b. 1 June 1974, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Morissette enjoyed considerable critical and public acclaim in her native Canada before that success began to translate to international audiences in the mid-90s. An accomplished singer, dancer and pianist, she began writing her own material at the age of nine. She then achieved her first domestic hit single at the age of 10 (‘Fate Stay With Me’). The single led to a publishing deal four years later, but she now dismisses her first two albums where she was pushed very strongly in a pop rock direction. Worldwide recognition followed her move to Madonna’s Maverick Records in 1994, by which time she was based in Los Angeles with musical collaborator Glen Ballard (previously co-writer of Michael Jackson’s ‘Man In The Mirror’). A tape was passed to Maverick by the mixer Jimmy Boyelle. Her third album, Jagged Little Pill, was composed almost entirely of those unadulterated demo tracks. It earned rave reviews across America for her confrontational poise and loaded lyrics, reaching number 1 on the Billboard album chart and spawning the worldwide hit singles ‘You Oughta Know’, ‘Hand In My Pocket’, ‘Ironic’, ‘You Learn’, ‘Head Over Feet’, and ‘All I Really Want’. It included an appearance by friends the Red Hot Chili Peppers on ‘You Oughta Know’, which featured her most quoted lyric: ‘Is she perverted like me?/Would she go down on you in a theater?’ As Morissette surmised: ‘I have a difficult time socially, emotionally and musically because I like to communicate on an overwhelmingly intense level. To get it all out, I write as an overt, aggressive woman.’ Just about every music industry award was won by Morissette in 1995 in what was an extraordinary year. In the USA alone, by August 1998, Jagged Little Pill was certified as achieving 16 million sales, and world sales had topped 28 million.
After disappearing from the music scene for a period, during which she travelled in India, Morissette returned in 1998 with the inelegantly named Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. Overlong, verbose and with an irritating line in American faux-spirituality, the album nevertheless contained several strong tracks, including the worldwide hit single ‘Thank U’, and debuted at number 1 on the Billboard album chart in November 1998. The following year, Morissette made her acting debut in Kevin Smith’s controversial Dogma, playing a female God, and released the low-key MTV Unplugged in November.
Morissette returned to the studio in the new millennium to record Under Rug Swept, which was released in February 2002 and topped the US charts. The album, which was also produced by Morissette, marked a return to the AOR rock style of Jagged Little Pill, while the strident sentiments of the single ‘Hands Clean’ also harked back to the earlier album. The 2004 follow-up So-Called Chaos jettisoned a lot of the anger and cynicism previously prevalent in her songwriting, with Morissette sounding at times almost contented. The artist’s next move was to record an acoustic version of her most famous album, Jagged Little Pill. A previously unheard sense of humour was unveiled on Morissette’s 2007 cover version of the Black Eyed Peas’ ‘My Humps’, which received widespread press coverage when a video was posted on the YouTube website. Her new studio album Flavors Of Entanglement (2008) was an improvement on the bland So-Called Chaos, but failed to restore the artistic and commercial clout of her mid-90s heyday.
