ALANIS’ FOCUS, EDGE,
Alanis Morissette still free but focused on ‘Jagged’ anniversary tour
Alanis Morissette has been recommending that people get their hearts trampled on and bite off more than they can chew for more than a quarter of a century. Living and learning with herself and her audience since the release of the era-defining “Jagged Little Pill” in 1995, Morissette can happily return to her biggest album.
“I live for the ‘Jagged Little Pill’ songs, and I think that’s fortuitous, because if I didn’t I wouldn’t still be performing them,” she told the Herald. “Thankfully my value system has stayed intact enough over the last 26 years to the point where there is no compromise in my singing ‘Jagged Little Pill’ songs. I can stand behind them wholeheartedly.”
That value system has carried the icon through to her 2020 album, “Such Pretty Forks in the Road.” In so many ways, Morissette’s new LP feels like an emotional and sonic sequel to “Jagged Little Pill” (of course, to be fair, the actual follow-up, 1998’s “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie,” is also an ideal sequel). Fueled by an equal amount of hooks and honesty, “Such Pretty Forks in the Road” carries the glorious defiance and intense introspection of youth forward to adulthood.
“What I have come to see through my writing process through two and a half decades is that there is an essential quality that I can’t get out of, and that is chronicling what’s going on, period,” she said with a little laugh. “I’m like a cockroach … I’m that little blade of grass coming up through a crack in the pavement. I will find a way to express (myself ).”
On her current tour, which stops Sept. 4 at the Xfinity Center in Mansfield, she celebrates the 25th anniversary of “Jagged Little Pill” while mixing in a half dozen new songs that fit in like a hand in pocket. “Ablaze” details her devotion to her children while “Diagnosis” takes an unflinching look at her journey through postpartum depression. “Reason I Drink” punches back at the music industry and wonders about chemical dependence.
“Such Pretty Forks in the Road” came together around the time the singer and songwriter began working with the American Repertory Theater on a musical based on Morissette’s music. Not a jukebox musical, the Cambridge theater’s “Jagged Little Pill” used Morissette’s catalog as the catalyst for writer Diablo Cody and director Diane Paulus to create something on the frontline of contemporary pain featuring plot lines about opioid and porn addictions, sexual violence and racism.
It also provided Morissette the rare chance to glimpse the power of her own work.
“I had never had the experience of sitting in an audience and receiving the songs that are usually coming out of my mouth,” she said. “For me to sit in the audience and receive the song delivered by, not just these olympian vocalists, but also by people of the opposite gender, it really showed me the constitution of these songs and hit me in the heart.”
“I was a weeping mess during rehearsals and while we collaboratively carved out the musical,” she added.
The show eventually moved to Broadway where, last year, it garnered a leading 15 Tony nominations. That goes nicely with the 15 million copies the album has sold (in the US alone!). And, while nobody wants to hear Morissette has been a weeping mess, now she’s gotten that glimpse at how hard and wonderfully her art has trampled on our hearts.