On her latest album, Alanis Morissette reveals her grown-up take on love, loss and moving on.
Alanis Morissette is calm, friendly and all smiles as she sits for an interview in a stark room in the depths of Toronto's Air Canada Centre, just 35 minutes before she opens for Matchbox Twenty. Other less seasoned or less confident musicians might be distracted throughout the conversation, worried that there wouldn't be time left to review the set list or get their makeup retouched. Most, understandably, would refuse to do press in the hour leading up to a concert. Morissette, however, doesn't appear stressed at all. One would think she had all day to chat about her forthcoming album, Flavors of Entanglement, and ongoing "recovery journey."
With the exception of two innocuous dance-pop albums the Ottawa native made as a teenager, Morissette's songwriting style has always been introspective and cathartic. Her emotionally tortured confessionals on 1995's Jagged Little Pill garnered four Grammys and sold a staggering 31 million albums. Her follow-up album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, in 1998 was more peaceful, inspired by a spiritual sojourn in India. In 2002, she once again explored her insecurities, quest for love and views on the state of the world on Under Rug Swept. But with the release of So-Called Chaos in 2004, it seemed that Morissette had finally found love and happiness.
So, what does her latest work reveal? Flavors of Entanglement was produced and co-written by Britain's Guy Sigsworth, but the lyrics are what we've come to expect from Morissette: beautiful and heartbreaking, conflicted and playful. The central theme of the album is growing up and taking responsibility for your life. Morissette - who turns 34 this June - says it's also about recovery. She is vague about what she's actually recovering from this time around, but the lyrics provide some clues. You don't have to be a celebrity sleuth to figure out that her ex, Ryan Reynolds, is the likely muse for "Torch" and "Not As We." The pair announced their split in February 2007, and Reynolds is now involved with Scarlett Johansson. Lines like "I miss your smell and your style and your pure abiding way" and "I miss your neck and your gait and your sharing what you write" from the song "Torch" offer tender insights into her post-breakup state - at least, at the time she wrote them.
"'Torch' is the I-miss-you song," says Morissette, who appears to be over it now. "It's about grieving specific things. I wrote it over a year ago, so thankfully there's some distance. I don't ever talk about who it's about, but I think you can draw your own conclusions," she says, laughing.
