US – Friday, July 30

Pillar of the ‘Entanglement’

Alanis Morissette on songwriting and the grieving process

 

You Oughta Know that Morissette has released six other albums since "Jagged Little Pill." This, of course does include 2005's "Jagged Little Pill Acoustic"

 

PROFILE. Alanis Morissette has won 12 Juno Awards and seven Grammies, her debut album, “Jagged Little Pill,” is the highest-selling debut album worldwide in music history, and, according to RIAA and United World Charts, she’s the biggest-selling female rock artist in music; however, she is consistently reduced to one word: angry. But she’s not the least bit mad about it. (Ironic, don’t you think?)

“If I’m going to be one-dimensionalized, it’s an honor to be considered angry,” she says. “Anger has been swept under the carpet so much with regards to women. It’s flattering.”
Morissette unabashedly admits that her latest album, “Flavors of Entanglement,” was written in “real time,” (not retrospect) and is based on “serious disassemblings in [her] personal life,” divulging that she recently hit “rock bottom.”

But surprisingly, so-called “angry” Morissette is profusely optimistic.

“The best news of all for me was that there is a bottom. ... I can bounce back up," she says. "I realized the only thing that’s bottomless is joy.”

Morissette’s intelligent and no-holds-barred songs, which take “20 or 30 minutes each” to write, are extraordinarily inspiring and empowering to females all over the world; even to herself (”the other day, I listened to ‘Sympathetic Character’ three times and felt much better”), and Morissette knows it. She defines her life’s purpose as “to share what I experience for people to make their own, so that I can comfort or uplift or thought-provoke or invite.” Originally, however, these results were accidental. 

“While I was writing [’Jagged Little Pill’] with [Glen Ballard], he turned to me on several occasions and said, ‘Do you have any idea how important this is?’ I remember cocking my head and saying, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I do know that I am loving this process.’"

“When the record was personalized in the way that it was by people, I felt like, wow, all these issues that I’m grappling with are universal in some ways, and I am not alone. That was comforting in a sense and then also horrifying because I thought, this pain is something everybody is feeling. My empathy skyrocketed.”

Reviews of “Flavors of Entanglement” suggest that “Flavors” sounds like grief, as opposed to the raging “Jagged Little Pill.”

“Rage is part of the grief process, so ‘You Oughta Know’ is as much of the grief process as ‘Not as We’ is,” Morissette says.

Was writing and singing “Flavors of Entanglement” as therapeutic as it was with “Jagged Little Pill?”

“However many times I sing emotive songs, there’s some catharsis in it, but catharsis is not healing. It doesn’t necessarily tie it up. It kind of becomes a ‘to be continued.’"

Alanis Morissette
Saturday, 7:30 p.m.
The Orpheum Theatre
$35-$55, 617-931-2000
www.ticketmaster.com