peace
and quiet in India. I could relax and I could take that step back and look at
my life from a different angle. I have a different perspective now.
And just what is that perspective?
I realized that I don't need to do anything. Nothing can force me to do anything I don't want to do, to do anything I don't like. I realized that I don't need to record another album if I don't want to. You know, I'm in the lucky position that I made enough money to do whatever I like, that I don't have to work anymore.
A lot of artists
would like to be in that position. It must feel pretty good.
Yes, it does. That was one of the reasons why I really liked working on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. I
could do whatever I liked. I didn't have to show any consideration for anything
or anybody. I could just do whatever I always wanted to do. That was a great
feeling. It made me realize that I can't imagine that music might not be a part
of my life anymore. Music will always be a part of my life. I love music. I
don't care how many units I sell, I don't need to compromise anymore. Not a
but. It's more that I think I have a lot of creative potential and I need to
explore it. Writing, painting, photography and, of course, cooking. I love to
cook and I think I'm really a great cook, even if people don't believe it.
Well, only the ones who haven't sampled my cooking don't believe it! [Laughs.]
Maybe that's a sign that I'd make a great mother and a housewife one day, but I
don't really think about it now. At the moment I don't want it, I don't want to
have a relationship. I'm rather egotistical right now, I just want to live!
Do you still feel
like the poster girl for a generation of angry young women?
I think I'm still carrying a lot of anger and frustration inside of me and I
really can't do anything about it. But I think I'm far more mellow now. I'm
more balanced, more in tune with myself. I think I'm more capable of dealing
with my own emotions now. I have myself under control.
So, you've just
tuned out the anger?
At the moment I have no room for anger. Anger doesn't play a role in my life. I
don't want it there. I don't want to burden my soul with anger--not anymore.
Anger sounds really destructive to me right now, it sounds bad.
How will your fans
react to that? A lot of them, especially the feminists, liked you because they
could relate to the anger you expressed.
I think most of my fans loved me because I was honest about my feelings. I
wrote songs about how I feel. I didn't dress my feelings up. I didn't try to
justify my feelings.
The hard-core feminists, I think they always loved me for my aggression, for being mercilessly aggressive, for having that anger, hate and aggression in my work. Maybe I'll really piss them off with the new album, but I can't change it.
I never tried to hide the fact that my songs deal only with how I feel, right here and now. You know, I always saw myself as more of an humanist than a feminist.
Sounds like the
taming of the shrew.
Not at all! I just entered a new phase in my life. I feel different and I write
songs about how I feel right now. That doesn't mean I'm like a toy, that I'm
willing to be submissive. Definitely not! I don't want to live in a
chauvinistic, male-dominated world. I'm not willing to let men rule my life.
I know that I have weaknesses, of course I do. Everybody has them, but I'm so fed up with guys who are trying to tell me how I should feel, how a woman should feel. What do they know about it?
Definitely, especially during the last year. But it feels good! I don't try to change things anymore that can't be changed. Communication is more important now, being able to interact with people, to have relationships and to feel okay, not to feel trapped.
I'm just talking about relationships in general, not the boy/girl, man/woman thing. Relationships don't have to be
sexual. People see it too narrow-mindedly.
You've always been
outspoken, but a lot of critics considered it an act...
That's their view. No matter what I would say or do, they wouldn't really
change their view. Sometimes I get the feeling that critics don't like you if
you're too popular. They're critics, they have that elitism. Of course, they
can't like you if a lot of people like you.
But I'm not writing songs for the critics, I'm not even writing them for the fans, to be honest. I write for myself. Maybe that's a very egotistical approach, but a lot of people can relate to the honesty.
What about the
argument that you just jumped on the alternative bandwagon?
Jumping on the proverbial bandwagon would be if I censored myself, censored my
feelings, what I sing about. A lot of artists do that, they censor themselves
so that more people will relate to it and buy the albums. That's not for me.
What is for you?
What's your motivation?
I firmly believe that the only reason why I'm on this planet, the only reason
why I live, breathe and exist is that it's my duty to be as honest as possible
in my art. It's my goal to confront people with myself, my personality, and I
do it as radically as possible.
In your view, what
made Jagged Little Pill such a huge
commercial success?
Jagged Little Pill wouldn't have sold
so many albums if I hadn't had something to say, if it hadn't meant something
to a lot of people.
Was it too
successful?
The sales figures were really a mixed blessing. On one hand, there was the
pressure of doing an equally successful album this time--and thank God I got
rid of that pressure in India. But on the other hand, it gave me a lot of
self-confidence. I'm grateful for the self-confidence. It's something you
desperately need to survive in this crazy business.
If you are the
voice of a generation, doesn't that carry a lot of pressure, too?
It depends. One thing that struck me--and it was a very positive feeling--was
that feeling at almost every gig I played that a lot of people out there in the
audience can identify with my songs. Of course, most of them are young women.
But I'm a young woman myself, so it's very natural.
But I have a huge problem with the term voice of a generation. Isn't it a bit arrogant to call yourself that? I wouldn't claim to be the spokesperson of a whole generation. I think I'm more the voice of myself.
I didn't exactly take three years off. I was touring for over 18 months, and I couldn't record. Then after the touring I needed another 18 months to relax, to get a grip on things and deal
with what has become of my life, to lick my emotional wounds, wounds caused by the situation, by the status I had all of a sudden.
***********************************************************************
Macleans Magazine Canada
No sooner did Alanis become a star than she began to shed the trappings of stardom
Imagine. You are 23 years old and you have made the biggest-selling album ever
recorded by a female singer. You have won four Grammys and six Junos. You have
toured the world, and everywhere you go, from Milwaukee to Manila, you can hear
echoes of your own voice raging from car radios. You are a lapsed Roman Catholic,
an Ottawa girl who learned to bare her soul in Los Angeles, and who became, as you
put it, Miss Thing. Now everyone wants a piece of you but you desperately want to
get away. And get real. Who you gonna call? Mother Teresa?
Well, if you're Alanis Morissette, that's exactly what you do. The Canadian pop star had been organizing a visit to Mother Teresa's hospital in India, but she still wonders
what prompted her to dial Calcutta on the night of Sept. 4, 1997. "I called out of the
blue," she told Maclean's in a recent interview. "I wanted to talk to her if she was open
to chatting. I talked to a couple of her sisters, and upon getting information from them,
they said, 'Would you like to speak to her now?' " Morissette remembers weighing the
decision in her mind. "In that moment -- taking into account how I felt when a lot of
people wanted to
speak to me -- I just said, 'No thanks, I'm sure she's really tired.'
Then the next morning I woke up and she had died."
I've talked to her."
By now, anyone who has heard Morissette's recent hit single Thank U ("thank you India, thank you providence") knows that she, like the Beatles, made the pilgrimage to the East and came back transformed. Spending six weeks in India in 1997 with her
mother, two aunts and two girlfriends -- "the goddess trip," she calls it -- the singer
briefly volunteered at Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity hospital. She also hiked
in the Himalayas. She later travelled to Cuba with a group that included fellow
superstar Leonardo DiCaprio. There, she fell in love with a friend of his, American actor Dash Mihok (The Thin Red Line). And during her year-long disappearing act, she also competed in three triathlons. Plus, she filmed her first movie role, in a comedy called Dogma, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as fallen angels: Alanis plays God.
Of the Canadian divas who virtually rule the world of female pop, Morissette, now 24, appears the most eager to reinvent herself. Shania Twain is the Vixen. Celine Dion is the Voice. But Alanis is the Free Spirit, a wunderkind who has broken out of her
packaging and seems willing to put her career at risk for the sake of self-expression.
All three singers were on hand for last week's Grammy Awards. Although Morissette's
new album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie came out too late in 1998 to be
eligible, she won two Grammys for Uninvited, her song from the City of Angels film
sound track -- best female rock performance and best rock song. As she sang
Uninvited on the show, she proved to be a class act in a night that unfolded like a
Felliniesque costume ball (page 52). But Morissette's teen fans, who cut their teeth on
the dirty outrage of You Oughta Know, must have been asking, "Where's the rock?"
All of a sudden, they find their heroine in a sequinned gown acting all grown-up in front
of a full orchestra.
With her new album and a new tour, Morissette is returning to the fray amid some daunting expectations. When she visited Toronto last month to announce a Canadian tour -- an 11-city blitz beginning on May 2 in Vancouver -- local media cynically suggested she was just trying to prop up soft album sales. In fact, since its release last November, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie has sold about three million copies in the United States and 260,000 in Canada. Coming after 1995's Jagged Little Pill, which eventually sold 28 million copies worldwide, the sequel's numbers may seem
disappointing. But no one ever repeats that kind of once-in-a-lifetime breakthrough.
Besides, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie does not exactly go out of its way to be
commercial. Among its 17 tracks, there are few of the catchy pop hooks that made
Jagged Little Pill so palatable. Instead, Morissette's voice surfs the thrash and drone of
minor chords, pulled by an undertow of Indian rhythms, while the lyrics offer a
therapeutic balm of confessions, conversations and New Age resolutions. The sexy
Anger of Jagged Little Pill has given way to healing and reconciliation. Morissette turns
free-form journal entries into unrhyming lyrics. She sings open letters to ex-lovers family members and friends. Unsent, her new single, addresses stream-of-consciousness love notes to five former boyfriends ("dear matthew . . . dear jonathan . . . dear lou.") This may be pop music's answer to e-mail. But Morissette's sophomore effort tries to stretch the boundaries of pop. And even when the result is Sappy or self-indulgent, it has a nervy originality.
Infatuation Junkie is the portrait of an artist in recovery from fame. Here is someone
who worked assiduously to become a pop star from the age of 10. She paid her dues
as a teenage disco queen, enjoyed a frustrating tease of Canadian celebrity, headed to
California as a 19-year-old unknown, flirted with a nervous breakdown, then
unleashed her raw emotion in Jagged Little Pill, an antidepressant hit of pop girl power.
But no sooner was Alanis a star than she began to shed the trappings of stardom.
The evolution was evident in the videos for her breakout album. The first showed her
as a rock chick in the desert vamping through You Oughta Know in black leather
pants; by the fourth video, for Head over Feet, she posed without makeup, giggling at
the camera, in a dramatically unflattering close-up. Then for Thank U, she walked the
streets of downtown Los Angeles in a granola/Godiva pose of sexless nudity, her
breasts coyly veiled by the hippie hair and her crotch whited-out by a video blur. "I
was in my shower when I thought of the idea," she says, adding she would happily
bare all if it were not for censors. "When I'm naked, I feel so free and liberated and
unself-conscious and close to God. So I thought it would be appropriate to be naked
in my video."
Record company executives were not so thrilled. "They would have loved something
safe," says Morissette's Los Angeles-based manager, Scott Welch. "But she felt, 'I
need to let girls see that you can just be who you are.' She's fearless. Here's a star
who's not afraid to be shown without perfect hair or makeup. And she's not afraid to
fail in public."
I am the biggest hypocrite . . .
I've gotten candy for my self-interest
The sexy treadmill capitalist . . .
I have abused my power forgive me
-- One, from Infatuation Junkie
The photo shoot is set up in a basement room of Toronto's new sports arena, the Air
Canada Centre. There is a toxic odour of fresh carpet in the air. Alanis, fresh from a
news conference announcing the Canadian tour, walks in wearing a long knit coat.
Underneath, a delicate brown blouse with sheer sleeves, button-fly blue jeans, scuffed
black combat boots. Her hair is a loose mane. Her only jewelry is a ring with tiny dried
flowers in a ball of lucite, a gift from a girlfriend in Vancouver.
Posing for a photographer, Morissette meets his eye with the plain, open gaze of an
innocent girl. But she is a wary subject, with the self-possession of a woman beyond
her years. When asked to lower her head and look up at the camera, she hesitates.
"I don't want to look like a rock star," she says firmly.
"Don't worry," says the photographer. "You
look like a fashion model."
"That's even worse," she laughs, turning
away.
Later, in a wide-ranging interview, Morissette talks candidly about her life and art --
from losing her virginity to coping with fame. She talks about channelling her anger,
going beyond therapy and finding serenity in self-expression. Her ideas, like her songs,
often verge on psycho-babble, but they seem honest and uncontrived, the musings of a
young woman infatuated with her newfound maturity.
Fame took some getting used to. "I felt there was a distance between who I was and
the environment I found myself in," says Morissette. "I was motivated by my own
expression, but a lot of people were motivated by fame and status and winning
awards. I questioned why someone would want my autograph, and why someone
would feel better standing near me or running back and telling their cousins they spent
time with me. And me not knowing when to say no and when to say yes -- and
perhaps erring on the side of saying no." On the other hand, she adds, "fame was an
amazing way to see who I was dealing with pretty much right away. I can immediately
tell a lot about someone's character by the way they feel about fame."
Then there are the perks. Getting to hang out with other famous people. Going to
Cuba with Leonardo DiCaprio. "It was a cultural exchange with 20 people put
together by an investment banking company in New York," Morissette explains. "We
went to different hospitals and art galleries and restaurants and dance clubs and really
just absorbed it. Basically, the Cuban culture wants America to see them as more than
just an embargo situation, and they felt inviting different artists down might result in us
kind of spreading the word." The trip was an all-inclusive package. "One minute I'd be
in an AIDS hospital speaking to a patient and connecting with them, and later that night
I would be dancing my head off at an outdoor salsa club. It was everything. It was
beautiful and inspiring."
And romantic. After meeting Dash Mihok in Cuba (he's the red-headed Pte. Doll in
Thin Red Line and a regular on TV's Felicity), a year later Morissette says they are still
in love. So how many times has she been in love? "We have to define what we feel 'in
love' means," she replies. "In love, I think maybe once. I have felt infatuation and heart
palpitations and obsession countless times. But I've only been in one really healthy
relationship. And that's this one."
I love you when you dance when you
freestyle in trance
so pure such an expression
-- So Pure, from Infatuation Junkie
Philadelphia, the eve of Valentine's Day. Some 15,000 fans packed into a hockey
arena erupt into wild cheers as Alanis steps onstage. She is clad in black, with a
spangled skirt wrapped around loose pants and a sleeveless top. Picking a microphone
up off the floor, she launches into Baba from the new album, a rock dirge about
Western tourists seeking instant salvation at the feet of "makeshift gurus." The theme of
Third World exotica extends to the simple stage set, which is flanked by batik banners,
and backed by ornate Moroccan fretwork.
But for a rock spectacle, it is a no-frills production. And Alanis wins over the audience
without the usual rock 'n' roll stagecraft. She does not dance so much as stride back
and forth to the beat. As she triangulates the stage, finessing her movements with
mercurial turns, she never tries to prod a response from the corners of the crowd.
Happily lost in her own world, she lets people watch the spirit move her. Nor does she
interact much with her musicians -- a drummer, two guitarists, a bassist and a
keyboard player. Her voice carries the show. It is a powerful, acrobatic voice, one
that is comfortable up in the jet stream somersaulting in and out of falsetto. As she
sings, she does something weird with her hands.
Holding the microphone with her right hand, the left hangs limp and twitches a spastic
code, fingers selecting hieroglyphic cues out of the air.
Between songs, stopping each time to sip from a water bottle that she keeps by the
drum kit, she is coolly dispassionate. At one point, she glances up at the arena's digital
clock and announces: "It's 10:14 and all is well." Talk about being in the moment. The
audience responds best to the hits. And with the opening bars of Thank U, it is truly
bizarre to hear cheers of recognition greet lines like "how 'bout getting off of these
antibiotics" and "how 'bout them transparent dangling carrots." One Hand in My
Pocket starts out unplugged, to the sound of hand drums and harmonica, while a video
shows Alanis jogging into the sunset. Then, in You Learn, she lets loose. With a
snowboarding video playing behind her, Alanis jumps and spins in circles, faster and
faster, like a kid trying to make herself dizzy, until her braid is pinwheeling around her
head. A whirling dervish. As the song ends, she folds her arms in prayer.
None of this seems choreographed. Or, at least, the illusion of naivete is convincing.
And none of the rage and pain underlying Morissette's lyrics comes across in
performance. From the Sgt. Pepper thrum of the band to the Indian decor, the spirit is
born-again peace and love. It is white music -- while the majority of Philadelphia's
population is African-American, there are few black faces in the audience -- and it's
not terribly sexy. Whenever things threaten to get too ethereal, however, Alanis picks
up the harmonica. She is no virtuoso, but as she bends over and blows the living
daylights out of it, she drives the crowd to a frenzy with her sheer exuberance. Later,
when asked about her fondness for the harmonica, Morissette says: "It's a sweet little
instrument, yeah. It's coming from the mouth. I love wind instruments." Alanis heard a
lot of harmonica as a child: her parents were heavily into Bob Dylan.
take a trip to new york with your guardian
and your fake identification
when they said "is there something anything
you'd like to know young lady?" you said
"yes i'd like to know what kind of people
i'll be dealing with"
-- Ur,
from Infatuation Junkie
Alanis Nadinia Morissette -- and her twin brother, Wade -- were born in Ottawa on
June 1, 1974, to Alan and Georgia Morissette, who are both teachers. Alan is
French-Canadian. Georgia was born in Hungary -- fleeing to Canada with her family
during the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising at the age of 10. Georgia was just 12 when she
and Alan met in a schoolyard and fast became sweethearts. Alan boldly predicted he
would marry her, which he did, nine years later in 1967. The Morissettes have three
children -- the older brother, Chad, was born three years before the twins. But the
bond between Alanis and Wade seems strongest. As a child prodigy, she often
performed with her twin brother, who became a singer-songwriter but is now a yoga
instructor in Vancouver. "We've influenced each other a lot," says Morissette. "Not
coincidentally, we've been going through a lot of the same changes at the same time."
Her talent first emerged when she was a toddler. In 1977, her parents began a
three-year stint teaching at a NATO base in Lahr, Germany. While on vacation in
France, Alan took the three-year-old Alanis to the movie Grease. She quickly
memorized all the songs, and using a nail-polish bottle as a microphone, she would
play Olivia Newton John to Wade's John Travolta. By the age of 9, Alanis had started
writing her own songs and putting them on tape, precocious numbers with titles like
Fate Stay with Me and Find the Right Man. She mailed the cassette to a couple of
family friends who were musicians, and they were impressed enough to help her cut a
single.
Meanwhile, the young singer had landed an acting gig on You Can't Do That on
Television, a local children's show that was picked up by the U.S. Nickelodeon cable
channel. She used her earnings to manufacture 1,300 copies of the single, Fate Stay
with Me, and ship it across North America. Although it did not take off, it caught the
ear of Ottawa impresario Steve Klovan, a former figure-skating champion who
became Morissette's manager and agent. At 13, she belted out O Canada for an
Elizabeth Manley skating show, then soon became a fixture at hockey games and
political rallies -- the Anthem Girl. When she was 14, Klovan whisked her off to Paris
to shoot her first promotional video, which showed her frolicking through a fountain in
a bathing suit. At 17, she released her debut album, Alanis, which sold 100,000 copies
and won the Juno for most promising female vocalist in 1992.
It was not easy being a teen pop tart. Every morning, her high school played her
version of O Canada over the PA system, giving the singer her first taste of an
anti-Alanis backlash. Also, she lived a double life. "There was this split," she says, "a
split between my high-school self -- the part of me that would go to parties and spend
time with friends my age -- and the part of me that was in the entertainment industry
with a lot of adults, staying in the studio till two in the morning. It required me to be
very much an adult, while emotionally I was still very much a child." But Morissette
insists her parents did not push her: "The pressure to perform perfectly was mine.
Perfectionism was something I battled for many years."
Growing up in a devout Roman Catholic home, however, was another source of
stress. Morissette says she did not lose her virginity until she was almost 19.
"Brought up Catholic," she says, "I was taught that if you're a virgin, then you're clean
and men will love you and you are going to be this prize. So while I was very sexually
active from the time I was 14 years old, I remained a virgin, which was hilariously
ridiculous in retrospect. But I was inundated with this whole
you-have-to-stay-quote-unquote-pure thing." Eventually, she adds, "I had sex and saw
how beautiful and freeing and godlike it was." Who was her lucky liberator?
Morissette will not say. "But we don't need to talk about him, poor guy," she laughs.
"He's one of the greatest loves of my life, still to this day."
(Around that time, however, she was involved in one of her first serious relationships,
with American TV actor David Coulier, who starred in Full House, hosted America's
Funniest People -- and is 15 years older than she. Among the thousands of Web sites
devoted to Morissette, Coulier's name often comes up as fans speculate about the
identity of the man who jilted her for an older woman in You Oughta Know. But
Morissette, who seems to be building a career on seeking closure with ex-boyfriends,
is not about to name names.)
At 19, Alanis reached an impasse. Her second album, Now Is the Time, had
performed weakly and her career was stalled. Meanwhile, she had been accepted by
universities in Toronto and Ottawa. But then MCA Music Canada executive John
Alexander connected her with Scott Welch, a Los Angeles manager who had turned
Paula Abdul from a cheerleader into a pop star. Welch persuaded Morissette to leave
home, live in Toronto and write songs. "We put her in a small apartment with the
smallest stipend she could live on," he recalls. "All of a sudden, she started to get a
sense of who she was. She'd always been in a creative situation where other people
were dictating the terms. This was her opportunity and she took it."
After collaborating with a string of Toronto songwriters, and hosting a CBC TV show
called Music Works, Morissette made the leap to Los Angeles in 1994. Shortly after
arriving, she was mugged by two thieves at gunpoint. Undeterred, she stayed on and
hooked up with Glen Ballard, a high-powered producer who has worked with
everyone from Barbra Streisand to Michael Jackson. "I thought she was intelligent,
curious, energetic," recalls Ballard. "We hit it off -- had a cup of tea and wrote a song."
But on a flight home for Christmas, while rushing to finish the last of her Christmas
cards, Morissette was overcome by an anxiety attack. It was followed by fainting
spells and bouts of uncontrolled sobbing. The breakdown unearthed a motherlode of
repressed emotions that became the active ingredients of Jagged Little Pill. When she
went back to work with Ballard in Los Angeles, the songs just poured out. Writing the
album together was "unpremeditated," says Ballard. "And it benefited greatly from the
fact that Alanis didn't have a record deal at that point. We were doing it for fun."
Maverick Records, the label owned by Madonna, signed her up, and the album,
powered by the sexual rage of You Oughta Know, took off like a rocket.
Morissette burst on the scene as pop's new feminist provocateur. Madonna, an earlier
prototype, told Rolling Stone that she "reminds me of me when I started out: slightly
awkward, but extremely self-possessed and straightforward. There's a sense of
excitement and giddiness in the air around her -- like anything's possible and the sky's
the limit." But, despite their mutual interest in yoga, Alanis and Madonna appear to
have as much in common as a flower child and a dominatrix. "I haven't been listening to
Madonna in the last few years," Morissette confesses. "When I was younger, I listened
to her a lot. We don't really talk very often."
Morissette's success, meanwhile, drew detractors. Courtney Love dissed her. And
Joni Mitchell was quick to squelch comparisons between herself and Alanis. "I'm a
musical explorer and not just a pop songwriter," she huffed. "Alanis Morissette writes
words, someone else helps set it to music, and then she's kind of stylized into the part."
Morissette coolly fields the criticism. "Everyone's entitled to love me or hate me or not
care about me. So I don't really feel the need to respond. I started listening to Joni
after Jagged Little Pill, when everyone said you're so obviously influenced by her. I
said, 'Actually, I don't even have one of her records.' So then everyone was inundating
me with Joni Mitchell records."
The Joni comparison is not completely farfetched. Like Mitchell, Morissette is a vocal
explorer with an ethereal instrument and original sense of inflection. And Ballard,
Morissette's writing partner, says she has a strong hand in the music. "I often suggest a
harmonic landscape," he says, "but she's always finding the ultimate melodic expression
for what she has to say. Once she starts wrapping her words around it, she has to
personalize the melody. And I have no idea how she gets so many words in one bar of
music." Morissette has developed a unique vocal attack, the way she fillets
multisyllabic words -- "un-a-bash-ed-ly" and "dis-ill-us-ion-ment" -- into unlikely
lyrics. In Sympathetic Character, a dissonant mantra about abusive men, she sinks her
teeth into "tes-tos-ter-one" as if bent on drawing blood.
Asked about whether she herself has suffered physical abuse, the singer says: "No, but
I've feared it, because I've spent a lot of time around men who couldn't control their
anger. They'd repress it so long by the time they had to release it, it just came out very
destructively. So I have a lot of fears surrounding that." Is this a boyfriend she is talking
about? Morissette offers a blanket response: "Family, friends, boyfriends, colleagues,
professional relationships . . . a lot of people." The singer, who professes a long-held
fascination with psychology, has been in and out of therapy since she was 16 --
everything from psychoanalysis to spiritual counselling. "I've read psychology books as
far back as I could read," she says. "I consider this physical realm to be somewhat
illusory, but we have to understand our pain."
Morissette does not indulge in the usual escapes. She does not do drugs, drink or
smoke. "I've dabbled with smoking pot," she says, "but I don't really feel comfortable
doing it. I like being still and being connected. And my life in general feels very
euphoric. All the things that I believe drugs can do, whether it's the clarity or
out-of-body experience or whatever, I've experienced in a pretty big way by being
straight."
So how does she get psyched up for a show? "I do yoga, I have a massage and I eat."
How does she unwind when she gets offstage? "I eat almonds," she says. Almonds? "I
eat nuts and I talk to my band members and I get on my bus and travel to the next
city."
You only have to look at Morissette's hands to see that she is not entirely stress free.
Her fingernails, the paint chipped away, are bitten down to the quick -- a habit she
attributes to the pressure of recently directing her two new videos. Touring, however,
has become much easier. "I'm laughing all the time," she says. "I didn't laugh once on
the last tour. There was just too much going on, so much stimulus. I was just
inundated."
Inundated. It is one of her favourite words. But lately, Morissette has found some
uninundated space in her life. When not touring, she can retreat to her three-bedroom
Mediterranean-style house in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles. "It's my dream
home," she says. "Sometimes I wish I could transport it outside of Los Angeles and
live somewhere else. But I don't even feel like I own it. It's somewhat communal. I
have friends staying there, and I just stay there when I'm home, so I feel I'm borrowing
it."
A lucrative royalty deal on Jagged Little Pill made her a wealthy woman. And since
visiting India, Morissette has also become a visible charity supporter -- one dollar of
every ticket sold for her Canadian tour goes to a local cause, such as Toronto's
Covenant House, an agency for street kids. But the singer, who drives a Jeep, says she
has trouble finding ways to spend her money. "My business manager said all her clients
have one thing that they spend their money on, and with me it's travelling. Whether it's
for myself or friends or family, I spend a pretty large amount of money flying people all
over the world."
Meanwhile, new horizons keep opening up. "I'd love to write a screenplay," she says,
"I'd love to be in films, behind and in front of the camera. I love photography and
poetry." Anything else? "I'm writing a book right now," she reveals. "It's a collage
book. One chapter is a fictional story, the next chapter is diary entries, the next is
letters, the next is photos, the next chapter is confusion and revelations and questions. I
may have to figure out where it all fits together, or not."
The earnest ambitions of Alanis Morissette raise questions. As she spins her emotional
life into a cottage industry, there is always a risk of becoming the Martha Stewart of
confessional pop. She has yet to prove that inner peace can be as compelling as inner
turmoil. But in the Age of Irony the apparent sincerity of this woman -- who built an
entire song on sweetly misusing the word "ironic" -- comes as a tonic. There is
something admirable about the faith with which she has invented herself. She is a work
bravely in progress, a pop star searching for the artist within.
**********************************************************************
Visiting Mother Teresa
When Alanis Morissette went on a spiritual search
in India two years ago, she planned to visit Mother
Teresa in Calcutta. ''I actually called her the night before she died,'' says
Morissette. ''I don't know why. I just had this desire to call her and connect with her
and her sisters for some reason. I called and they offered to put her on the line, but she
wasn't feeling well and I said, `No, let her rest.' She died the next day.''
Rather than regret the lack of contact, Morissette, who is far better known as the rock
singer who sold 28 million copies of her album ''Jagged Little Pill,'' still went to
Calcutta and spent a day helping the sick and infirm at a healing center run by Mother
Teresa's Missionaries of Charity.
''It was one of the most intense days of my life. It was very beautiful. There have been
about 15 intense days in my life - and that was definitely one of them,'' says
Morissette, who went with her mother, two aunts, and two friends.
Morissette came back from India and wrote and recorded her follow-up disc,
''Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie,'' which she's backing with a tour headed to the
FleetCenter Monday. The first single from the record, ''Thank U,'' distilled some of her
spiritual learning: ''Thank you India ... thank you frailty ... thank you consequence ...
how 'bout no longer being masochistic ... how 'bout remembering your divinity ... how
'bout not equating death with stopping.''
As for not seeing Mother Teresa in the flesh, she says, ''I feel like I have seen her
anyway, so it's all good.''
Clearly, this is a long way from the Morissette of the ''Jagged Little Pill'' days, back
when she primal-screamed parts of her vocals, snapped at ex-boyfriends, and was
labeled the latest Angry Young Woman. She's still only 24, but seems much more
grown up and, by her own words, much calmer.
''I love the
space that I'm in right now,'' says Morissette, a native of Ottawa. ''It's the
ultimate, because
I have the privilege of being able to share what I express. Some of it
is also due to
the fact that I have a lot more experience now, having toured for `Jagged
in the
physical crazy realm. Those kinds of things have resulted in my feeling calmer
in general, and happier. I've been
laughing so much more now than I ever have.''
She says she's feeling much more balanced. Before this recent phone interview from
Cleveland, she meditated and did some yoga. She also has a massage therapist with
her on the road. ''It's important to be able to feel centered in the environments that I'm
often in,'' she notes.
And, though she's known as one of the most earnest, most serious new acts of the
'90s, she also unplugs by playing a lot of basketball. She was practicing her three-point
shot just the day before, she says, adding that '' we have a basketball hoop that we're
getting to bring on the road with us.''
Life is good for Morissette, who learned something else from her trip to India - that no
matter where you go, you can't expect to find nirvana outside of yourself, no matter
how exotic or spiritual the country you're visiting may be. That's why she penned
another song on the new record, ''Would Not Come,'' which says: ''I'd go trave ling
and still it would not come/I would starve myself and still it would not come ... I'd
renunciate and still it would not come.'' ''After chasing [bliss] for as long as I have, or
as long as I did, I realized that it's really inside of myself,'' she says. ''The highest, most
blissful moments I have are when I am sitting still.''
With such thinking, no wonder she's not susceptible to gurus or cults. In the new song
''Baba,'' she parodies the need for gurus: ''How soon will I be holy/ How much will this
cost, guru? ... I've watched you smile as the students bow to kiss your feet.''
''It's about
putting gurus up on a pedestal to the point where people are no longer
listening to their
own inner voice,'' says Morissette. The song is not about a specific
guru or cult, but
''I think it makes it quite clear that cults wouldn't get very far with me.''
By changing from the simpler girl/boy subject matter of ''Jagged Little Pill'' to the more
complex spiritual issues of the new album, Morissette knows that she has lost some of
her listeners (especially younger ones). The new album, which has moodier, less
accessible music overall, is not the commercial blockbuster of her previous CD.
Indeed, it slipped to No. 38 last week, though it may spike back up because several
more singles will be released from it. ''I've seen a change,'' she admits. ''A lot of older
people are gravitating toward this record. But I'm really not interested in who kind of
loves it or hates it or is inspired by it or repulsed by it. I just need to express exactly
where I'm at during this particular moment; and that's all I'm really concerned about.''
She's feeling so free and unconstricted these days that she even posed nude in a fetal
position for a picture on the CD itself, and made a video for ''Thank U'' that showed
her romping nude on the streets of Los Angeles.
''The idea came from feeling a lack of self-consciousness and a lack of restriction,'' she says. ''It's a symbol of my wanting to communicate that - of feeling really comfortable with my body and accepting it and treating it really well and feeling beautiful without hiding.''
Between her two albums, Morissette competed in three triathlons as a way of paying
more attention to her body. Such physical activity also helped hone her balance. ''I
always thought that if I were to develop other parts of myself, I would have to
compromise the cerebral, intellectual part. But I've come to realize that it never really
goes away, and that you can have both.''
With her new confidence, she's exploring other career goals as well. While she has
codirected videos in the past, she stepped up to be the sole director of her new video
for the song ''Unsent,'' which comes out Monday. (It's about love letters never sent to
boyfriends, a theme that appeared on Carly Simon's 1995 album ''Letters Never
Sent,'' though Morissette says she hasn't heard that CD). And she would like to direct
a feature-length film. ''I've just been offered a script to potentially direct, and I'd love to
write one as well,'' she says.
She'd also love to try more acting. She has completed one role as - get ready - God in
the film ''Dogma,'' a comedy written and directed by Kevin Smith, who did ''Chasing
Amy'' and ''Clerks.'' It was ''very funny'' to be cast as a female God, whom she
describes as ''everything - happy, angry, young, true, wise, crazy.''
Meanwhile, she's continuing to exhibit a strong social consciousness. She'll join a
Tibetan Freedom Festival date in Europe this summer (no details yet) and she
performed at an Amnesty International benefit in Paris with Bruce Springsteen, Peter
Gabriel, Radiohead, Tracy Chapman, and Youssou N'Dour.
''It was also
up among my 15 most amazing experiences,'' she says. ''I felt totally
supported.
There was such an atmosphere of love, not an atmosphere of competition
or fear or a
lack-of-communication vibe that I've felt at some other festivals. Any time
I can delve
into an environment like I felt at the Amnesty benefit, I'll do it.''
************************************************************************
1/26/99 Chat Transcript
Alanis: I just
love the South in general and I love the atmosphere and people in New
Orleans. A lot of
love and crazy spirits here. There's this intangible energy I feel here...
When I came here last
time I drove down from Toronto and there's something in the
air
nola_alone : Considering the abundance of female Grammy nominees this year, did it
seem to you like 1998 was a good year for music in general, but especially for female
artists?
Alanis: It's a
great year for music in general... I don't think about the gender of the
people being nominated. I needed to take a break because
it was very overwhelming...
I needed to regroup and assimilate and give it as much
time as it required... I wanted to
be inspired to write.
Talula1412 : What keeps you motivated, or is all your writing and work automatic for
you?
Alanis: I think
rejuvenating keeps me inspired, and if I'm in an environment that isn't
nurturing... I
can't create, so I just keep that in check. I find it liberating to be honest
in
the process, the more that I speak truthfully... The more healing it is.
nola_alone : Why did you think that "Thank U" was a good one to re-introduce fans to
your sound and lyrical vision?
Alanis: That
was the first song I wrote with Glen for the record... I was just
overwhelmed with this
sense of gratitude and excitement and I really wanted to write
about it.
ThrowinStones : Who are your greatest musical and literary influences? Who are your
greatest musical and literary influences?
Alanis: Carole
King, everything from Abba to Bob Dylan, and what my dad played...
I've read a lot of classics, a lot of psychology, Freud, Carl Jung.
pralineprincess : With this album such a success already, does it relieve any of the
pressure to follow-up "Jagged Little Pill?"
Alanis: I didn't
really feel that much pressure... The challenge was to get back to that
unselfconscious place to write...
nola_alone : Why did you think that "Thank U" was a good one to re-introduce fans to
your sound and lyrical vision?
Alanis: I have
to feel that a record is done and that usually is synonymous with me
feeling happy to it.
Original_Idiot : Alanis, at www.alanismorissette.com, part of the blurb about SFIJ
goes "marks the next leap forward in Alanis's growth as an artist". - So would you
personally describe it as a "leap forward"? Are you satisfied with it?
Alanis: Yes I
think everything I create is a snapshot of where I'm at the time... It's a
reflection of the
fact that I'm an evolving person... an indication of where my evolution
is at the time.
liDdLeStAR : Alanis...when I heard Thank You for the first time I was in a parking lot
at a restaurant, I felt really depressed, and when I heard those lyrics I was like, wow,
that’s exactly how I feel...I wanna ball my eyes out...that whole song just comforted
me, thanx. Did you write the song and what made you see so clearly?
Alanis: I wrote
the lyrics and Glen Ballard and I wrote the music together... It was
written and
recorded on the same day or evening, as were all of the songs on SFIJ.
That will probably be the way I do it moving forward -- same day writing
foxcrest_15 : What was the point in being nude in your video?
Alanis: To
celebrate my body and not objectify it... Not impose the societal standard
of what my body
should look like... to acknowledge our inner being. I was naked in
the streets of LA for two night in a row
SON_OF_EROS : ALANIS YOU ARE IN TERRIFIC SHAPE HOW OFTEN DO
YOU WORK OUT?
Alanis: Not often
right now... I did some triathlons and snowboarded during my time
off... I'm not overly stringent about my regiment.
cajunqueen_1999 : What's been going on in Alanis Morissette's world since 'Jagged
Little Pill?' And why the long layoff between projects?
Alanis: To get
back to who I was in the midst of all of it, the illusion, the beauty, etc... I
regrouped with my family and get to know them and them to know me.
Wilt_Manson : Are your lyrics personal or you prefer to make them out of other
people's lives ???
Alanis: If
I'm writing about someone's life, it's usually indirectly about me.
cajunqueen_1999 : If you weren't a musician what would you have chosen as a
profession?
photographer, I'd love to teach at some point
Falg99 : What are some of your favorite tracks on the new album?
Alanis:
"Would not come", but my faves differ from week to week... and
"Your
Congratulations"
esplanade_captain : Why did you pick Liz Phair and Garbage to be your opening acts
on this tour?
Alanis:
Because they're supergoddesses! All the men in the band (laughs)
Alanis: What was
required of me to go to a place of India was an openness and letting
go... it was very
humble and informative, the lack of materialism and the joy evident in
that... Just to
travel with a backpack was very illuminating... In Cuba we went to
galleries and hospitals and tried to tell the stories of the people of the country.
slusheemaker : Do you think you could have been as satisfied with either record if you
wouldn't have written them with Glen Ballard?
Alanis:
Sure...yeah, I guess it's hard to imagine it without him... but I probably
would
have
been happy. It was either doing it alone or with Glen.
lovester_99 : What inspires you to write your songs? Is it things that happen in your
life?
Alanis: Yes -- a lot
of times I write in retrospect... but sometimes I write about things
in the moment. I can listen innocently, I'm a huge fan of any style of music.
hattmall : Alanis, recently I heard a demo version of "Unsent" and in it, it had different
names and two more verses... Is there any reason why you decided to cut them out of
the final version?
Alanis: Yes, I
wanted to feel as though I was expressing myself... and I wanted to
respect the
privacy of some of the people I was singing about... and I was speaking
with some of the people to see if they minded being on the record.
dacman0 : When you reflect on your life what do you see and what have you to tell all
the younger women of the world?
Alanis: Just to have compassion for yourself, and we're all connected.
AngelicEyes1977 : Do you really think life is as "Ironic" as the song?
Alanis: There
weren't a ton of ironies in that song... but I have a fundamental attitude
toward life. It's quite funny toward me.
Alanis: I used to play in 7th grade, and I just picked it up again on this record.
manthas_aludain : What has been the hardest thing about becoming the superstar that
you are? Have you made a lot of sacrifices to get to where you're at?
Alanis: I've
made a lot of choices, but I don't know how much I've sacrificed... and
couldn't do
certain things, but it was a conscious choice... When I took my time off, I
made a list of things to do, and I did them all.
esplanade_captain : What's it like being on Madonna's Maverick Records?
Alanis: It's
great, I have a lot of freedom, and I've been in different environments... and
the ultimate scenario would be the freedom that Maverick gives me.
Alanis:
"Unsent" in US, "Joining You" in Europe and around the
world... : I’m gonna
direct "Unsent" video. No lip-synching, but I'm still fleshing it out.
Original_Idiot : Alanis, do you think you're much different (or any different!) from the
Alanis of five years ago?
Alanis: I
change and grow and adjust all the time, sometimes within the hour. My
personality is definitely different.
Katryna_26 : In the song "UNSENT" are all of the names of the guys really old
boyfriends of yours?
Alanis: Some were boyfriends, co-workers, platonic friends.
dancingbarefoot23 : Do you find that people are now more cautious/self conscious
because they're aware they might end up in future songs?
Alanis: Not the people that I spend time with... I'm not that harsh. The people I’m
close with are present in the relationship... and they'd know I'd keep their privacy
intact.
Alanis: I love doing the webchat, I love what's happening with technology... and if we
can have music and artists mutually exist, it would be great. I will be releasing a song to
the web.
cajunqueen_1999 : Where did the title of this album come from?
Alanis: It came from my busting my own chops, and saying that I no longer had time
for infatuation... and how ridiculous that is. posie54 : What’s the most embarrassing
thing that you did on stage?
Alanis: Tripping over the monitor and landing flat on my face... in Sydney.
sYnApSe1128 : Alanis what is your favorite song that you have written?
Alanis: I can't answer that, they're all my favorites. I love Radiohead's "Fake Plastic
Trees."
AM69Dana : Alanis you have been such an inspiration for me, who has been your
biggest inspiration?
Alanis: Wow -- everyone from Carole King when I was younger, and I read about
people like... Nelson Mandela and Ghandi and Annie Lennox, anyone who wants to
share and grow and be crazy.
Rockyracoon_grapes : What did you think of working with Ringo Starr in his last
album "Vertical Man"
Alanis: He was a beautiful man, I love him... I had just watched the anthology and I
loved him... He was very kind and gracious.
Alan69_98 : Did you find it very challenging trying to top your last album?
Alanis: It wasn't a concern -- the only thing I think of is to have it be an extension of
where I am at the time... and then I'm happy. I didn't have yes-men around me, they
left me alone.
cajunqueen_1999 : Give us a snap shot of how you worked with your producer Glen
Ballard and arranger David Campbell and how does that collaborative process work
with the three of you? Why the same producers?
Alanis: David Gamble is one of the sweetest spirits, and Glen and I have connected...
since '84 and he has no preconceptions of who I should be as an artist... It's just a very
inspiring atmosphere.
Alanis: I have none. My affiliation is with God, the presence that is all around... I see
God in everyone and everything. The song, where it's coming from, and expressing
myself through film... it's such an amazing way to communicate and express.
zagman2 : Seems like you have a supportive family. did they influence you musically?
Alanis: They influenced me by never saying I couldn't do something... They didn't
pressure me... I am very appreciative for their support. They're avid music fans.
wampy1 : When you say "Thank you Providence, is that Providence RI" and why are
you thanking Providence RI?
Alanis: It isn't, but it can be if you like... It's providence the divine being.
esplanade_captain : What are your thoughts when you look back at old footage of
yourself doing a very pop/dance style of music, completely opposite of what you're
doing today?
Alanis: I want to dance desperately, so when I see that footage, it inspires me to
dance... It was important for me to be creating in that way in those environments... I
love it.
PurseQueen : Alanis, any memories from your "You can't do that on television" days
that you'd like to share?
Alanis: They were exciting, I was with TV vets, so I was intimidated at first... but
they're pretty amazing, sweet people.
Alanis: Yes.
junkiepill : Why is Pollyanna flower, London, king of intimidation, gorgeous not on the
new album? Did you feel that it doesn’t fit with it?
Alanis: Pollyanna was a b-side... and some of the others were from the last tour, and I
felt like they weren't of the moment at that point...
Alanis: I went to a few of my fan sites at the beginning of the last tour, but I haven't in a
long time.
AlanisLover_1 : You told MTV that you once thought of not releasing a second album.
Do you believe that you will make a third album?
Alanis: I will write music for the rest of my life... as long as I can get back to not feeling
burdened by it... I can say that with confidence now.
jillianne_01 : Do you consider yourself a perfectionist?
Alanis: I used to consider myself one... Now I think I'm very passionate about
representing myself properly.
Jagged_Lil_Saryn : I read somewhere that you might want to cut your hair! Say it isn't
so! Will you be cutting your hair soon?
Alanis: Probably at some point, on a whim... I don't know if it will be drastic, but I
probably will cut it.
kittykat_226 : What’s the craziest thing you ever did?
Alanis: Moved to Los Angeles... I think it's a very inspiring place, I love to leave there
and return to there.
Alanis: I kept the recording studio simple, no posse... Me being alone at my home
studio or with Glen.
TJDS100 : Do you ever wish you weren't a celebrity?
Alanis: I did last tour, but I don't this one... because I'm not always a celebrity.
Alanis: I love South Park, but I would never kill Kenny.
steven_polychronopolis : Do you feel that you had to sacrifice any of your artistic
integrity to make it to where you are now in the music industry? If so, does your
"superstar" status now give you more freedom to do what you want musically?
Alanis: I've never felt that I’ve compromised anything... I don't feel like I have to sell
any proverbial part of my soul.
bardofangels : I was wondering what's the story behind "I was hoping" Can you tell me
anything interesting about it? Its one of my favorite songs. Thanks
Alanis: Cool -- the second verse is self-explanatory – being patronized... due to sexism
or ageism... and the final verse is about judgment, feeling safe not to have conflict with
a person who felt judged... It was me singing my hopes for a relationship to my mate.
Alanis: My favorite celebrity is Geoffrey Rush.
country_tulip : Alanis, If you were to speak to a group of 20 something aged women,
what is the best advice you could give them on living their lives as strong women?
Alanis: Speaking their truths and surrounding themselves with people that love them...
and expressing themselves and being connected with men and not seeing them as the
enemy.
Alanis: Thanks for having me! Good night.
**********************************************************************
Taming Morissette's restless spirit
LOS ANGELES — After denying it, fearing it and rejecting it, Alanis Morissette has
made peace with fame."There was a time when I didn't think Iwas going to be able to
live a normal life again," she says. "Now I realize that being in the public eye doesn't
have to be a hindrance. It's something I consciously choose. It enables me to connect
with people."
The singer, 24, crept into the spotlight with her first record at age 10 and spent her
teens as a dance-pop queen in her native Canada. But even a decade in show business
couldn't prepare her for the media blitzkrieg that followed 1995's U.S. breakthrough.
Jagged Little Pill, the biggest selling debut ever by a solo artist, spent 12 weeks at No.
1 in Billboard, won four Grammys and sold a whopping 28 million copies
worldwide. Initially overwhelmed by public scrutiny, Morissette adjusted by accepting
it as part of the creative process.
"I express myself, and people love it or hate it or are excited or inspired or repulsed,"
she says. "I think there is an opportunity for listeners to define who they are, even in
the 12 seconds that they hear the song. That's what's amazing about art."
The aggression and bitterness in her You Oughta Know hit inaccurately defined
Morissette as the alpha bitch in a new breed of Angry Young Women. That image
bears no resemblance to the vision of Morissette perched on her hotel-suite sofa.
Smiling beatifically and waxing rhapsodic on spiritual contentment, she seems more
saint than she-devil.
"I appreciate Jagged Little Pill for what it was and what it is, but there's a lot of it that I
can't relate to anymore," she says, describing the album as a snapshot of a specific
phase. "I don't entirely have a sense of what people think of me, but there was
definitely a view of me as an artist who's very one-dimensional, whether it be angry or
sexual or in pain."
That is not the impression she leaves on fellow artists.
"Alanis is a beautiful, soulful human being and a true artist," gushes Ringo Starr, who
persuaded her to sing on his Vertical Man album.
Nor is that fabled volatile nature dominant on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, an
unorthodox, exotic pop record rife with Morissette's self-lacerating candor and
probing insights on relationships and the quest for inner peace. After entering Billboard
at No. 1 in November, it has sold 1.9 million copies and now rests at No. 35, falling
short of Pill's history-making pace.
But who's counting?
Almost everyone. Junkie arrived amid preposterous expectations. Neither Morissette
nor co-producer Glen Ballard aimed to follow Pill's commercial or artistic trajectory.
"The simple and safe thing to do was come up with Jagged Little Pill Refill, but that
was never what we wanted," Ballard says. "She had one mandate: 'Let's not write the
same record sideways.' She wanted to stretch and smudge the boundaries.
"Nothing she does surprises me," he adds. "She's a seeker, somebody that is not
comfortable with letting the world go by. She's so engaged, and it's reflected in her
art."
Junkie's spiritual tones sprang from a post-Pill hiatus that took Morissette to India and
Cuba with friends and family. For 18 months, "I don't think I had even one encounter
with anyone from the industry," she says with some awe.
Escaping the pressure cooker reignited creative fires and gave her the self-confidence
to bare her soul in stunningly blunt songs — and to bare her body in the strategically
blurred Thank U video.
"The idea came to me in the shower," she says of the nude clip, shot in public settings
over two nights. "I had moments of wondering how I'd feel doing it, but I felt really
amazing and liberated and beautiful. It was positive and fun, but I couldn't have done
that a year ago."
When she penned her brazen confessions on Pill, Morissette had no inkling she'd be
sharing her musical diary with a global audience. The peering masses did not deter her
from revealing struggles with men, fame and self-esteem on Junkie.
"I don't hide much," she says. "I did have reservations about writing about other people
and invading their privacy. It's one thing for me to express vulnerability or sadness or
confusion; it's another thing to write about someone else."
Names were changed. She called subjects of certain songs and gave them the option
of nixing lyrics. None did.
"I didn't get a negative reaction," she says. "I got a kind of bittersweet closure."
The romantic calamities detailed in Pill are behind her. For the past year, she's been
involved in a "very healthy, very exciting" relationship with an unnamed suitor (reported
to be actor Dash Mihok of The Thin Red Line and TV's Felicity).
"I had no idea what intimacy really meant until about a year ago," she says. "A year
ago, I would have said I prefer being single because it was really horrible and
distracting being in a relationship. But now it's great. It's healing."
But can you mine grist for songs from a stable union? She retorts, "Happy, healthy
relationships aren't always stable."
The wisdom and self-possession in Morissette's songs and personality stem from a
childhood immersed in grown-up pursuits. She was reared in Ottawa by educators —
her father is a teacher and ex-principal; her mother taught for 18 years.
"I spent so much time with adults when I was younger," she says. "My parents were
very analytical about human nature. Every conversation around the kitchen table
included some sort of analysis."
Her parents supported her ambitions and early entry into the recording business. By
16, she was a national dance-pop star, but she barely acknowledged her past after
relocating to Hollywood to embark on the harder-to-swallow Pill.
"I distanced myself from it," she says, admitting she quashed attempts to re-release her
earlier records during Pill's chart reign. "That would have confused people. But at
some point, I'd love to put out a record of songs I've done since I was 10."
Even back then, the rebellion behind Pill and Junkie was incubating in her curious head.
"I had a voracious appetite for self-knowledge from the time I started reading," she
says. "I picked up my first book on psychology when I was 13, because I was curious
about pain, and I tried to understand the concept of suffering. It was confusing."
Adding to that confusion were growing doubts about religion. Raised in Catholicism,
she began to question its tenets while recording an album with an avowed atheist. She
was 11.
"He was the antithesis of me," she says. "I respected him, and it blew me away that we
had such different views of God. So I asked him a million questions, and I started
doubting that Adam and Eve really existed. Then I questioned everything: the fear, the
idea that you're bad. It just didn't make sense."
Consequently, she rejected not only the dogma but also her need for a sacred bond.
"Eventually, I felt that void of not being connected to God," she says. "I had thrown the
baby out with the bathwater. That is where the core of my suffering came from. But
that changed over the last couple of years."
The transfigured Morissette is spiritually grounded, psychologically sound and
physically fit (she completed three triathlons during her furlough and now makes time
for cycling, yoga, tennis and swimming).
Though she negotiated hard for balance in her life, Morissette does not duck career
challenges. Her global tour continues through 1999. She's open to outside projects like
Uninvited, the Grammy-nominated tune she contributed to the hot City of Angels
soundtrack. Her role as God in Kevin Smith's upcoming Dogma sparked a desire to
act and direct. Also on the drawing board: a quasi-autobiography, a novel, a
screenplay, painting, traveling and having babies.
A self-described recovering perfectionist, Morissette insists that her full plate has less
to do with ambition and ego than a hunger for experience.
"Being a perfectionist was destructive and sad, really," she says. "It wasn't very
nurturing of my free spirit. I still discover moments of my perfectionism now and again,
but what often looks like perfectionism is really my attempt to be completely honest. A
lot of people misunderstand that."
*****************************************************************
Why now?
:
Alanis is getting behind a second album with a
name that's more difficult to say quickly than
Morissette is to spell.
Setting: Acoustically correct arenas
Crowd: Top 40 listeners; people who think the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie
tour is some kind of Narcotics Anonymous symposium.
Early word: This is not the Alanis of Jagged Little Pill, who was not the Alanis of
big-haired Canadian pop, who was not the child-star Alanis of You Can't Do That on
Television. This is the post-fame, post–Tibet visit, post-therapy Alanis — older, wiser
and quite anxious to tell you about her journey of personal growth. Want to see what
four years of intensive psychotherapy and a few (more) breakups can do? This is the
concert for you!
Why go: Alanis' lyrics are tiresomely literal. ("Dear Jonathan," she writes in "Unsent," "I
liked you too much. I used to be attracted to boys who would lie to me, and think
solely about themselves ... the truth is whenever I think of the early '90s, your face
comes up with a vengeance like it was yesterday.") But she has a voice most of her
contemporaries would give their eye teeth for.
Suggested listening: If you really want to know how far Alanis has come, see if you can
dig up the single-disc Canadian pressing of her first two dance albums, Alanis and
Now Is the Time, which feature song titles like "Party Boy" and "Oh Yeah!"
Opening act: In musical history, Liz Phair can be considered the woman rocker who
refused to sit in the back of the bus.
Phair's now-classic 1993 album, Exile in Guyville, was one of the first times a female
musician produced a smart, honest and brutal album about relationships and sex.
Because she broke barriers, Phair opened the flood gates for a slew of angry women
to start releasing their pent-up rage (chief offender being Alanis Morissette).
But by the time the Alanises and Fionas were giving men a piece of their minds, Phair
had dropped out of sight, going into retreat after a disappointing second album. But
after four years, Phair the innovator is back with an album that's a worthy successor to
Guyville.
She has overhauled her sound on whitechocolatespaceegg. Phair's once
basement-level, lo-fi recording techniques have been scrapped in favor of full rockers
that truly cook. Tunes like "Polyester Bride" and "Johnny Feelgood" prove that Phair
can create pop songs with bite.
***********************************************************************
YOU'RE DOING A COUPLE OF SHOWCASE GIGS WHILE YOU'RE HERE
AND I SAW YOU LAST TIME IN ONE OF THE AREANS. HOW DIFFERENT
ARE THESE SHOWS TO WHAT WE SAW LAST TIME? BECAUSE THAT
WAS THE END OF THE TOUR HERE LAST TIME WASNT IT?
Yeah. Well, its new music (laughs) A little bit of a new vibe on stage. Just more
intimate. I like the smaller venues, especially now delving back into this lifestyle. I think
the smaller, the safer, the warmer, the environment, the better.
I WANTED TO KNOW WHETHER YOUR SANITY WAS EVER BROUGHT
INTO QUESTION DURING ALL OF THOSE HEADY TIMES?
Definitely. I lost my mind. Definitely. That's why I had t take a year and a half off. It
was a little overwhelming. I didn't understand all of it. I knew a lot of it was illusory and
a lot of it was beautiful and I didn't know which was which. There were literally 14 or
15 moments of different stimuli every day which I didn't have the time or energy to
process because of the many different roles that you wind up playing when you're out
on the road. So I needed to get off the road and stop for what felt like the first time in
my life. I knew that would be equally as exciting at some point but terrorizing at first,
just because I'd never really stopped.
OFF THE TOP OF YOUR HEAD CAN YOU GIVE ONE LITTLE
ANNECDOTAL INSTANCE OF THE INSANITY OF IT? BECAUSE I
IMAGINE IT'S ONE OF THOSE THINGS WHERE SUDDENLY YOU'RE ONE
OF THE MOST RECOGNISABLE FACES ON EARTH AND THAT BRINGS
AROUND THAT CYCLE OF ISOLATION, RIGHT?
A-ha. The moment I can think of wasn't a specific moment. It was realising I could no
longer walk down the street and just look at people, have eye contact with them, and
not have it be a moment of wondering whether they were recognizing me as opposed
to just connecting with someone for the sake of, you know, human to human. Now it
was human to someone that they recognized. And I kind of grieve that because I loved
connecting with people just in a very kind of anonymous way. And that had changed
obviously. Especially when you're on tour, you're I the consciousness of the particular
city you're in. When I was off the road and I would travel, it was not as much of an
issue because people were not aware of the fact that I was in their city to do a show
that night.
ONE OF THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY ELEMENTS OF SEEING YOUR
SHOW LAST TIME WAS 13,000 PEOPLE, MOSTLY TEEENAGE GIRLS,
SINGING ALONG TO LITERALLY EVERY WORD OF EVERY SONG.
THAT'S A RARE THING. AND ITS POWERFUL..WELL, ITS POWER ISNT
IT?
Yeah it was beautiful. It was beautiful because I saw them coming to my shows not
solely for the sake of coming to see me as much as coming to see a part of themselves
in accordance to my songs or my show. That was the most beautiful part of it, really.
OBVIUOSLY, BEING AN ARTIST, THOSE EARLY RECORDS WOULD
HAVE CAPTURED YOU IN THE INFANCY OF YOUR DEVELOPMENT.
HOW DO YOU LOOK BACK ON THEM?
I love them. I listen to them about once a year, just to get some objectivity. But I love
them, not only because there's a thread of continuity through everything that I've ever
done but, again, it's like a Polaroid of that time in my life. I see the confusions, I see the
apprehensions, I see the naivetes and the joys.
THE OTHER THING IS, I DIDN'T KNOW YOU HAD A TWIN BROTHER.
HOW DOES HE DEAL WITH WHATS HAPPENED TO YOU?
He's good. He was the one who was in India, he'd been there for many months, he
was the one who encouraged me to go over there.
***********************************************************************
In Her Own Words
Why did you decide to be naked in the video for 'Thank U'?
I thought of it when I was in the shower, while we were still mastering the record. I
was naked, obviously, and I wanted something very raw and present, because that's
what the song is. And the last couple of years, the way I feel about my body has
changed so that I don't see it as just an ornament, partly because of the triathlon
training. Now who I am inside determines how I feel about my body instead of the
other way around. Because I had been at both extremes: seeing my body as just an
aesthetic presence and then going to the opposite extreme and wearing overalls for
two years. Now I'm somewhere in the middle.
Let's talk about your childhood. What's your earliest memory?
Living in Germany when I was three or four -- I just remember being with my twin
brother in a kindergarten class and thinking that if I put my hands over my eyes, no one
could see me. I vividly remember that.
And do we think that that's revealing, that you wanted to cover yourself and not be
seen?
If we want it to be revealing, it shall be, and if we don't, it won't. I think my most
enjoyable moment on earth is when I do feel seen, and when I am privileged enough to
be able to see someone else. I think it's the biggest gift we can give each other.
It's kind of a contradiction: wanting to be seen, and all the loose clothes and the hair in
the face.
Well, it's equally exciting and horrifying to be seen. To be seen before you see yourself
is a very scary thing.
Do you remember your first kiss?
Yup. I was in grade eight. I mean, my first real kiss; I had my first kiss when I was in
grade one -- that was more of a cheek kiss, but he was definitely my boyfriend. His
name was Jeffrey, and I'm very curious to see where he is right now and what he's
doing.
And who initiated this romance?
We were both equally into each other. It was great. He's the template by which I
measure all men. It lasted many months. And we were exclusive. And the one in grade
eight, we were both about to go into class, at the bottom of a set of stairs, and he
leaned over and kissed me. It was very exciting. I had had a crush on him for a year.
It must be so difficult to be the boy in a sudden-first-move situation, don't you think?
I think more women are making first moves. I reached a point over the last few years
where I've been making the first move and not really worrying about it.
And what's your success rate been?
It's been pretty good. In my experience, the first kiss rarely happens unless both
people are ready for it. It's not as though you just grab somebody's head and say, 'I
don't know whether you like me or not, but I'm going to plant one on you.' Usually you
have a sense.
What's the hardest thing about fame?
When you're famous, when you're successful, you're surrounded by a lot of liars. It
was pretty hard for me to deal with the situation. It was like I lost my identity. But in
some weird way, I'm positive that until recently I didn't have a real identity. I think
that's the worst thing that can happen to any artist, when you don't know yourself
anymore, when you don't have a clue who you are.
How did you deal with that?
I went to India and it helped me a lot. Of course, the pressure is still there and it would
be really naive to believe that it would disappear all of a sudden, but I had a bit of
peace and quiet in India. I could relax and I could take that step back and look at my
life from a different angle. I have a different perspective now.
And just what is that perspective?
I realized that I don't need to do anything. Nothing can force me to do anything I don't
want to do, to do anything I don't like. I realized that I don't need to record another
album if I don't want to. You know, I'm in the lucky position that I made enough
money to do whatever I like, that I don't have to work anymore.
A lot of artists would like to be in that position. It must feel pretty good.
Yes, it does. That was one of the reasons why I really liked working on Supposed
Former Infatuation Junkie. I could do whatever I liked. I didn't have to show any
consideration for anything or anybody. I could just do whatever I always wanted to
do. That was a great feeling. It made me realize that I can't imagine that music might
not be a part of my life anymore. Music will always be a part of my life. I love music. I
don't care how many units I sell, I don't need to compromise anymore.
***********************************************************************
2-19-99
Minute by Minute
11:05 p.m.
Alanis reaches a powerful wail, waves her hands at the crowd and exits stage left. The house lights come up. I would like to Thank U for tuning in with us tonight. It was a pleasure broadcasting to you.
10:59 p.m.
The house lights come up and exposes an entire arena on its feet. Alanis screeches into a laid back version of "Not The Doctor."
10:57 p.m.
Alanis has strapped on an electric guitar for the first time this evening and the crowd goes wild.
10:52 p.m.
Yes! At least one more song! Alanis thanks the crowd and tears into "Wake Up" from her debut disc. The movie screen behind the band is filled with images of a high speed car trip in a post-apocolyptic waste land.
10:50 p.m.
Alanis has once again left the stage. Will we get another encore?
10:46 p.m.
The first licks of "Ironic" are played, and the audience immediately responds. It is a song that everyone can relate to. This was Alanis' first big cross over song. It dominated everything from MTV's 120 Minutes to easy listening stations. There is nothing ironic about its popularity...it is simply a fantastic tune.
10:44 p.m.
A golden glow stretches from the stage and onto the floor section of the crowd. The color's tone perfectly matches the melody and words of positivity.
10:41 p.m.
Alanis returns and rips into "Thank U," the first hit from her follow up album. It is a fitting way to begin your encore.
10:39 p.m.
Alanis waves to the crowd and leaves the stage. The band follows and we wait for the encore. NJO editor Sara Glines has just told me that other shows on this tour had encores that kicked off with "Ironic." Let's see...
10:37 p.m.
The section that is most active is the group in the obstructed view seats, just off to the right of the stage. They continue to dance and have not sat down since the second song of the night!
10:35 p.m.
Alanis takes center stage once again for an Indian flavored version of "Uninvited," the hit from the "City of Angels" soundtrack.
10:34 p.m.
It's a very creepy version of the song with Novak playing bongos instead of his kit. The song is slowly building and eventually explodes into the powerhouse that lies on "Pill." The crows erupts as it builds!
10:32 p.m.
The bass pounds into the intro of "You Oughta Know." It's a menacing version of this song and the audience is yelling out the lyrics with her. This is obviously a favorite of this crowd.
10:28 p.m.
"Why are you so petrified of silence," Alanis sings. "Here can you handle this..." and the crowd roars through the silence.
10:24 p.m.
Alanis introduces her band Nick Lashley on guitar, drummer Gary Novak, Chris Chaney on bass, Darren Johnson on keyboards and Joel Shearer on guitar, then launches into "All I Really Want."
10:20 p.m.
From "Unsent," Alanis switches back to the "Jagged Pill" CD and belts out "Right Through You" with the venom in her lyrics and voice.
10:15 p.m.
The lead guitarist straps on an acoustic and Alanis chimes out, "Dear Mathew," the familiar start to her latest hit, "Unsent." The song is made up of a series of letters from Alanis to old lovers and friends. It is a beautiful song and the crowd sways in unison to the catchy melody.
10:10 p.m.
Alanis continues her return to "Jagged Little Pill" with "Mary Jane." It is a well deserved breather for Alanis after her torrid energy output from the past 2 songs.
10:05 p.m.
The band grinds into "Forgiven." Alanis continues to storm around the stage, often reaching out to the audience with passion and angst.
10:02 p.m.
Alanis is frantically jumping around the stage during the conclusion of this song. She looks like a litte kid who just got a great birthday gift. It is obvious she really loves her music and performing. Some members of the crowd respond by holding up a Canadian flag.
10:01 p.m.
The Hammond organ cranks u and the entire floor section jumps from their seats!
10:01 p.m.
Alanis launches into a stripped down percussion only version of "You Learn." She dedicates it to us. The band blasts in on the chorus.
10:00 p.m.
It is hard to imagine that a woman of 23 can have so much maturity and emotion in her voice, but Alanis is a seasoned pro, having her first Canadian hit at the age of 10.
9:54 p.m.
Alanis takes center stage for "Perfect." The stage is an muted blue.
9:49 p.m.
Alanis follows up "Mad" with "Sympathetic Character," as she does on he latest album. The whole front floor section is on their feet, entranced by Alanis' quick sing-song banter.
9:47 p.m.
A large movie screen fills the back of the Arena. It shows slow motion close-ups of hands and arms. It serves as the perfect back-drop to this living room setting.
9:43 p.m.
The crowd seems very responsive to this older tune, but the night is still young! Alanis tells the audience that we are "sweet." She picks up an acoustic and strums the opening chords to "Are You Still Mad"
9:40 p.m.
Alanis blows a mean harmonica. The drum beat has an Indian flavor, as does much of the new album (a trick she perhaps picked up from co-Maverick recording artist and owner, Madonna).
9:38 p.m.
Alanis has picked up a bouquet of flowers and the drummer storms into "Hand in My Pocket." The crowd goes crazy!
9:35 p.m.
Alanis is in great voice. The powerful growl you hear on her records ring true in live performance. However, I must admitt, she is shorter than I thought she would be. She has such a powerful voice and image that you expect her to be a giant!
9:33 p.m.
The stage turns a frosty green as Alanis grabs an acoustic guitar and launches into "Can't Not"
9:30p.m.
For those of you who are curious as to what instruments make up Alanis' band, here is the lineup: 2 guitars, a bass guitarist, a drummer and a keyboard player. It looks like the keyboardist has a synth as well as a Hammond organ, a necessity for "Pill" tunes.
9:28 p.m.
Alanis is opening with material from her new CD "Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie." While a video of Alanis running across a field plays in the background, she rocks on stage to "Would Not Come."
9:25 p.m.
The background lighting looks like a Tiffany glass window. The crowd is on it's feet cheering and waving as Alanis roams the stage.
9:23 p.m.
Alanis comes out in her black pants and t-shirt with the floral slit skirt and launches into "Baba."
9:21 p.m.
The lights have come down. And the band is coming on stage....
9:19 p.m.
The stage is empty, but the crowd is beginning to cheer to encourage the Alanis show to start. The crowd's getting into some major wave action around the arena. Yep, we're still waiting for the show to begin.
9:09 p.m.
The roadies have peeled back the black matting that covered the stage during the Garbage show to reveal a brightly colored tapestry pattern on the floor. It's very Alanis.
8:59 p.m.
The arena is farely full now. The audience ranges from very pre-teen to 40-something, with an equal mix of men and women. There's a decided concentration of late-teen to early 20s women, but it's a mixed group.
8:56 p.m.
The stage is being set up for Alanis. Stay with us for the live play-by-play transcript of her show at the Meadowlands in East Rutherford.
8:46 p.m.
Manson and the band have left the stage. We will be on a short intermission, awaiting THE MIGHTY ALANIS.
8:45 p.m.
The "When I grow up, I'll be stable" is cutting right to the bone of this youngish crowd. It is truly an anthem to many!
8:42 p.m.
Manson introduces the last song of the evening for them, "Grow Up." The bubble gum start of the song radiates throughout the stadium.
8:39 p.m.
Manson does not stand still for a minute! She is constantly prancing around the stage! She is the perfect mix of high energy, sexiness and raw attitude and the band knows it. She is the center, and they play off of her energy perfectly!
8:37 p.m.
The crowd cheers as Manson introduces, "I'm Only Happy When It Rains," a song she describes as being "very Scottish."
8:33 p.m.
The synthesized intro to "Push It" fills the arena. The song has become a staple for MTV commercials and ESPN sport high-lite music. You can't beat the energy of this song. It is pure driving pop/rock with the catchiest of hooks.
8:28 p.m.<p>
Manson has just thanked the NY/NJ crowd for coming out and Ms. Morissette for letting them play. Vig's twangy guitar kicks off, "Special."
8:23 p.m.
Manson has just introduced "Stupid Girl," the second hit from their debut self-titled album. The crowd is on their feet now and Manson is jumping around the stage in her signiture sneakers. She prowls around the stage like a boxer who just scored a massive knock out. All attitude!
8:23 p.m.
The last time Garbage was in Jersey was on Halloween when they rocked the Asbury Park convention center. What a show that was!
8:18 p.m.
Manson and the band just wrapped up "Medication," from their second release, "Version 2.0." The veteran band made up of Manson, super producer Butch Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson are extremely relaxed before this sold-out crowd.
8:14 p.m.
For a fairly hi-tech album, Garbage really sounds true to the record. I am sure that Butch Vig, always a perfectionist, made sure that the sound is flawless.
8:11 p.m.
The guys out there are probably wondering what Shirley is wearing. She was wearing an orange long sleeve, but she just peeled that off to reveal a glittery tank top. The band just smashed into "I Think I'm Paranoid"
8:08 p.m.
Strobe lights flood the audience in synch with the throbbing techno sounds. Manson is lively, despite a half empty arena.
8:06 p.m.
Shirley Manson and the band have taken the stage and have launched into "Temptation Waits."
8:04 p.m.
Even more emotion-drenched and script-friendly is the fact that her mood of black
misery was swept away with the discovery of one album. "The first time I heard Tori
Amos' Little Earthquakes," she says, "I played the record in its entirety, lying on my
living room floor, and I just bawled my eyes out. It felt like it was the first time I
could relate to a woman on that level through her music and I was so grateful. I felt
that she'd been through a lot of the things I'd gone through."
*******************************************************************
Alanis In Wonderland
I shouldn't be here. From a vantage point not ten feet away, I'm watching Alanis
Morissette grind her arms and legs through a vigorous workout on an obsolete
stationary bicycle-the kind where the handlebars go back and forth. Minutes earlier,
her tour manager had firmly instructed me to keep my distance.
"She'll be in the gym," he said, "but we'll see you at dinner." "I could just go down to
the gym..."
I squeaked.
"That's not what I said," he growled.
But how could he expect me to obey orders knowing that, over in the hotel exercise
room, the pop banshee of the moment was sweating her booty off? Fueled by 1995's
anthem of the jilted, "You Oughta Know," the 21-year-old Morissette has successfully
packaged female anger and sold it back to ex-boyfriends worldwide at an incredible
markup. Her American debut, Jagged Little Pill, is racing up the Billboard album chart
with all the fury of a ravenous she-wolf hunting her prey, and her blurry form
dominates MTV much the same way her record label CEO, Madonna, once did.
The sweathog grunting before me, though, doesn't at all resemble the royally
pissed-off alterna-grrrl who refused Sinead O'Connor's abandoned Lollapalooza spot,
the siren whose show Alicia Silverstone, the summer's slickest teen, clamored to see.
As if. Clad in plaid shorts and a baggy white tee, her long brown hair pulled back,
Morissette could be Typical Girl History Major at Liberal Arts College. In a space as
cramped as this, hardly 20 feet square, she's forced to exchange a tentative "Hi." Her
monosyllable provides few clues as to whether or not she'll bite my head off when my
espionage becomes clear. But when she abandons the noisy bike and approaches the
bench press machine, she smiles and turns to me. Noticing my confusion at a padded
contraption attached to the weight-station, she comes around to help out. "It's for
curling, I think," she offers after some tinkering. The vengeful video vixen, it turns
out, isn't Tank Girl after all; she's friendly and sweet, almost flirtatious. And a
samaritan of sorts.
Lousy with guilt, I confess to staking her out. Her shoulders tense momentarily, but
she quickly rules me out as a potential stalker. "Nobody ever recognizes me," she
sighs, as if saying so will keep it true.
"I was thinking about your song," I shyly begin.
"Which one?"
" 'Your House,' " I admit.
"Uh-oh." Those shoulders stiffen once more. "Are you some kind of stalker?"
"Your House," for those uninitiated, is the super-secret track at the very end of
Jagged Little Pill. Search past track 13, the uncredited remix of "You Oughta Know,"
until you get to 5:12, and you'll hear an a cappella Morissette seeking absolution from
a lover whose house she has broken into-she takes a bath, plays his Joni Mitchell
albums, puts on his cologne-as she sings, "I shouldn't be here without permission / You
might be home soon / Would you forgive me, love / If I laid in your bed?" Saturated
with reverb, the track possesses a chantlike, religious quality that leads me to wonder
if the one-time Catholic is actually singing to some deity.
"That is the only song on the record that's not 100 percent true," she confides. "I was
staying in this guy's house in Hollywood and he wasn't there for a week. I remember
being overly curious and sleeping in his bed. It felt eerie and unnerving; I also had
kind of a crush on him. I get burned at the end of the song because if I had really
snooped around as much as I wanted to, it would have been wrong. I probably would
have found something I didn't want to find. I deserved it." She laughs. "So do you."
That evening, when Morissette appears for dinner, a mild transformation has
occurred. Her hair, extending just about to her elbows, falls perfectly straight until it
reaches her chest, where it freaks out into zig-zaggy tentacles. She's wearing a white
oxford fastened together by a safety pin in only one place despite its fully functional
buttons, baggy satin sweatpants, and no-name tennis sneakers-very Haight-Ashbury
'90s love child. I can't help but notice her fingernails, decorated in a lovely shade of
robin's-egg-blue nail polish. Not only do I notice it on Morissette, but on several
members of her band, a Muppet Show of longhaired L.A. session dudes. "I've made
everyone put it on," she smiles before glancing at my own fingertips with devious
intent. "Would you like me to do yours?"
I make some small talk with the Muppets, but I can't help watching Morissette
sideways. Not because I fear an unauthorized manicure, but because she knows how to
get your attention without demanding it. She's a hair twirler. If you've got it, twirl it, I
suppose. She claps her hands in front of her mouth and squeals when she gets excited
about things, particularly the temporary tattoo she plans to buy and affix to her
guitarist's butt, a drawing of a hand with the inscription, "Grab My Love." When a
cake arrives for the table next to us, she croaks "Happy Birthday" just as out of tune
as everyone else.
"Hey, you can't sing!" I exclaim.
"You're right," she deadpans. "You'd better go home."
The next time we meet, just before the evening's Pontiac, Michigan, show at 7th
House, a tiny rock club just beyond the affluent edge of Detroit's suburbs, the
metamorphosis is complete. Morissette is devastating. She's done little more than slap
on some foundation and accentuate that big Carly Simon mouth with a smidgen of
burgundy lipstick, but that proves plenty. She warms up her voice by outsinging the
Motown on the radio. Now I recognize her. You only have to flick a switch to turn on a
light.
7th House looks to be about two-thirds full, the twentyish pop music consumers almost
evenly divided between guys and gals. Strangely enough, this miniature cult following
includes a large number of couples, who nuzzle in the balcony or stand on each others'
toes down front. All of them have long feathered hair, and, it seems, at least one item
of cut-off clothing.
Morissette's band, sans their frontwoman, swarms the stage, launching into a
ferocious Zep-like groove. For all their offstage goofiness and Sunset Strip hairspray
residue, the four Muppets are ear-poppingly good musicians, with the kind of
enthusiasm that results in lots of flying drumsticks. Guitarist Jesse Tobias, formerly
of the band Mother Tongue, came recommended by the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea and
Dave Navarro, who backed Morissette on "You Oughta Know." The rest-drummer Taylor
Hawkins (a self-described "cross between Brad Pitt and Animal"), bassist Chris Chaney
and one-time King Swamp guitarist Nick Lashley-"all just showed up and worked out,"
says Morissette. "If I wasn't in a band with them I would probably have dated each one
of them already, except Nick, who's married. But it's too sacred for us to jeopardize
our professional relationship."
When Morissette finally races onstage, flinging her tresses from side to side before
ripping into "All I Really Want," the crowd whoops like an Arsenio audience. The
sleeves of her button-down shirt flapping at her sides, Morissette looks like she's
taking orders from some other planet. With her eyes practically rolled back in her
head, and her left arm waving spasmodically, it's clear that Typical Girl has been left
behind at the hotel gym. After a few impressive tosses of her hair, Morissette begins
to resemble those terrifying teen starlets of '70s horror films-pig-bloodied Sissy
Spacek in Carrie, Linda Blair growling "Your mother sucks cocks in hell" in The
Exorcist. You'd best believe that all she really wants is deliverance-"a way to calm the
angry voice."
Morissette isn't all revenge fantasies and spewed split-pea soup. The flower child with
the light-blue nail polish emerges in the lilting singalong "Hand In My Pocket," which
finds Morissette exploring the central dichotomies of her existence: her private life
versus her stabs at reaching out, apathy versus engagement with the world. "I'm high
but I'm grounded / I'm sane but I'm overwhelmed / I'm lost but I'm hopeful," she
drawls. Astonishingly, her cult following at 7th House has developed a little routine for
the song's chorus. In the lyric, one hand always remains in the aforementioned pocket,
while the other goes through a series of easily imitable functions-hailing a taxicab,
giving a high five, flicking a cigarette-which our feathered friends demonstrate at the
appropriate moments. In perfect unison. Sure it's cheesy, something you'd expect of,
say, Hootie & the Blowfish fans-and you know there's gotta be some overlap-but the
entire audience partakes, without any prompting from the stage whatsoever.
Sometimes cheese is Brie.
Morissette doesn't have a clear-cut explanation for the song. When she tells me that
she never watches TV, reads nothing but books-she's presently plowing through
Marianne Faithfull's autobiography-and that fun for her is climbing a tree with a friend
and not speaking for four hours, I suggest that said concealed hand symbolizes the
Glenn Gould-like depth of her self-imposed isolation.
"Sure, that could be what it's about," she hedges. "Most of those songs were written so
quickly that I would write something and sing it, and the next day not remember doing
it. It was just exactly the way I was feeling at the time."
Morissette has a dark secret, several even, but she's not showing her hand for
nothing. She's keeping it in that damn pocket.
The following afternoon, Morissette and I commandeer the tour van and spend a
Zen-like afternoon on the campus of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, home to more
beautiful sculpture gardens than you can shake the Venus de Milo at. We sit in the
sun, by a reflecting pool filled with multicolored carp and water lilies and flanked by
spitting cherubs, and talk, ironically, about pain.
Morissette speaks wisely and authoritatively about her fans' connection with the hurt
and anger of her music, recognizing both their need to identify and her own need to
purge. "Everybody has to release it somehow," she says. "If you don't, it'll take its toll
on you, and it'll either be a physical thing, or all your relationships will be really
negative and full of conflict or something. So you have to deal, whether you go
through therapy or get into relationships, or music, or write it out in diaries. Smoking
cigarettes isn't enough. There's no way around pain. That's part of the charm of being
alive."
Indeed, Jagged Little Pill's calculatedly eclectic pop-a hip-hop beat here, a folk guitar
there, a little extra feedback on the bridge-gets its power from Morissette's
willingness to push a little harder emotionally and lyrically than any woman currently
working the Buzz Bin. Her voice goes from quirky punches at the ends of lines and
awkward, expressive breaths to high piping siren territory, and is all the more
impressive for her lack of formal training. "Never had a singing lesson," she beams.
"I'm getting a vocal coach, though...."
Taking cliches like "you live, you learn" and exploding them into painful
conclusions-"You bleed, you learn / You scream, you learn"-Morissette mines the
nitty-gritty too often relegated to mere subtext in pop music. Grrrls can't be girls
because the media defines them through their anger, and that just makes them
angrier. The way in which Morissette carves out space for a broad emotional range is
more typical of men: She simply assumes it. "Being able to express both your
masculine and feminine sides is a great advantage," asserts the former tomboy.
Morissette's gentler (but not necessarily "feminine") side, as heard on "Hand In My
Pocket" and the sympathetic "Mary Jane," nestled alongside rants like "You Oughta
Know," effects a sea change in pop music by affirming that "angry" and "woman" don't
have to add up to "angry woman." "The day that there's no need for feminism, this
society has truly woken up," she says. She hasn't even heard Throwing Muses or PJ
Harvey.
Her career, however, began long before either of theirs, despite her just having
turned the legal drinking age last June. Alanis Nadine Morissette, the only daughter of
military high school teachers Alan Morissette and Georgia Feuerstein, respectively
French Canadian and Hungarian-born, spent most of her first few years in Germany
before being whisked back to Ottawa, along with her twin brother Wade and older
brother Chad. At nine years of age, before you learned three-place multiplication, she
took up piano, and at ten she began to write songs and act, landing a recurring spot
on Nickelodeon's wacky kids show, You Can't Do That on Television, where she
unsuccessfully dodged falling buckets of green slime for the 1986 season. Back when
you were a big Kajagoogoo fan, the determined Morissette took all the money she
made on You Can't Do That and recorded the self-penned single "Fate Stay With Me"
with help from a couple of Canadian music biz veterans. She had 2,000 copies of it
pressed on her own indie label, Lamor Records, and MCA Publishing was impressed
enough to snag her a contract with their Canadian division at age 14. You'd just
popped your first zit.
Because of her ample confidence, not to mention the cross-legged Buddha posture
she's assumed, it's easy to forget that Morissette has only walked the earth for 21
years. Her precision masks her unruly sentiments. When she says she believes in "that
whole concept of having to hit rock bottom in order to make any changes," I remember
that she's dealt with her problems in the past-realizing that her heart wasn't in the
music she'd become so successful performing-by dropping everything and moving to
Toronto at age 18, and then again to Los Angeles at 20. She explains: "You have to
reach a point that you're so consumed by whatever it is that you can't take it anymore,
and until you reach that point you just coast along like a bottom-dweller."
We stumble upon a man-made swimming hole. "We're going in, right?" she declares.
Neither of us has a swimsuit. I strip to my skivvies. She dives in fully clothed. Talk
turns to relationships.
She insists that she's ready to love somebody, but lets it slip that she's never been in a
positive relationship before, citing examples of dalliances with older men who were
"emotionally unavailable" to her.
"How will you handle it the next time you get dumped?" I ask.
She immediately responds, in all seriousness: "I'm never going to get dumped again."
She intimates that the last good time she had in bed resulted in bruises up and down
her arms.
"Hickeys?" I hope, worrying that the sex might have taken an ugly turn.
"Hickeys, bite-me's. It was great."
"So what happened to him?"
"He's coming back. Definitely." With that, she inverts herself in the water and lets her
legs finish the conversation.
Not until I rejoin her in Toronto do I uncover Alanis Morissette's dark secret. None of
her press people have been particularly forthcoming about her first two albums, the
1991 Canadian platinum Alanis and its 1992 near-gold follow-up, Now Is the Time. No
one carries them in the U.S. As soon as I land in Canada, I'm praying I can find at least
one of her previous releases at the local mall. Unbeknownst to me, the time I spend
hunting down these rarities coincides with our scheduled interview session. I am
embarrassing her and pissing her off simultaneously. Would you forgive me, love?
I know I can't mention to her the exact nature of my disappearance when I get a look
at the cover of Alanis, from which a younger version of Morissette, still swaddled in
baby fat, pouts defiantly. Inside, she sings of "party boys" and "supermen," and sassily
exclaims "My name is Alanis / I'm a white chick singer / The drums are a-smokin' and
so's the bass." It's as if her high school yearbook picture came to life and made an
album designed to haunt her forever. Sometimes cheese is Velveeta.
"There are certain mistakes that you make when you're 16 because you're ignorant,"
she demurs the next morning, realizing I'm in on the musical make-over that has made
Canadians skeptical of Morissette's newfound alternative status. No wonder she refers
to Jagged Little Pill as "my debut album," and lowers her head in shame when referring
to her two dance-oriented, teen-spirited chartbusters. Alanis was the Debbie Gibson of
Canada.
When her contract with MCA Records ex-pired, the 20-year-old HI-NRG queen exiled
herself to Los Angeles. "It was kind of a blessing that it was over," she muses,
"because I wanted to start out with a clean slate, not only personally but career-wise,
too. It left me sort of naked. Leaving Toronto to go to L.A. gave me a severe dose of
disillusionment that was really necessary. I was finally in a position where things
weren't working out. And it was good for me. It made me realize that certain people I'd
blindly trusted let me down. My intuition was saying 'Don't trust these people, don't
work with these people,' and I went against it."
She keeps her bitterness over her early career in check, though.
"I've had people cheat me out of a lot of money. Let's just say that I'm still paying for
the mistakes I've made. I think of it as my tuition for The College of Music Career."
Still, everyone resembles their high school yearbook picture a little, no matter how
much they mature. It's worth noting, therefore, that most of the love songs on
Alanis-"Jealous," "Walk Away"-consist of diatribes against unfaithful or unsuitable
lovers. Even a 16-year-old Morissette crackles with angst, in sharp contrast with the
peppy Paula Abdul-esque computerized backup. "Feeling lost in a world full of lies / I
can't help thinkin' that love is just passin' me by," she moans in "On My Own," a song
for which Morissette retains a reasonable amount of respect, probably because it
describes her lack of control over the final product. How ironic that Jagged Little Pill
producer/collaborator Glen Ballard, who rescued her from MIDI hell, has also helped
trap Paula Abdul and Michael Jackson there.
Ballard brought Morissette to the attention of Maverick Records, playing "Perfect" for
A&R whiz-kid and Freddy DeMann-protege Guy Oseary. Though the 22-year-old Oseary
denies that the song touched off a synergistic prodigy vibe between the two, he tends
to stress Morissette's precociousness. "She and I are about the same age, and people
are always so amazed that we've accomplished anything since Generation X-ers are
supposedly not ambitious. We're showing people we're as ambitious as anyone else."
Oseary, who also inked Candlebox to Maverick, has yet to see or hear Alanis' first two
albums, though. "I don't even want to," he says.
Morissette downplays it, but this evening's Toronto show means a great deal, as much
a vendetta as a homecoming. "It feels good to have a country understand and
appreciate my growth as opposed to questioning it," she declares. With two wildly
successful albums' worth of ripe cheese to live down, Morissette's trying to pull off the
entertainment business's toughest trick: the Janet Jackson/Tori Amos/Ron Howard
how-ya-like-me-now. As the young and underpaid hoser who sold me her previous
releases quipped with more admiration than scorn, "She's a trend-jumper."
The sold-out show, at Lee's Palace, has a much friendlier vibe than the exciting chill of
the Pontiac bloodletting. It's the first show after a week's vacation. She spent it in
Ottawa with family, catching up by taking long walks down train tracks with her
brothers, who thankfully never discuss her career with her. "We couldn't be more
different," coos Morissette, "but I feel closer to them than I ever have." She takes
care to explain that her parents aren't phased by hearing their daughter refer to oral
sex and fucking to the cheers of an enthusiastic throng. "A lot of people ask my
parents, 'Aren't you embarrassed that your daughter speaks like that?' and they say,
'No, she's been that way her whole life, she just wasn't doing it publicly. And we're glad
she is now.' " Morissette laughs. "My mother's raunchier than I am."
Old friends from her Toronto days drop in, including former roommate Mike Levine of
the Canadian cheese-metal band Triumph. Her parents come down to see the show.
Even old enemies from her mallrat days, busily promoting the opening act, have
shamelessly appeared.
"Right now is pretty pinnacle-ish," she tells me when I ask about her goals. "I went to
the beach just the other night and I sat on the same rock I sat on when I first moved
to Toronto, which was probably the hardest time in my whole life. I remember sitting
on that rock in such major pain. And then I sat on it the other night-same rock-and I
just went, 'Man.' "
That's why it looks strange when she squints a little and arches her back during "Right
Through You," sternly indicating the band as she growls, "Hello Mr. Man / You didn't
think I'd come back / You didn't think I'd show up with my army / And this ammunition
on my back." After the show, she tells me that she spotted in the audience some of
the same record execs who inspired the song. Her eyes light up. "When this one guy
approached me backstage," she whispers, "I looked him in the eye and said, 'See you
on the way down.' "
*********************************************************************
Adventures of Miss Thing
Here's a clue for the clueless generation: If you're going to worship someone, you
ought to know what she looks like. Outside the Mercury Cafe Brewhouse, in Denver,
where Alanis Morissette is playing a club gig, a desperate young man approaches the
singer in the hopes of buying an extra ticket, unaware that he's talking to the
headliner. It's a few hours before show time, and already a crowd of ticketless fans--a
mix of intense young women, bookish lads and preppy couples--has gathered to try to
buy scalped tickets to this sold-out show.
Just because fans of Morissette connect with her heartfelt, earnest songs--in fact,
they seem on the verge of annointing her rock's Generation X-rated diva--doesn't
mean they could pick their heroine out of a police lineup. They're not to blame: The hit
clip for that unltimate bad-breakup anthem, "You Oughta Know," is so atmospherically
photographed as to make its star a barely recognizable MTV icon. Similarly, the photo
of Morissette on the cover of her smash album, Jagged Little Pill, has a hazy, elusive
quality.
"I've been told a few times now that I don't look like my songs," Morissette says.
"People expect me to have purple hair and a pierced nose and boobs. Then they meet
me, and I'm just...me." In this instance, "me" is a petite but curvaceous young woman
who wears little makeup. "I hate to let anyone down, but I'm not the cleavage sort of
aesthetic babe. I've been down that road before, and that's not what I'm about."
Exactly what Morissette is about has become a subject of passionate debate on the
Internet and everywhere else music fans meet since "You Oughta Know" started its
long reign atop the modern-rock radio charts. She has been called everything from
brilliant to naive, naysayers are pissed that the public has chosen to make Morissette
a star instead of the critically lauded Liz Phair. In any case, the masses have spoken
with their wallets. Want to know how hot Morissette is? The other day she got a
gushing love letter from the other queen of 1995's pop culture prom, Alicia
Silverstone.
On Jagged Little Pill's "Right Through You," Morissette sings about a time that sounds
like the present: "Now that I'm Miss Thing/Now that I'm a zillionaire." Although actually
written when she was broke and sleeping on friend's couches in Los Angeles, the lines
appear to have come true.
"I guess in a way, I am Miss Thing right now," Morissette says, shaking her head. "I
laugh now when I sing the song onstage because the whole thing's so ironic. When I
wrote those words, I was the furthest thing in the world from it." Not that she's
complaining. Unlike some of her contemporaries, Morissette says she's excited by her
success: "I asked for this."
Partly because Morissette collaborated on Jagged Little Pill with Glen Ballard--a
successful songwriter and pop producer known for his work with Wilson Phillips, among
others--her critics suggest she's simply a contrived creation of the studio. But for the
crowd in Denver, there's no question that Morissette is for real. From the moment she
kicks into "All I Really Want" with furious harmonica-blowing accompaniment, it's
obvious that a healthy percentage of this packed audience has not only taken these
songs to heart, it knows them all by heart--and this for an album that at the time of
the Denver show had been released only five weeks. Morissette's uncensored
documentations of her psychosexual former-Catholic-girl torments has become the
resonant fodder for the rest of the entire listening world. As she sings on "Forgiven":
"I sang halleluhah in the choir/I confessed my darkest deeds to an envious man/My
brothers, they never went blind for what they did/But I may as well have/In the name
of the Father, the skeptic and the Son/ I had one more stupid question."
"The reaction of the audience has been so amazing and open," says Morissette. "It's
comforting and bittersweet to know that I'm not the only one who's gone through these
things. At the same time it's a little disturbing that apparently there's a lot of people
out there having gone through such painful things. The reaction has been pretty
intense." Sometimes the reaction is so intense, it shocks even Morissette. "There was
a mosh pit in Minneapolis when we played there. Is it me, or is this music not about
mosh-pitting?" Still sings with conviction and whipping her long mane of hair around
the stage, Morissette brings the Denver crowd to a frenzy. Some may find her
powerful voice--which at times recalls Sin_ad O'Conner's and Kate Bush's--overly
mannered, but she really is one of rock's most gifted vocalists. Like the Counting
Crows' Adam Duritz and the Cranberries' Dolores O'Riordan, she's a brave lead singer
willing to go to an emotional level just millimeters below over the top.
With confidence, Morissette leads her crack four-piece backing band--none of whom
played on Jagged Little Pill--through looser, more explosive versions of the album's
material. Her young band comes from journeymen backgrounds: Guitarist Jesse
Tobias, a former member of Mother Tongue, was briefly a Red Hot Chili Pepper before
being replaced by Dave Navarro; guitarist Nick Lashley and drummer Taylor Hawkins
played together in Sass Jordan's backing band. Then there's bassist Chris Chaney,
whose prior gigs include time with '80s soft-pop star Christopher Cross. In a 65-minute
set, Morissette and the band play everything on the album except "Head Over Feet."
They include no covers, but they've rehearsed a ska version of the Beatles "Ob-La-Di,
Ob-La-Da" and the Human League's "(Keep Feeling) Fascination."
Morissette connects with her audience in a way that--when viewed without fashionable
cynicism--is moving. The dynamic is less like a concert than modern-rock group
therapy with Morissette serving as a sort of twentysomething Joni Mitchell backed by
thrashy guitar. Despite having a song called "Ironic," she's as unironic an artist as they
currently come. "Thank you for understanding," she meaningfully tells the crowd before
launching into her encore number, "Perfect," an anthem about the pressure of youth.
According to Madonna, the woman whose label, Maverick, Morissette records for,
Morissette is handling those pressures just fine, "She reminds me of me when I
started out: slightly awkward but extremely self-possessed and straightforward," says
Madonna. "There's a sense of excitement and giddiness in the air around her--like
anything's possible, and the sky's the limit."
Who has earned more of a right to sing the postmodern blues than a former Canadian
child star who was washed up before she turned 18, an impressionable youth who once
opened for Vanilla Ice?
Morissette was born on June 1, 1974, in Ottawa. Her French-Canadian father, Alan,
worked as a high school principal; her Hungarian-born mother, Georgia, was a
teacher. Morissette describes her parents as "very free-spirited, curious people." The
family moved frequently when Morissette was young, as her parents skipped from
school to school, teaching the children of military personnel. From the ages of 3 to 6,
she lived in the former West Germany with her parents, her older brother, Chad, and
her twin brother, Wade, before moving back to Canada.
Morissette got the performing bug early. At 6, she took up piano, and at 9 she started
writing her first songs. Her acting career, however, took off first. By age 10 she had
made a splash on Nickelodeon's cable-TV kids series You Can't Do That On Television.
"It was a good, stupid, sarcastic kind of show," Morissette says. "Very obnoxious and
very tongue in cheek." Recently, MTV News aired footage of a virtually unrecognizably
young Morissette being slimed by her co-stars on the show. At that time, jealous
viewers wanted to slime Morissette, too. "I got hate mail because I played the
girlfriend of the two lead guys on the show," she says, "so I represented a threat to
them ever having these guys. It wasn't the best experience." She went on to other
acting work, including a "horrible" movie in which she appeared as a rock singer
named Alanis, and future Friends star Matt LeBlanc played her boyfriend.
"But music has always been my priority," says Morissette. At 10, she used some of her
acting money to cut an indie single called "Fate Stay With Me." At 14, she signed a
song-publishing deal, which led to two MCA/Canada albums. And so it was that the
year Nirvana told the world Nevermind, 16-year-old Alanis Morissette released her first
album of vaguely Madonna-esque dance pop. She was credited simply as Alanis.
Morissette says her parents never pushed her into showbiz, Still, she adds, "I don't
think there's such a thing as a dysfunction-free family. My parents, I love them, I'd
jump in front of a truck for them, but no matter what family you're in, there are going
to be obstacles, and I'd be lying if I said there weren't any." Asked if her parents
pushed her to perfection, she says simply, "I just wanted to do whatever it took to get
the approval of my parents and the people I was working with at the time."
Morissette's early musical output is fairly generic. Her pipes were already powerful,
but the only quality that ties her first two albums to her current material is a healthy
sense of adolescent lust. "You're just a party, party, party boy/From the moment I
walked into your life/I knew right then it was a serious thing for you," she sings on
"Party Boy," from 1991's Alanis. Things took a darker turn on "Big Bad Love," from her
1992 follow-up effort, Now is the Time. "I'm having dreams in the night of you, baby,"
she sings, "and Sigmund Freud would have thought I was crazy."
"No, I'm not scared people might hear those records," says Morissette. "I never did
Playboy centerfolds. There's nothing I regret. Maybe people will just understand my
lyrics now a little more if they hear those records. It validates this record." (Hey,
unless you're Stevie Wonder or Michael Jackson, how would you like to listen to a
record you did when you were 16?)
Alanis sold more than 100,000 copies in Canada and earned Morissette a Juno Award
as Most Promising Female Artist, while Now is the Time sold in excess of 50,000
there. She doesn't disavow the earlier recordings, but she considers Jagged Little Pill
her "real" debut. "There was an element of me not being who I really was at the time,"
she says of her first two albums. "It was because I wasn't prepared to open up that
way. The focus for me then was entertaining people as opposed to sharing any
revelations I had at the time. I had them, but I wasn't prepared to share."
As you might gather from listening to Jagged Little Pill's "Forgiven," some of
Morissette's revelations involved her feelings about sexuality and spirituality. She
went to church every Sundy while growing up and attended a Roman Catholic school.
"Then I rejected the whole concept of organized religion," says Morissette. "Still do.
But now when I'm onstage, it's very spiritual. I feel very close to God when I'm up
there."
Morissette says that part of her problem with the Roman Catholic church is its sexual
repression. In "You Oughta Know" she describes herself as "perverted." Today she
simply describes herself as being "a very sexual person." "I was active and physically
doing the things that were sexual when I was younger," she says. There was one side
of me that was crazy and deviant, doing things ahead of my time, and another side
that was very held back, wanting to remain virginal for the sake of being the good
white Catholic girl."
These sorts of tensions led the overachieving Morissette to a few episodes she
characterizes as breakdowns. "I had a few," she says. "That sort of comes from a
passive-aggressive approach. From the time I was 10, I was working with all these
people trying to control me and tell me what they thought I should be and what I should
look like. And I tried to control myself to be what they wanted me to be." Morissette
says drugs were never a problem for her "because my getting into drugs would have
meant that I wasn't perfect."
In an attempt to find more fulfillment musically and perhaps even grow up a little,
Morissette moved to Toronto after graduating from high school at 17. "The idea was
to let her live on her own and see what's life's about," says Scott Welch, who became
her manager around that time. Morissette calls these "a couple of the most growthful
years for me." Creatively, however, she searched with little luck for the right musical
collaborator.
Eventually, Morissette found free articstic expression in a most unlikely location: Los
Angeles. "It was a sort of baptism by fire when I got there," she says. "I was held up at
gunpoint in Hollywood when I first moved here. Still, depite all the negatives, it was
like in 'Hand in My Pocket': I was broke, but I was happy."
Professionally, Morissette went on about 10 bad "blind dates" with various songwriting
pros and in the process "learned only what I didn't want to do." Things turned around in
February '94 when she knocked on Glen Ballard's front door. A onetime
protŽgŽ of Quincy Jones, Ballard cowrote Michael Jackson's "Man in the
Mirror" and has worked with everyone from Evelyn "Champagne" King to David
Hasselhoff.
The two hit it off famously. both had gone the safe commercial route before and were
anxious to try something more adventurous. "Glen had a certain history, as I had, and
when we met, we immediately connected," Morissette says. "We just started with a
clean slate."
"What struck me about Alanis was that she was so incredibly self-possessed," Ballard
says, "I just connected with her as a person, and, almost paranthetically, it was like
'Wow, you're 19?' She was so intelligent and ready to take a chance on doing something
that might have no commercial application. Although there was some question about
what she wanted to do musically, she knew what she didn't want to do, which was
anything that wasn't authentic and from the heart."
Feeling safe in the nurturing environment of Ballard's home studio, Morissette's
creative floodgates opened. "It was the most spiritual experience either of us ever had
with music," she says. "The whole thing was very accelerated and stream of
consciousness.
"The record is my story," Morissette says. "I think of the album as running over the
different facets of my personality, one of them being my sexual self. To isolate 'You
Oughta Know' is a misrepresentation of the whole story. By no means is this record
just a sexual, angry record. That song wasn't written for the sake of revenge, it was
written for the sake of release. I'm actually a pretty rational, calm person."
Despite her youth, Morissette says the songs on Jagged Little Pill are based on
numerous relationships. "Yeah, I've met a lot of people and done a lot of things," she
says matter-of-factly.
The album title comes from a lyric in "You Learn," which for Morissette expresses the
idea that "a lot of times when you're immersed in something painful, you don't realize
there's any lesson. A lot of what I wrote about was difficult times from which I walked
away a better person."
Much of Jagged Little Pill was recorded with only Morissette and multi-instrumentalist
Ballard in the studio. She wrote all the lyrics and worked out musical ideas with
Ballard. Only later did some of the other musicians on the album--keyboardist Benmont
Tench and the Red Hot Cili Peppers' Flea and Dave Navarro--add overdubs. "We'd
literally write and record a song in a day," says Ballard. "That process was so much a
factor in us capturing the moment."
Confident they were onto something special, Ballard sent a tape of some of the early
songs to a friend at Atlantic. Although a full-out bidding war never materialized, a
couple of companies expressed interest. "The process was difficult for me," says
Morissette. "Since I was 14, I've spent a lot of time with people focused on everything
except the music. For me this was not about money or getting patted on the back. I
met with some people who'd tell me, 'Why don't you change this lyric, and the kids will
respond more.' And I'd say, 'I didn't write it for them. I wrote it for me.'"
Finally, Morissette found a new corporate home shortly after she and Ballard took a
meeting with Maverick's A&R executive Guy Oseary, who heard "You Oughta Know" and
"Perfect" and went straight to his colleagues Freddy DeMann and Abbey Konowitch.
After seeing Morissette sing a few songs live in Ballard's studio, Oseary signed her late
last year.
Asked what initially drew her to Morissette's music, Madonna answers, "Her honesty,
her pain, her hopefulness." Morissette returns the compliment. "I respect Madonna
very much," says Morissette. "I respect her strength and her resilience in a crazy
business. I still remember seeing her in an interview when I was younger, talking
about freedom at a time when I was coming to terms with my own sexuality. She's a
great CEO."
Jagged Little Pill came out this past June, and Los Angeles' influential alternative
station KPOQ jumped on it immediately. "I guess we're all so callous that if people
start responding to a record, everyone just assumes it's hype," says Welch,
Morissette's manager. "We were just hoping to sell maybe 250,000 or maybe 300,000
albums by the end of the year and build a base. Look what happened."
Jagged Little Pill is now double platinum and shows no signs of slowing down.
Obviously the music-buying public approves of the new, grown-up Morissette in a big
way. But more important, what do her parents think?
"They're happy because they know a lot of what I've gone through, and they're happy I
got it all out of my system," Morissette says with a smile. "My did called me up when
he heard the record and said, 'So you're expressing a lot of emotion. That's good.' And
I laughed and said, 'Yeah, I am, to say the least.'"
Over lunch in New York a few weeks later, Morissette says she's again ready to do a
little acting. She says portraying another character would leaver her feeling less
vulnerable. "It takes a lot out of me, singing every night," she says, "knowing there
are people listening to things I never thought you could even share with one person,
let alone everyone."
Final preparations for one of the biggest days of Morissette's life are being made as
she speaks. Last night she collapsed from exhaustion after an important New York
show that she nearly cancelled hours before show time. Later this afternoon she's
taping The Late Show With David Letterman before rushing to the night's gig in
Philidelphia. Tomorrow there's a video shoot for Jagged Little Pill's second single,
"Hand in My Pocket." Still to come are the MTV Video Awards. But as she chats away in
a Manhattan health-food restaurant, the self-confessed bohemian comes off like the
calmest person in the Top 10.
Offers are pouring in for tours, soundtracks and movies. "I just have to make sure I
do things for the right reasons," Morissette says emphatically. "I've got to remember
what brought me to this place, which was being honest. If I stop doing that, I'm
disrespecting what got me here."
Already, Morissette has learned that she doesn't want to do more innuendo-laden radio
interviews like the one she did on KROQ's Loveline, a sex-oriented listener call-in
show. "I owe it to myself and Glen and this album not to demean it," Morissette says.
"Jokes about me taking guys out to theaters are not funny." (Not that she doesn't have
a sense of humor about her angst-in-her-pants image: One of the slogans on her new
tour T-shirts is INTELLECTUAL INTERCOURSE.)
Retaining the spirit of the album was also a goal in finding her band, according to
Morissette. "We auditioned 50 people just through word of mouth," she says. "The
idea was not just to make sure the musicianship was amazing but also that we didn't
want jaded people who had done the road thing one too many times and spent their
time rolling their eyes. And as you can see, I got real lucky."
While traveling around in a crowded van and staying in cheap hotels, the Jagged Little
Pill tour mates have shared an authentically grungy experience. Part of the idea of this
tour--booked before the album took off--was to give them the chance to become
close-knit, which they have. The only thing the band is lacking is a name, although
Morissette reports that the boys in the band are pushing for the Sexual Chocolate.
To stay sane on the road, Morissette reads, meditates, and exercises. Socially, she
says, "I've just been dating a whole bunch of people and kind of making up for lost
time." More chastely, she has made a habit of painting the fingernails of many of the
men she encounters. She started with her own band mates and has moved onto other
men she has met, including the members of Better Than Ezra. "It's a good excuse to
get a guy to put his hand on your knee," she says.
As its namesake paints away, Morissette-mania spreads worldwide, even to Canada,
an early holdout. Apparantly some of her old fans initially had trouble with the way in
which she has grown up in public. "For obvious reasons, they're a little more
apprehensive in Canada," Morissette says. "A number of interviews I did turned into
adversarial situations up there. They'd tell me my records sucked and that what I'm
doing now is contrived. If it was that calculated, I must be pretty darn smart. Don't
give me that much credit."
Since Morissette's work is so autobiographical, does she think she has to endure more
fucked-up romances and other miseries before she can write another powerful album?
"I think it's inevitable that you go through the hard, fucked-up stuff," she says. "If
you're alive on this earth, it's going to happen, so I'm not worried."
Her performance of "You Oughta Know" on Letterman goes well. Morissette sings the
song's uncensored lyrics, knowing full well she'll get bleeped because you really can't do
that on television. As she makes her hasty exit out of the studio, Morissette runs into
fellow Canadian Paul Shaffer. "Great performance," the bandleader tells her warmly.
"Even more anguished than the album version."
The next morning--too few hours after returning from the Philly show--Morissette and
the Sexual Chocolate gather in their lobby and head out to Brooklyn, N.Y., for the
"Hand in My Pocket" video shoot. On the way the rest of the band members scant two
newspaper reviews of the New York show. The New York Times is extremely
respectful; the Daily News is extremely savage. SHE DOES THE TRITE THING is the
News' headline. The piece calls Morissette "pop's latest and most transparent poster
girl for female rage." "You don't want to read that one," Lashley tells her.
"I don't want to read either one," Morissette retorts before quickly offering to paint
the guitarist's fingernails black.
Upon arriving at the shoot, Morissette's thrilled to see that the vision she has been
brainstorming in recent weeks with director Mark Kohr, know for his work with Green
Day, has come to life. An entire picturesque Brooklyn block has been transformed into
a colorful, Fellini-esque parade route. An eclectic cast of characters, including
skateboarding punks and the police on horseback, lend the scene a nicely surreal feel.
The Cadillac that Morissette will drive in the parade awaits her. The locals,
meanwhile, are trying to figure out what the hell's going on. "I think it's some foreign
group," says an elderly lady standing in front of the All for Paws pet store.
The band members will only appear as bored parade observers. Morissette, on the
other hand, has settled in for an all-day shoot that will end with an artificial rainstorm.
In a moment of down time, they all sit in a trailer and watch a replay of their
Letterman
performance. Suddenly there's a knock at the door. A New York
policewoman has
spotted Morissette and requests an autograph on, of all things, the
Daily News review.
DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU
READ.
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