Alanis Morissette: We thought that whole era of ‘size zero' was done. We dropped the ball

Irish Times

3 days ago

Alanis Morissette
asks which version of her I wish to hear from: 'The hormonal bitch who has a lot to say? The people-pleasing, kind, amenable part? They're all here.' It's 9am in sunny Los Angeles and the ­Canadian-born singer-songwriter is ­wearing a slouchy top, her wavy hair loose. She's long been aware of these different 'parts', that her life is full of contradiction. 'I have 14 different opinions about one thing.' It's why, aged 19, she wrote Hand In My Pocket (lyrics include: I'm high, but I'm grounded / I'm sane, but I'm ­overwhelmed), one of several anthems on
Jagged ­Little Pill
, the album released 30 years ago this month. Back then, in the unenlightened 1990s, people found this sort of talk unnerving. 'They were like, 'Whoa, that's scary. What are you talking about?''
'They called it my 'psychobabble'. I'm like, 'I'm going to stay the course with my psychobabble.'' It's what she sees as her 'karmic assignment' and feels not a little vindicated now that these ideas are welcomed by the mainstream. There's a whole seam of psychotherapy that views the mind as composed of distinct 'parts', called Internal Family Systems. Morissette speaks at the symposia, as well as summits on trauma, or wholeness verses wellness, career, art and feminism. She hosted a podcast devoted to this stuff. 'The healing arts,' she says, adding drily: 'I am from California, never forget that. California, because if I were in any other state my head might explode.'
Morissette hair-whipped into our consciousness, a waif with a wide smile belting raw honesty in an outsioutsizeo-soprano, with You Oughta Know. It wasn't just the 'psychobabble' that caused consternation. It was the unsettling range of female emotion, the androgyny, the 'monstrous feminine'. 'I used to say, 'I'm on the frontlinesfront lines head chopped off.'' Jimmy Fallon compared her to a troll doll. Rolling Stone called her 'rage-filled', put her on the November 1995 cover with the headline Angry White Female. Purists cleared their throats over the use of 'ironic' in her track of that title. The New York Times declared the things she described – 'a black fly in your chardonnay', 'rain on your wedding day' – 'distinctly unironic'. Morissette said yes, she was sometimes 'the malapropism queen'. But her fans understood. And 33 million of them bought Jagged Little Pill, so.
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Since then, she's sold 75 million records, released 10 albums, most recently The Storm Before the Calm, featuring 11 guided meditations. She's acted in films, led healing workshops, raised awareness on issues such as sex abuse, post-partum depression, disordered eating, addiction. We've met because this Friday evening she will step on to Glastonbury's Pyramid stage. She's never been to Glastonbury – which seems incredible; in so many ways she might have been hatched in a tent in the Healing Field – but as an artist, she says, 'It was bucket-listy.'
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She's grateful to still be able to perform work from her 30-year oeuvre without compromising herself. It's because she still believes every lyric, she says, 'value systems-wise and in terms of passions'. There's only one she's iffy about. It's a song about partnerships called Not the Doctor, which says, essentially, 'I don't want to worry about your stuff. Your stuff is your stuff. My stuff's my stuff. Never the twain shall meet.' She pulls a face. 'Now I've been married 15 years, I'm like, Oh, the twain shall meet. The twain are very much meeting every day.'
This morning she's at her desk in the home she shares with the rapper Souleye (whom she met at a meditation retreat in 2009) and their three children, sons Ever, 14, and Winter, five, and daughter Onyx, nine. Also in the house, 'so many dogs and animals, holy f**k'. The camera her end tips up from time to time creating a sensation for me of being capsized.
I first met Morissette five years ago when she was in London for the launch of her album Such Pretty Forks in The Road. She was breastfeeding her youngest, then a few months old, and grappling with 'lacto-menopause' (What's that? 'It's a f**king shitshow'). My takeaway then: Morissette doesn't do half measures, but she does do gallows humour. She had been living in Berkeley, California, enjoying the community spirit, people dropping round with smoothies and hot soup. She found the microclimate calming on her nervous system when the energy in LA got too much. 'There's a lot of unfinished trauma in LA,' she told me then.
Before moving to Berkeley, she'd been in the western suburbs of LA for 24 years. They then lived in Malibu, but were driven out by fires in 2019. She has occasionally tried to live outside the state, 'briefly' on Bowen Island, Vancouver. And she tried New York for a year. 'But that Pacific Ocean, it keeps pulling me back,' she says. Yup, she's 'a Californian girl through and through'.
By January this year, they had been living in Pacific Palisades in LA for just a few months when the wildfires tore through their neighbourhood, writing off their house and 85 per cent of their belongings. More than 200,000 people were displaced. Many of her friends fled to New York, whole communities upped sticks.
Alanis Morissette in 1996. Photograph: Steve McNeil/Daily Record/Mirrorpix via Getty Images
It was the ocean, the communal living vibe, the general feeling that made her want to stay in California. The family initially found a temporary solution, living 'communally' with four friends between January and May. About a month ago, Morissette worked 'feverishly' to find the house she's in now, a block from where she used to live, surrounded by hills, 'room-mating indefinitely' with a friend who lost his home in Altadena, north LA.
She says a heaviness persists in the city, 'a grief'. She avoids the devastated areas, even if it means taking long detours, 'because when you drive through Sunset all the way down, it's still surreality'. She says her mind can't compute what her eyes are seeing. And the beach is out, because any time she contemplates going in the water she remembers, 'it's likely filled with toxins' from the ash. 'It's a different city now, but it's always a cool city. I'm pretty in love with Los Angeles.'
A few days after we speak, the city lit up again, this time with protests against Donald Trump's immigration raids, which spread across the country after the US president's deployment of the national guard. The night before Morissette and her family left for Norway for the first date of her summer tour, a curfew was imposed by the LA mayor.
I ask about living in Trump's America, and she says (with a touch of sarcasm) that she was looking forward to this part of the conversation. 'The gift of travelling the planet is I get glimpses of how the international community perceive America,' she says. She has a way of summing up how Canadians respond to rudeness. They are, 'Nice, nice, nice. Then piss us off on the wrong day and we explode.' Is this prime minister Mark Carney's way of doing business with Trump? She laughs. 'It becomes a hard no. We try to be amenable, but then it's a very hard no. Unequivocal. So that's kind of our thing, culturally. We came by it honestly.'
Morissette's tour will take in cities all over Europe including Malahide Castle in Dublin and Ormeau Park in Belfast. She says when she's touring, she's pretty nocturnal, going to bed as late as 4am. Mornings are sharpened with a bulletproof coffee and she practises 'intuitive' intermittent fasting. When she's at home, she 'putters – you know, organising and cleaning with no agenda. I'll get back to you on what that means neurobiologically.' She says her awareness is 'diffuse' while she does this, which is 'instantly feminine'.
'You can be aware that your child just stubbed his toe, the dog needs his food, the husband needs a snug. That's the divine feminine capacity.' Her mentor, the late author and addiction specialist Pia Mellody, once said vacuuming was her spiritual practice. 'I was like, 'That's mine, too!' So, if you see a clean environment, it means I was meditating.'
Alanis Morissette describes herself as part of the 20% of the population who are 'highly sensitive'. Photograph:While we talk, her husband, whose real name is Mario Treadway, is padding about somewhere in the house. He's released nine albums, and there's some thematic crossover with his wife in terms of an interest in spirituality, 'inner child work' and mental health (he lost an older brother to suicide). Certainly, from the outside – see Instagram – their home is a sweet, functioning environment. He's the kind of husband who wears a Patriarchy Hurts Us All T-shirt and makes juices (spinach, celery and lemon) for breakfast before shouldering his share of the children's home schooling. As musicians, they 'make sense to each other', Morissette says. 'I'm not strange to him. I'm not weird or freakish.'
But they put the work in. She can't imagine how relationships manage without couples' counselling. 'I'm a huge couples' therapist person. I have been for ever.' Her non-negotiable is that the therapist be 'trauma-informed' and 'addiction-informed'. 'I can't be supported by someone who doesn't look through those lenses.'
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She's long been frank about addiction, deliberately so. 'I call addiction 'relief-seeking measures that kill you eventually'.' Work, love, sex and shopping, 'those are the chestnuts' for her. They are 'Whac-a-Mole', in that as soon as she's bashed one, another pops up. Being a workaholic is 'especially' hard. 'Because the number one priority is being clicked into some seed of productivity. There's no worth in just being. And it's a higher power thing, so work addiction is also called the praise addiction.'
For instance: 'If I said, 'Oh, I did heroin till four in the morning and totally blacked out,' people would be like, 'Oh s**t. Bitch needs some help.' But if I said, 'I've been working my f**king ass off for this deadline and I finished at 4.15am,' people would be patting my back and be, like, 'Good work, girl.' It's equally corrosive. Because any addiction, if we keep going with it, we're dead. It is great for 20 minutes, then you're dead.'
She's joking about the '20 minutes' and at the same time very much not joking about the 'dead'. She describes herself as part of the 20 per cent of the population who are 'highly sensitive' as well as part of the 4 per cent who are 'empaths' – meaning she'll walk into a room porous to everyone else's issues, pain and general unresolved junk. It's a cursed trait, she says. Society loves the 'yield' of the sensitive person: 'They love the songs, the photos, the art. But they don't love the human.' Without therapy, she 'would not be alive'.
She was suicidal? 'All the time. I still struggle with it. I have an anxious, depressive tendency. Those who are sensitive are much more susceptible to their environmental information. If you put a highly sensitive person in an environment where they're browbeaten or reduced, they'll basically want to kill themselves. It's the worst. If you put a highly sensitive person in an environment where they're supported, championed and listened to, they thrive.'
For her own children, Morissette has tried to create an environment where their 'multiple intelligences' are nurtured. A word about 'multiple intelligences' for the uninitiated. It's a theory developed by the US psychologist Howard Gardner, who identified eight different types of intelligences alongside the old 'academic, sit in your chair and get good grades in a test' type. Morissette is a fierce advocate of the intelligences. I'll let her take it from here: 'My job has always been to understand an entire model through clinical training and otherwise, and then update it. Expand it. So when I interviewed Gardner on the podcast, I said, 'Can I update the multiple intelligences?' And he said, 'You can do whatever you want, Alanis.''
What I found in terms of the lovely patriarchy, was that at that time if men couldn't f**k me, they didn't know what to do with me
'So now I have 16 intelligences. Not only do I use that as a template when I'm home schooling, but I also use it as a template if friends come to me worried about their kids. Or if we're talking about the conventional curriculum in public schools, or what the government's up to with education. I constantly reference multiple intelligences, because so many kids say, 'I'm really dumb.' And it kills me. I'm just like, 'What do you mean? Where are your intelligences? Where do you spark up? Where do you jump out of bed in the morning?' And it might be physical intelligence. It might be that you're meant to do backflips in a way that I'll never do. I'll need a stunt double for that. So I go through it with anybody who's across from me and seeking support.'
She calls home school 'unschool', and the kids are allowed to opt into the mainstream the moment they choose. Ever, for instance, chose to go at seventh grade. I ask her to give me a flavour. 'Like, Winter will be singing to us his whole day, channelling his stream of consciousness. And then Onyx is twirling around the room. Artistry as a way of life is so normalised in our family. It's not like if one person's loving their academic moment, that isn't recognised. If someone's loving the backflip they just mastered, we're like, 'Awesome!' So there is a celebration of process here. Destination is fun, but process is everything. We value that here.'
Morissette calls the people who help the family the 'caregiving gang', certainly a nicer way of putting it than 'nannies and tutors'. Everybody in that gang knows about the multiple intelligence system. 'What I've done is laminated maps and posters to indicate what each might look like. For example, musical intelligence might look like Souleye in the studio writing a song. He'll bring Onyx in, and she'll write a song, and he'll record it.'
Naturalist intelligence is another. The family have a farm in northern California where they keep cows, turkeys, ducks, snakes 'and tons of chickens. Onyx is super knowledgeable, to the point where, when I don't know a thing about an animal, I just turn to her. So we've got our naturalist intelligence there, our animal empath. I can't even keep a plant alive.'
She loves the tranquillity of the farm, the peaceful escape. 'I love anywhere where there's a vortex,' she says. For a second, I think: vortex? The internet informs me that there's an alternative definition. A vortex in this context is 'a state of alignment with one's desires and source energy'.
Morissette says she gets 'a little word salady sometimes. It's a linguistic issue.' She loves words, loves using them, 'but sometimes I play with them a little much'. She'll create words – tangentalise, decohesify – that intuitively seem to fit.
Alanis Morissette and her family had been living in LA, until wildfires destroyed 85% of their home. Photograph: CBS via Getty Images
How does she talk to her kids about the post-partum depression she experienced after all three were born? 'I apologise all the time. They'll say, 'I remember that whole era,' and I'll say, 'Well, I wasn't exactly available to show up for you in the full way that I wanted to.' I am pretty transparent about how I failed them. And my running joke, which is not a joke, is that I have accounts set up for their potential college fees, if that's the route they take, but I also have whole accounts set up for their therapy, because they're going to need it.'
She says interest in post-partum depression is better than it was, say, 30 years ago. 'But 'interest' isn't salve. Being interested in someone's suffering isn't the same as showing up for it. There's not a lot of education around anything feminine, but this one especially. So, it's rugged. But I really consider myself a sort of existential cockroach. There's a tenacity – I don't know where it comes from, probably my parents – to keep going.' She puts on a voice here of someone asking a question after the birth of Winter, when she was 45: ''Why would you get pregnant again if you've already been through it twice and it gets progressively worse?' I'm like, 'Well, look at my children. I'll do anything for these kids. To meet them, even, I'll suffer anything.'' She pauses then adds: 'It's also a generation X thing. We're known for our white-knuckle approach to fricking everything.'
She's tugging the ends of her hair. I should say something about her hair. It's still long, brown, middle-parted and what the kids would call iconic in the way Janis Joplin's was, too. Morissette helicoptered it on stage, semi-dreaded it in You Learn, wore it as her only clothes in her video for Thank U. 'I mean, my hair is a band mate,' she says. 'It's a way of expressing and flailing and raging. It's like a typewriter, it speaks on my behalf. Without me, even. It's a friend who protects me when I'm feeling vulnerable on stage. If you have 80,000 or 200,000 people looking, a well-placed moment of deep' – she mimes retreating behind her hair – 'and then I'm back' – she mimes re-emerging – 'It's a pretty way of hiding. The perfect tool for an introvert. And I've always felt androgynous, so in some ways my earrings or my hair length can remind someone that it's a female body.'
She doesn't mind when it's long and greasy, she likes the 'aesthetic of dirty chic' (I fear Glastonbury may test even the steeliest Californian). Plus, her hair supplied a fierce and tangible shift from the way she'd been moulded as a child star back home in Canada.
Born in Ottawa, she was one of three children of teachers Alan Morissette and Georgia Feuerstein; her mother's family escaped the Hungarian revolution when she was 10. 'Basically, they were on a train, someone leant over and said, 'Hey, we just want to let you know that every family getting off at the next stop is being taken away to be killed. Your family might want to jump off.' They did, looked back from the field, and saw everyone being executed.'
Morissette has an older brother Chad, and a twin, Wade. By all accounts she was a child in constant motion, always spinning, singing. 'My twin brother used to joke he would be playing soccer while I was writing songs about fate,' she has said. She tells me two clear things about her early life. One that she had a 'prophetic' vision of herself travelling the planet and singing. 'That's what I saw as a very young person.' The second is that her 'psychological leanings' were always there. 'We all have our funny roles in our family, and my role was the 'psyche understander' and the conflict resolver. Some might think that made me the peacemaker, but really, I was just the family therapist. Which is exciting, but also horrifying.' (Does she still have that role? She laughs. 'I quit.' She mimes handing out other therapists' numbers, 'Here's a couple of business cards.')
We thought that whole era was done, right? We sorted this out! Didn't we? Oh, we didn't. We dropped the ball
At the age of 10, Morissette – Lady Di hairdo and roll-up jeans – appeared in five episodes of the Nickelodeon kids' series You Can't Do That on Television. She used the money she earned to make her first album. At the same time, she was a competitive swimmer with a punishing training schedule. Not long after, she was signed by MCA, who turned her into a cringy pop princess bopping with Paula Abdul-style dance moves in a crucifix and bra top. She even opened for rapper Vanilla Ice. She was cutting records in studios until 3am and still attending school – even if the classroom desk was just a chance to catch up on sleep.
Behind the teen gloss, of course, were the predatory men, the exploitative financial deals, the criticisms about her looks and weight. All this, in an era that celebrated size zero, cemented a severe eating disorder.
After high school, she learned to play guitar and started writing songs. Aged 19, she moved to LA and spent her days trying to navigate a culture where no one asked her a question and just writing, writing, writing on the beach. Music was suddenly an outlet. Her lyrics were, 'psychologically, spiritually, emotionally informed'. She was signed by Madonna's label Maverick and Jagged Little Pill was released when she was 21, selling half a million copies in one week. Nonetheless, it was a 'rough time' to be a solo artist. 'There was no one to hide behind. What I found in terms of the lovely patriarchy, was that at that time if men couldn't f**k me, they didn't know what to do with me.'
When she looked around her in the musical landscape, the people who seemed successful were 'secure in their loudness, à la Courtney Love. That seemed to be valued. I was like, 'Okay, I'm going to pretend to be an extrovert for the next 25 years.' So, tequila – anything that allowed me to be the life of the party – or if I was doing a talk, Xanax. Anything that would help me pretend I'm not me.'
She takes a deep breath and says as if speedily wrapping up, 'And that's why perimenopause is so great, because now there's zero desire to present as something that I'm not. I spent 25 years trying to be someone who didn't have this temperament. At 51, I feel this is just what it is like.'
A 2020 mural of Alanis Morissette by the Irish artist Emmalene Blake, in south Dublin. Photograph: Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images
She says that menopause is 'rough and amazing, both'. She interrupts herself to ask if I know about the micro-feminism trend, 'where you just impose the feminine on everything. It's anything's like, 'Oh, I need to talk to a doctor, because she'll tell me ... ' I do it all the time. If someone sees a bug, 'Oh my gosh, she's gorgeous.' Because, obviously, patriarchy would have it be such that every f**king thing is male, including the creatures. I'm working those micro-feminisms into every board meeting.'
She hates that the hypersexuality of the 1990s and 2000s is back. That 'size zero' is back. 'We thought that whole era was done, right? We sorted this out! Didn't we? Oh, we didn't. We dropped the ball. The collarbone thing came back in ... and the hypersexualisation thing is so boring.' She laughs: 'Of course, a perimenopausal woman's going to say that, right? My procreative imperative is, thank f**king God, chilling out. There are gorgeous things that come along with that – less people-pleasing, more directness. But I'm still in the middle of it. And that can be disconcerting. Most of my friends are in the middle of it, too, so we cut each other a lot of slack. My menopausal women friends are like, 'Honey, it gets f**king great.' It's the best news.'
Is her view of sobriety is nuanced? 'There are some people who would get very mad at me for implying at all that it's nuanced. Because for those of us who were drinking at seven in the morning, well there's nothing nuanced about that. So, I guess it depends. For me, it's whichever addiction is bringing you to death very fast. Which one is it? Which one's ruining your relationships? And then there's the Whac-a-Mole approach, which is, 'Okay, I've stopped not eating. And now I'm working my ass off. Oh, yeah, and I took a few too many pills.' The Whac-a-Mole, that's what we have to keep an eye on.'
She's looking ahead to Glastonbury, which is part of what she calls her 'summer of communalism'. She'll be travelling with her family and ever-expanding caravan of friends. When she takes to the stage, that long hair billowing, she expects to be wide-eyed, taking in the crowd in front of her, and 'beholding the shit out of everything'. – The Guardian
Tickets for Alanis Morissette's Dublin and Belfast dates can be found via
Ticketmaster
.
For support with addiction, see
HSE Addiction Services
,
Addiction Counsellors of Ireland
or
Family Addiction Support Network
Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or [e-mail].