Isn’t that ironic?
Panic attacks, sex addiction, heartbreak and suicidal thoughts... post-grunge poster girl Alanis Morissette on the jagged little pills she swallowed – but somehow survived
‘I’m an attention junkie, but fame almost killed me’
Of all people, Alanis Morissette appreciates the irony of her troubled relationship with fame. A self-confessed ‘attention junkie’ from birth, when the Canadian singer-songwriter finally achieved the adoration she craved, it left her battling panic attacks, predatory rock stars, deep depression, A-list break-ups and sex addiction. The top of the world felt like rock bottom. Ironic? Perhaps. Terrifying? Undoubtedly.
Twenty years later, she’s just glad she survived. ‘It’s taken a lot of work and therapy to just not be suicidal,’ she says. ‘There’s been a little PTSD I’ve had to work through over the years.’
Released in June 1995, Morissette’s breakthrough album, Jagged Little Pill, was a raw outpouring of anger, fear and insecurity that chimed with a generation. She hoped it might shift 125,000 copies. To date it has sold 33million. Buoyed by the global hits Ironic, You Oughta Know, Hand In My Pocket and Head Over Feet, it made Morissette a superstar – and almost killed her in the process.
‘I didn’t know what I was signing up for,’ says Morissette, who at 43 is frank, friendly and still youthful looking. ‘I was already quite an isolated person, and it got worse. I became averse to people even looking at me. I was always a people-watcher, I’d sit for hours observing, and then all of a sudden, every eyeball was on me. I was horrified by it.
‘I started landing at airports internationally and there were 30,000 people there. I wound up hiding in my hotel room, but if I walked past the window, even my shadow on the drapes would cause people to scream outside. People would break in and leave notes in my underwear when I was doing a show. It felt like an obliteration of my boundaries.’
That was just her fans. The attentions of male musicians left
her feeling equally objectified. ‘Especially with other artists, if certain men couldn’t sleep with me or didn’t want to sleep with me, they didn’t know what to do with me,’ she says, refusing to name names. ‘If there wasn’t going to be romance or sex, they didn’t know how to categorise me.’
Today, Morissette has a solid family base. Since 2010 she has been married to Canadian rapper Souleye, with whom she has two children, Ever, five, and Onyx, one. At the height of her fame, however, she felt like a trapeze act with no safety net. ‘I had no one, apart from a couple of therapists who I would phone from the road, desperately, at three in the morning.’ Was any of it fun, I wonder? ‘No,’ she says briskly. ‘No, it wasn’t fun. I just kept looking down. It was one foot in front of the other.’ It was harder to handle because it was all so unexpected. A teen prodigy, Morissette had made two minor albums before being ‘dumped’ by MCA records, who told her that her career was over at 17. When she began writing songs for Jagged Little Pill, she did so with no profile but an urgent compulsion. ‘I was always a people-pleaser, smiling when I was in pain,’ she says. ‘But these were stories I had to tell, or I was going to die.’ The most dramatic of all the stories was You Oughta Know, a brutal autobiographical rant at an older man who had wronged her, X-rated lyrics and all. Morissette has always avoided naming the object of her ire. Last year, however, American actor David Coulier outed himself as the ‘Mr Duplicity’ who gets both barrels in the song. Perhaps he is. Morissette is still keeping mum. ‘I’m not being coquettish,’ she explains. ‘A lot of people have said it’s a great revenge song, but the idea of revenge being acted out is something that I think is really dangerous in our world. The reason I won’t say who it’s about – certainly, it’s to protect them on some level, but mostly it’s about me wanting to make sure I stand by my value system of not advocating revenge.’ She hoots. ‘But revenge fantasy? Go for it!’ More recently, her relationship with the actor Ryan Reynolds, to whom she was engaged between 2004 and 2007, was outlined in painful detail on her 2008 album, Flavors Of Entanglement. She says the end of the relationship
WAS ANY OF IT FUN? NO, IT WASN’T FUN. IT WAS ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER
was ‘devastating’, and that externalising the pain didn’t necessarily help. ‘Singing these songs all over the world is cathartic, but it doesn’t heal the rift or the rupture, because the rupture happened in the relationship,’ she says. ‘I naively thought that some healing would occur, but it turns out you still have to deal with humans.’
She admits she has been reckless in matters of the heart. ‘I wanted relationships that couldn’t possibly work out, and those were the ones that were enticing,’ she says. ‘A lot of the recovery work I’ve done has been around love addiction and sex addiction, and addiction in general.’
Much of Morissette’s ‘work’ has been conducted in public. Does she ever feel she should be less revealing in her music? ‘It’s terrifying to share publicly. Every time I put out a record, the night before I have a full-blown panic attack, but I’ve found strength in my continuity of being frank and vulnerable. There’s an empowerment in it for me. If I was faking invincibility I don’t think that would have been sustainable. That’s not who I am.’
Such openness made Morissette more than a mere pop star. For some she became a figurehead for a new generation of outspoken female artists. For others she was a post-grunge poster girl spouting psychobabble. It’s fair to say she polarises opinion.
‘My father told me when I was quite young and had started making music: “Alanis, some people are going to adore you, some people are going to hate you, and a ton of people won’t give a s***.” Not to say that that made it easy for me to receive negative feedback, but to a large degree I didn’t read it.’
In particular her worldwide hit, Ironic, was widely ridiculed for its long list of complaints – ‘rain on your wedding day’; ‘a free ride when you’ve already paid’ – most of which bore only a passing relation to the recognised definition of irony. ‘People bring it up to this day,’ she admits, explaining that