Still jagged after all these years

Alanis Morissette doesn't care if you think her music makes her seem like an angry, stark-raving, man-eating bitch. She's not out there to impress; her albums and her music have always aimed to be an accurate reflection and self-portrait of her life, loves, failures and successes.

Right now, you could say Morissette is enjoying one of her successes. Earlier this summer, her new album, Flavors of Entanglement, debuted at No. 8 on the Billboard 200 and has sold over 500,000 copies to date.

In an interview with The Diamondback, Morissette discussed her uplifting album and the corresponding Flavors of Entanglement tour.

"The album reflected some serious disassemblings in my personal life, and it's sort of far reaching," Morissette said. "It reaches into my professional life. It's like a breaking or a broken moment captured and then, I like to think, a phoenix rising."

It's been nearly 18 years since Morissette's first album, Alanis, and 13 years since Jagged Little Pill. But Morissette believes her current release may be her most significant album yet.

"The album allowed me to hit rock bottom in a way that I [had] never done before," Morissette said. "I'd always sort of bottom-dwelled, but I never really bounced off the bottom. The best news of all for me was that there is a bottom, because I used to think that emotions were bottomless, and if I didn't calibrate it, that I would be eaten whole.

"So now that I know that when I surrender there's a bottom and I can bounce back up, I realize the only thing that [is bottomless] is joy, so that's a pretty big revelation for me," she added. "That's the snapshot of this record."

Morissette has given hope and adrenaline to music listeners for nearly two decades, but her overwhelming message of empowerment still holds true.

"As a woman, I had shame around being powerful," Morissette said. "I had shame around being a warrior. I had shame around being angry. I had shame around being vulnerable and devastated and ugly and rejected and all these seemingly shameful things. There's this no-holds-barred approach when I write a poem or, frankly, even when I write an e-mail sometimes."

On tour, the multi-layered set represents the album's shifts in mood from rage to joy, and Morissette is excited to have designed most of the set pieces herself. But while she could easily - and happily - leave the music scene for good, she said she is far from being finished with her music.

"I feel like I'll be writing until I'm dead," she said. "I'm not sure who will be listening to it, but it really isn't something I can control."

After all, she's never really cared what her critics say.

"I write these songs for myself," Morissette added. "I don't write them for other people. I can appreciate that some people say, 'Hey, that's me.' And whether they're accurate or not for whatever reason, people recognize themselves in my songs, and that says something right there."

Alanis Morissette will appear at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington Sept. 22 and she performs at the Lyric Opera House in Baltimore Sept. 23.

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