‘So many people who were using me didn’t even realise they were doing it’
Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill is a rock classic, but she was not protected as a young artist. She tells Chloe Hubbard about coping with fame, the track she’d change and the effect of lockdown on her mental health
You can thank Noel Gallagher for this glorious recording. After he used some choice language to describe the city of Hull while on stage in the US, brother Liam pledged to perform at the city’s Grade II listed hall.
What started in spite has gifted fans a snapshot of Liam at his post-oasis best.
The frontman famously missed Oasis’s MTV Unplugged in 1996 over a “sore throat”, leaving Noel to take on singing duties.
This time around he was ready. With his voice in fine fettle, Liam tears through a set of Oasis classics bolstered by new material.
On MTV Unplugged, Liam settles an old score and settles it well.
7/10 Alex Green
Jack Garratt was 24 when, in 2016, he won the Critics’ Choice Award at the Brits, following in the footsteps of Adele, Sam Smith and Ellie Goulding.
Big boots to fill, you might think? Well, Garratt thought so too. After releasing his debut album Phase he disappeared from the limelight, racked with anxiety and struggling with his sudden graduation from smalltime performer to headliner.
Luckily, his time in the wilderness has not been in vain.
Love, Death And Dancing is a more focused affair that strips back much of the decoration that distracted on his debut.
There’s a clear sense of identity here, one that feels authentic and avoids the modish eclecticism of his debut.
7/10 Alex Green
After two highly rated albums as singer with Savages, not to mention a Gorillaz collaboration, Jehnny Beth finally goes it alone.
The inspiration for To Love Is To Live came on the night David Bowie died, listening to his last album Blackstar, while the fragmented tracks on Beyonce’s eponymous fifth solo album helped pull her free from traditional verse-chorus songwriting.
First track I Am starts with her declaring “I am naked all the time” and rises to a crescendo of tortured synths, while Flower is less fractured, simple beats and minimal guitar, and We Will Sin Together is the most conventionally catchy. A
Place Above is a 73-second spoken word introduction by Cillian Murphy to I’m The Man, which was featured in Peaky Blinders and subverts power balances with Beth’s distorted vocals repeating the title between interludes of woozy piano.
The vocals are variously whispered, chanted and screamed but it’s the quieter tracks — minimal piano-led ballads The Rooms and The French Countryside — that make more impact, suggesting less can be more, along with final track Human, the longest at over six minutes.
Dublin band
Kodaline have always aspired to the heights of Coldplay, Bon Jovi and The Script, both in their music (glossy and chartready) and in their appearance (neat and boy band-esque).
In their native Ireland, three number one albums have elevated them to such heights, while their chart success in the UK has been considerable.
One Day At A Time, their fourth album, continues a winning formula: a hint of folk, a swelling chorus, frontman Steve Garrigan’s emotional vocals.
Spend It With You is a genuinely beautiful love song carrying a delightfully simple message.
Like much of the album, it’s likely to inspire great singalongs when Kodaline return to their rightful place — the stage.
6/10 Alex Green
This debut solo album marks a big shift in style for the frontman of indie group The Maccabees. A Quickening sees the singer ditch the band’s upbeat guitar riffs and throwaway lyrics in favour of a much more reflective and downbeat tone.
The album is about Weeks’s experience of becoming a father and it does seem to show a musician who is mellowing with age. His haunting voice is frequently accompanied by gentle piano and trumpet playing.
The album’s singles Milk Breath, Blood Sugar and Safe In Sound are richly textured with an intense yet calming sound.
All three are powerful in their own right, however, the album offers little in the way of shifts in tone and many of the songs feel similar to each other.
While A Quickening contains some strong songs, when taken as a whole it verges on becoming repetitive.
6/10 Tom Horton
Iremember when I first got my hands on Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette. It was 1996, and I had it on cassette. When I think of listening to it I’m in a car — my best friend Karly’s clappedout Nissan Micra. There would be a pause and then the unmistakable jar of the harmonica, before 57 minutes of wailing and headbanging as Morissette covered love, break-ups, feminism, exploitation and abuse. It felt edgy, rebellious, raw. We loved her and we knew every word.
Morissette was still a teenager when she set about writing this seminal album (below). She’s soon to turn 46 when I catch up with her over Zoom from Los Angeles, where she has been in lockdown for three months, on a countdown to the release of her eighth studio album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road. She’s finding the lockdown difficult. “My emotions are all over the place; I had postpartum anxiety already” — she and husband Mario Treadaway, aka hip-hop artist Souleye, had their third child last August — “and it’s compounded by all the other understandable emotional rollercoaster rides that this has begotten for all of us, those who have underlying anxiety or depression or OCD or anything, it’s like ‘Woo, off to the races!’”
Morissette’s honesty in regard to not being “quite as well, I thought you should know” — as she famously describes it in You Oughta Know — is the visceral thread that runs through Jagged Little Pill and everything she has written since. It was her vulnerability juxtaposed with the guitars, yelling, and of course the harmonica that drew so many of us to her work in the first place.
Jagged Little Pill was already her third album. The first two had been hits in her native Canada, where she grew up in Ottawa, before moving to Toronto. But the 12 tracks on this unapologetically acerbic feminist record would become the soundtrack to the formative years of a generation of young women.
The writing process was fast: just two months holed up in a Los Angeles studio with producer Glen Ballard in the spring of 1994. At the time of making the record, Morissette said she knew she liked it, but had no idea she was making a hit. She recalls a conversation with a record company executive who told her she would have done “really well if the album sold 175,000 copies” — to date, it’s sold 33 million and inspired a Jagged Little Pill musical which opened on Broadway in December before its run was interrupted by the lockdown.
Morissette believes the album stands the test of time because it is unfettered and she’s proud of it — with the exception of one track: “I can still stand by the content and the narrative of these songs … there’s only one that would benefit from a little updating, Not the Doctor.” The track is an uncompromising rejection of responsibility for a partner’s needs or failings. “I don’t want to be a bandage if the wound is not mine,” she sings. “I don’t want to be your mother.”
“I wrote that when I hadn’t even been in a long-term committed relationship, let alone a marriage,” she says. “At one point I was hyper autonomous, thinking that was the way, I’ll just do this all myself, I don’t need anybody, and then now having been married 10 years I realise that there’s some lyrics in that song that I would update. As in, I’m actually participating in your healing, I’m not just sitting over here going, ‘Hey, you’re on your own, call me when you’re done!’”
The success of the album was daunting for the young Morissette, who struggled with the pressure of writing a follow-up. Retrospectively, she realised she was at times being exploited.
She was sent out on a vast US, European and world tour that began on July 1, 1995, and ended on December 14, 1996, playing almost every night, often without a break even between continents — such as November 6, 1995, when she played Los Angeles the day after performing in Tokyo; or a month later, when she played London, one day after a concert in Detroit, then after four straight UK gigs was back playing in New York. “I struggled with the sheer amount of it I think. At one point, after the tour of Jagged Little Pill, I remember thinking — and, you know,
I was naive, I didn’t know there were ebbs and flows to relevance and ‘fame levels’, zeitgeists shifting, I didn’t know anything — I just thought, ‘Oh f **k, for the rest of my life if this is what it’s going to be, I don’t want this’. But then it moved into a quite lovely place within a 10-year period.”
But in the pre-digital age, Morissette still enjoyed a moment of anonymity even after the record was released because of a quirk in the filming of the You Oughta Know video which meant the whole thing appeared blurry: “I was walking around with You Oughta Know out like a little cat that got the canary, no one knew what I looked like, then as soon as the video for Hand in my Pocket came out, I remember walking down the street in New York and people started running up to me and I thought, ‘Oh, okay this is different’. As a Canadian with my particular temperament, I just love people watching and then all of a sudden I became the one that was watched, and it was very odd.”
Later, Morissette would write about the dark side of being a young woman in the music industry, most explicitly in the 2002 song Hands Clean. The lyrics point to the ever-autobiographical Morissette being the victim of sexual abuse. “If you weren’t so wise beyond your years, I would’ve been able to control myself,” she sings, taking on the personality of an unnamed guardian, “Just make sure you don’t tell on me/ Especially to members of your family.” Asked now what advice she might have for a young Alanis in the pre-#metoo era, the artist says she would have done things differently. Is there anything she wishes could have been done to protect her younger self ?
“I would have had a few extra guardians around her,” she says. “There were a lot of people with the title guardian around me that were often, at times, the very people who were not a guardian. I don’t know how I would have convinced 19-year-old Alanis on this one, but let’s get a couple more people around you who aren’t exploiting you and who aren’t using you. The thing is, a lot of people didn’t even realise they were doing it. I could barely fault anyone because so many people who were exploitative, who were using me, they didn’t even know they were doing it.
“But it’s all there, all the lyrics in all the stories are all there — I consider myself to be the queen of revenge fantasy, not the queen of actual revenge acting out.”
Critically, Morissette received mixed reviews for Jagged Little Pill, and on November 2, 1995, Morissette appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone with the headline: ‘Alanis Morissette: Angry White Female’. This simplistic handle is ridiculous, she says, but she’s been called worse things than angry: “If I were to be violently and rudely one-dimensionalised the way that was happening during that time, I’ll take anger. I think anger is pretty amazing. I think a lot of people when they think of anger they think of destruction, acting out of anger that’s destructive, and that’s not what I think about when I think of anger. I think about fire and the capacity to say no, and changes, and standing up for oneself, or protecting someone — momma bear is all about rarrrr. So I was happy with angry. It was much better than any of the other ones at the time, but it’s ridiculous to call any human being any one thing.”
After Jagged Little Pill, the pressure to follow it up weighed heavy on Morissette. It would take more than three years for Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie to hit the shelves in November 1998.
As we grew older, the lyrics that would resonate from the album changed; it became less
❝ I’ve always been terrified in real human being relationships