| Alanis lets her hair down Morissette gets swept up while recording, producing latest disc By JANE STEVENSON -- Toronto Sun Alanis Morissette's new album, Under Rug Swept, finds her striking out on her own and sharing details about her personal life like never before. On this self-produced effort, in stores Feb. 26, the Ottawa-born singer-songwriter sings honestly about her relationships with men while periodically revisiting the harder rock sound of her 1995 breakthrough Jagged Little Pill. "(It's) just further along the line of evolution really," Morissette, 27, said during an interview with The Sun in Toronto late last fall. "The songs that I was afraid of sharing in the past -- I'm still alive and I'm still here and it's still okay, so it sort of inspires me to continue to aspire to be as transparent and as authentic as I can possibly be. That's kind of my highest goal." On her new 11-song album, That Particular Time takes the listener through the breakup of Morissette's previous relationship, followed by the transition period during which she wrote 21 Things I Want In A Lover, and forming a new relationship, which is reflected in Surrendering. Morissette has described writing and recording the new album as a "reawakening" of sorts. "I had lost myself quite big-ly, to say the least," Morissette said with a chuckle of her last relationship. "It was like a re-emergence and redefining. It was all about me figuring out who I was again 'cause I'd really kind of gone to sleep in order to keep something alive that maybe wasn't meant to be kept alive." Other new songs detailing her personal life include the first single, Hands Clean, which is about a relationship she had with a much older man when she was a teenager; the tunes Flinch and So Unsexy, which make references to an uneasy dynamic with her father; the male-bashing song Narcissus and, finally, A Man, which is written from the male perspective. "I would have a lot of these kinds of men as my friends," Morissette said of writing A Man. "And, at one point, I just thought I really want to write about that kind of man's perspective because he might be kind of tired, not only of me singing songs like You Oughta Know and Narcissus, but also living in a society where there were and still are a lot of women angry at men all the time. "I can understand and validate why women are angry at men, in a lot of ways obviously. But there are a lot of men that are trying very hard to sort of bridge the gap, so I wanted to write almost a response song to Narcissus, like a man responding and going, 'Hey, you know what? I'm trying, so f--- you.' " As for her relationship with her father, she describes it as evolving. "So much love," she began. "As with any dynamic or relationship, there's complexity in all of them. So he and my brothers were the original template that I would go by for every man. So it became a little bit disconcerting, to say the least, when I would start interacting with other men and have the same level of response or reaction emotionally to them as I did my brothers and my father. Whether it be the ugliness of dependency on them or putting my self-esteem in their hands and having them do with it what they will. It was not the most enjoyable thing, but I started to really understand what was going on, in a way, so that helped." Another significant man in Morissette's life is producer Glenn Ballard. Ballard, of course, produced Jagged Little Pill and co-produced (with Morissette) its 1998 followup, the less commercially successful Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. She said she did speak with him before going her own way on her new album. "I took him out to lunch before this record and I said, 'I'm not really sure what my intentions are. I do know that I want to produce it on my own.' I didn't know at that point, 'Would I write with him? What would I do?' And it was met with a happy but not happy response. There's an element of it probably being a difficult thing to hear when the proverbial If-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it mindset comes into play." Still, the fact that SFIJ sold seven million copies worldwide, about a quarter of what Jagged Little Pill did, had some music industry observers saying Morissette's glory days were behind her. "I mean, eight copies is great to me," Morissette said. "I knew that the relativity would bowl a lot of people over, particularly those who were really invested in hilariously trying to live up to something like Jagged Little Pill, which was its own entity. But, ridiculously enough, that was one of the slants that someone who represented (my record company) Maverick was taking. They were very focused on 30 million to eight million or whatever it was and that being this downward trajectory. It was like so ridiculous, I can't even tell you. "It was coming from everybody," she continued. "So my take on it has always been, of course, I would love to share my music with as many people as are interested. So I'll share it with as many people as I can without compromising my own self-care and my own integrity. But you know, it's just kind of going to be what it is going to be. There's no control that I can have over that. I can just express who I am and where I'm at and let it be a snapshot of that time in my life and the rest isn't really up to me." At one point, Under Rug Swept was going to bow in record stores last year, but the album's release date was delayed repeatedly when Morissette wound up writing more songs and, more importantly, renegotiated her record deal with Maverick/Warner. "There was a questionable moment or two as to whether I would even re-sign a deal with them which would make it so that I had to be willing to have this record not even come out," Morissette said. "It may have come out like two years later after many an uncomfortable moment." Now still to come is an EP of songs that didn't make it onto Under Rug Swept. "I'm kind of considering it to be a volume two of sorts, so it might have five or six songs on it. I wrote 30 songs, so there's other songs that'll be on the EP that are far harder but they just didn't show up on this record. There's a lot of electric guitar on it, but as far as it being this quote/unquote harder record, I think that would have been the case had it been a double LP." Over the course of making her two earlier records, Morissette won seven Grammy Awards, directed two of her own videos (So Pure and Unsent) and racked up acting credits in the film Dogma (she played God), HBO's Sex And The City (she kissed Sarah Jessica Parker) and off-Broadway's The Vagina Monologues. The latter, she joked, was a "terrorizing" experience. "No, it was great. It was a real evolution.Two weeks of the first few shows being really scary segueing into the following days being really inspiring and challenging and then finishing on a note of it being really comfortable and fun. And my being able to just apply some of my strengths and ability to communicate in the music industry, being able to apply that to acting world too." Still, Morissette thinks she's better suited to film and has a couple of movie projects she's interested in but wasn't able to talk about yet. "I think film for me. There's more subtlety that can be captured on film, which is kind of floating my boat. I think I'm ready to dive in, into the deep end on that one. It's actually contributing to me considering not having this tour be as long as the past tours have been." So far, her one confirmed Canadian appearance is on MuchMusic's Intimate & Interactive program on March 1. |
 |