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ALANIS
MORISSETTE has felt heartbreak before, as anyone who’s
listened to her ripped-from-life songs knows. But last
year’s split with her fiancé, actor Ryan Reynolds,
turned out to be the big one. “I think it’s the straw
that breaks the camel’s back,” Morissette says. “It’s
having had too many of them. And I was a full-blown love
addict, so it was like, ‘I can’t keep doing this, my
body can’t take it.’ Breakups are a horrible thing for
almost everybody I know. For someone who is a love
addict, it’s debilitating.
“I’ve
been on a constant journey toward finally surrendering
and hitting the rock bottom that I’ve been avoiding my
whole life....So this was a huge, critical juncture for
me. Everything broke, and it was an amazing and
horrifying time.”
Not
surprisingly, you can hear all about it on Morissette’s
new album, Flavors of Entanglement, now in
stores. While it touches on other themes, and isn’t
framed as a literal blow-by-blow account, the 11 songs
describe knotty conflicts and the pain of separation.
“I miss
your warmth and the thought of us bringing up our kids /
And the part of you that walks with your stick-tied
handkerchief,” she sings in “Torch,” dealing out vivid
details in her distinctively conversational style.
But more
of the songs—“Not as We,” “Moratorium,” “Giggling Again
for No Reason”—are drawn from the prolonged aftermath of
the breakup, a process leading to what she calls “the
Phoenix rising.”
“I
entered into my own version of rehab. I went to therapy
five days a week, I journaled, I had a lot of support
from this incredible group of friends....It was just
really moment by moment, step by step, snail’s pace....”
She also
gutted and remodeled her
Los Angeles
house (one of her favorite forms of expression, she
says, equal to making two or three albums), rode
motorcycles, worked on a book and designed jewelry.
And made
music, this time with English producer
Guy Sigsworth, who helped her return on some tracks
to an electronic dance style reminiscent of her records
as a teen star in her native Canada.
While
Morissette has been known for raw candor since her
landmark 1995 album Jagged Little Pill, parts of
Flavors take it to a new level. This time she
didn’t need to call on the journals she usually uses as
a catalyst, because the events were unfolding as she was
working on the music in London and Los Angeles.
“There
is an immediacy in that it was all written in real
time,” she says. “A lot of times I’ll write in
retrospect. These songs were written in the exact
present moment as it was happening, so that may be
something that’s palpably felt on the record.”
A lot of
that immediacy also stems from Morissette’s unusual
method of lyric writing, which is pretty much
stream-of-consciousness.
“Typically I go in the studio and whatever I’m
contemplating that day will wind up being a song. I
don’t come in with lyrics....I just go in and let it
happen....
“I don’t
change anything once we’re done. I put all my energy—and
this also shows up in other areas of my life—my energy
goes into being ready....With songwriting I spend a lot
of time living life, accruing all these experiences,
journaling, and then by the time I get to the studio I’m
teeming with the drive to write.”
Sigsworth, who has worked extensively with Björk, says,
“So many of my ideas about songwriting have been changed
by working with her, because she works so fast as a
writer and gets the raw statement of the song so
precisely so quickly.”
“She
seems to just center on that focal point, the crisis
issue at the heart of the song, and she gets it
immediately,” he says.
“There
were songs where I would listen and be almost in tears
and think, ‘Where did this come from? There was nothing
here this morning.’”
Shunning
the limelight
SITTING
in a dressing room at a
Burbank
rehearsal studio where she and her band are preparing
for a long stretch of touring, Morissette, 34, doesn’t
seem like someone who’s been to rock bottom.
Surrounded by exotic wall hangings she’s brought in to
decorate the bare space, the singer has the focused,
upbeat manner of a life coach. She’s looking forward to
what she calls “the sensual experience” of being on the
road, she’s dating someone again, and she laughs easily.
This
seems more like the prankster who created a sensation
with her impromptu version and video of the Black Eyed
Peas’ My Humps, which originated in the studio
where she and Sigsworth were writing music. “I remember
turning to him at one point and I said, ‘God, I wish
that I could write a really simple song, a song like ‘My
Humps.’ So we just turned to each other, did it on piano
really quickly, reinterpreted the harmony, and then
within a week of shooting the video in my garage with my
comedian friends, we put it up on
You Tube.
“I
thought maybe a couple hundred people would get a kick
out of it. I didn’t even think it would be on anyone’s
radar.
“The
lyrics really have the light shone on them when they’re
balladized,” she notes. “So there is something to be
said about, ‘Make him work work, make him work work work
work work.’
“For me
I always frame things that fit in with my philosophy, so
how I framed that one was, ‘Yeah, she’s really good at
receptivity, which is a decidedly feminine quality.’”
She has
also finished shooting a lead role in Radio Free
Albemuth, a science-fiction movie based on a Philip K.
Dick novel—one more public venue for a woman who isn’t
sure that’s where she wants to be.
“To me
the biggest irony of this lifetime that I’m living is
that for someone who thrives in the public eye in the
creative ways that I do, I actually don’t enjoy being in
the public eye,” she says. “I feel like I’m a recluse in
a famous person’s body.
“But I
love to entertain....My vocation is to accrue all these
experiences, to write about them, to get them out of my
system, to not get sick, and then to share them
publicly. So the sharing-them-publicly thing is that
voice that constantly says, ‘You have to share this.’ I
have this temperament of someone who just wants to yell
‘No,’ but it’s what I’m here to do, so I keep doing it.”
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