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By PAUL ZOLLO
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 t's all about honesty," she says, absorbing the abundant sunshine streaming through the western windows of her Santa Monica home. (A Canadian in Southern California, she still delights daily in the incongruity of such springtime warmth in the midst of winter.) "It's about writing songs that are like snapshots of how I feel and who I am," she says. "Because if they are not real, it's impossible to sing them with any real conviction. And the audience always knows when it's not real. There's no fooling them."
And fooling them is not something that interests Alanis Morissette, who has elevated the expression of personal truth in songs to new heights. As a teen star in Canada, she'd already sung her share of songs that were more about confection than confession. But when she discovered the capacity of songs to contain the real truth, it changed everything. "I can pull out different lines from those early songs that were exactly how I was feeling," she says. "And when I performed I found that I would inevitably be able to sing those particular lines with more conviction than anything else." She knew that if she could write an entire song that reached that level of essential truth - or an entire album of these songs - that she could make music with such soul and substance that the entire world would notice.
And that is, of course, exactly what she did.
But first she had to find a collaborator. Which was no easy task, as previous collaborators objected to her desire to be fluid with songform, to change the lyrics of the chorus every time if need be, and to be spontaneously unbound in the pursuit of words and music. She met with "a huge handful of writers" before finding her ideal partner, capable of providing her with a firm musical foundation for the profusive freedom and frankness of her lyrics. That person was Glen Ballard, who had previously written hit songs such as "Man In The Mirror" (with Siedah Garrett) for Michael Jackson, and produced hit records for Wilson Phillips, among others.
It was a match which couldn't have been more ideal. Because Ballard possesses not only prodigious musical ability - great melodic sense, keyboard and guitar prowess, and production chops - but also a hunger to reach a deeper and more personal level in his own work. It coincided with Alanis' inclination to explore the full freedom of unadulterated honesty in songs, and a great new songwriting team was born.
Their connection was immediate and electric. Rather than discuss what they hoped to accomplish, they simply started writing and recording, and the result astounded even them. "There was no need for any revision," Glen said. "The pure, raw energy of it was better than me going back and then refining it and overthinking it. This was completely felt. When we were in sync, it was like all the lights were green and we just kept driving."
And rather than consult a map, or check a compass to determine their direction, they kept cruising at full-speed. The songs kept flowing, usually one a day, with Ballard making musical tracks fast enough to capture the full heat of Alanis' vocals on tape while the creative fire were still raging.
"I didn't know what style this music would be," he said, "but I knew it needed to reflect her intelligence and her energy. So we went in that direction, but nothing was calculated. I didn't know who she was supposed to sound like. But as soon as I heard her voice I said, `Hey. You sound like you. And that's all I need to know.'"
Like Dylan and others who expanded the content of popular songwriting with a union of poetic energy and personal truth, Alanis and Glen embraced a spirit of spontaneous expression in their songs without abandoning the traditional aspects of songcraft - such as the use of strong melodic structures - that hold songs together. As stunningly provocative as the explicit carnal candor expressed in "You Oughta Know" was, it would not have been half as effective if not for its solid musical underpinning, which allows the words to explode with an unalloyed power and purity of purpose.
Asked if he had any reservations about the overt sexuality of "You Oughta Know," Ballard said, "No. In retrospect I probably should have. I felt that I knew she was coming from a real place and I encouraged her to go for it, and not be afraid to say what was on her mind. She was so courageous to keep doing that. And if I was able to provide a sanctuary where she was able to do that safely, then I accomplished my mission."
So genuine is the wrath directed from woman to man in "You Oughta Know," that it's hard to fathom such a young woman writing it, and even harder to conceive of her doing so in collaboration with a man. But according to Glen, "it didn't matter if I were a man or a woman. What mattered is that Alanis felt safe and supported. My job was to provide an artistic free zone, a sanctuary, where she could do what she wanted to do and say what she wanted to say, and we would figure out the market later."
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Not only was he stunned by her way with words, but also by her singing: "She has a tremendous range, but never uses it to show off. It's always in the service of the idea. Writing for that voice is a great gift. She can hit intervals most people would find challenging, and do it so naturally, it's scary. She has remarkably good diction, and with such a clarity of expression. She's really one of the great singers."
Born on June 1, 1974 in Ottawa, Canada, Alanis was a child star by the age of ten when she joined the cast of a kid's show called "You Can't Do That On Television." Even then she had little interest in performing just for the sake of performing, and used her TV earnings to fund the independent recording and release of "Fate Stay With Me," the first song she ever wrote. "I started my own label because record companies were deathly afraid of ten-year-olds then," she says with a laugh. "And it was amazing. I wasn't invested in anything other than the process of doing it. It was thrilling."
She was happy to abandon her TV career when offered a record deal, and moved to Toronto in 1991 to record her debut album, a mixture of dance songs and ballads called Alanis. Though it wasn't the international hit for which she'd hoped, it was immensely popular in Canada, where she won several Juno Awards. Her second album, Now Is The Time, was also a Canadian hit though not to the extent of her debut. (To this day those in the Great North tend to consider Alanis as a kind of Canadian Debbie Gibson, instead of a songwriter who deserves to be included in the lexicon of Canadian songwriting greats, along with Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Bruce Cockburn and others.)
Aiming southwest, she moved to Los Angeles, eventually hooked up with Ballard, and created the miraculous Jagged Little Pill, which raced to the top of the charts on the engine of "You Oughta Know." A remarkable record for several reasons, "You Oughta Know" broke through because of the voice, the music, the words, the maturity, the rage, the honesty. And perhaps even more astounding than the impact of this one song was the fact that the entire album contained songs at this level. This was clearly no fluke - here was a woman expressing anger, love and desire with the passion of Janis Joplin, the authority of Chrissie Hynde, the expansive honesty of Joni Mitchell, and the unhindered creativity of her first idol, Carole King. Within months of its release, Jagged Little Pill generated as many hits as King's Tapestry did some two decades earlier.
By 1996, after much touring, and after picking up Best Song and Best Album Grammys, she and Glen reunited to commence work on the follow-up to Jagged Little Pill. But rather than rush or overthink the process, they wisely allowed the new songs to emerge organically, as they did with Jagged Little Pill, and again their creative bond was instant and electric. Inspired by the affirmation of near-universal acclaim, Alanis further broadened the scope and structure of her songs with great torrents of verbal virtuosity, creating visceral surges of zealous articulation, such as the awesome "Front Row," in which she furiously chants a combustible counterpoint of lyrics behind the words of the chorus.
We said, "Let's name thirty good reasons
Why we shouldn't be together
I start by saying things like,
"You smoke"
"You live in New Jersey"
You started saying things like,
"You belong to the world"
All of which could have been easily refuted
But the conversation was hypothetical…
I'm in the front row
The front row with popcorn…
From "Front Row"
"On Junkie there is an enormous amount of words," Ballard said. "But there is always a melodic through-line on every branch. And then her words are like leaves on that branch which infuse the melody. The way she takes that through-line and wraps the words around it is amazing." Once their creative floodgates were opened again, a river of new songs rushed in, including "Thank You," "Baba," "I Was Hoping," "That I Would Be Good," "Joining You," and more. But Alanis recognized that the world was getting impatient to hear this record, and she elected to stop recording and save many of the new songs for future albums. "I knew I had to finish this record that everybody at every check-out stand of every grocery store around the world wanted to hear," she says.
Many members of the press predicted that, like Carole King's inability to transcend Tapestry, Alanis would never surpass the phenomenal success of Jagged Little Pill. They were, of course, wrong. Far from the shallow sophomore effort many expected, Supposed Infatuation Junkie was a solid artistic and commercial success, and powerful proof that Alanis was much more than a one-album wonder.
MTV's Unplugged show was graced by a beautiful 1999 performance by Alanis, which spawned a live album that features outstanding alternative approaches to her many famous songs, as well as the previously unreleased "Princes Familiar," as well as her version of Sting's "King Of Pain," which she makes very much her own. Recently she wrote two beautiful songs for movies -- "Uninvited" for City of Angels, and "Still" for Dogma, a film in which she plays the role of God.
Despite the international magnitude of her success, which could easily convince even the most earthbound among us that they possess some measure of genius and/or divinity, she's authentically humble in person. When we meet, she politely says, "Hi, I'm Alanis," instead of assuming the obvious -- that most people on this planet already know she's Alanis. As someone who has existed in the center of a hurricane for years, her countenance is almost supernaturally peaceful, the polar opposite of a prima donna. She's as present and genuine with inquisitive writers as she is with fans, roadies, bandmates and friends. Grounded in gratitude and spirituality, she's dedicated to the expression of an eternal truth in her songs, which is especially admirable in an industry which often celebrates that which is ephemeral and emotionally empty.
(continued ...)
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