Latest news with #Morissette
ITV News
04-07-2025
- Climate
- ITV News
Lytham Festival night cancelled due to 'adverse weather'
The second night of Lytham Festival on Friday 4 July - due to feature Alanis Morissette - has been cancelled due to the weather, it has been announced. A festival organiser said: "Due to adverse weather conditions we unfortunately have had to make the decision to cancel this evening. "The safety of our customers, staff and artists is our priority and increasing high winds mean it would not be safe to go ahead. "All customers will receive a full refund for tonight's show. Please wait to hear from your ticket agent for further information."The evening's line-up, as well as Canadian star act Morissette, was to feature Leigh band Lottery Winners and US acts Liz Phair and year's festival has been dogged by bad luck. The planned first night on Wednesday 2 July was cancelled when the frontman of headline act Kings of Leon, Caleb Followill, suffered a broken foot. The festival was reduced to four days as a result.
Elle
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Elle
Thirty Years Later, 'Jagged Little Pill' Is Still the Perfect Conduit for Female Rage
Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. When Alanis Morissette was brainstorming songs for her first internationally-released album, Jagged Little Pill, which marks its 30th anniversary on June 13, her intention was to make a record that would absolutely blow her mind. 'That's all I wanted and it was all I could think about,' the singer-songwriter says. It was the mid-'90s and after Morissette's first two albums (released in Canada only), the 19-year-old Ottawa native had become known for a dance-pop style—an image and sound that industry insiders wanted her to keep. Morissette remembers record bosses in Canada who belittled her desire to express herself more boldly in both her lyrics and composition in her third album. 'Your contribution to the song you co-wrote is basically 0.08 percent,' she says they told her, dismissing any creative input she made. 'It was just the ongoing reduction of my contribution during my teenage years.' She took the artistic confinement as a cue to move to Los Angeles so that she could make music on her terms—only to come up against more of the same obstacles. Nobody wanted her to wander out of her musical niche: 'They were like, 'Oh you can't do that because that's not what you're known for, sweetheart,' or 'Oh, your publisher won't like it,'' Morissette tells me from her home in L.A., looking bare-faced and casual. The idea of being an artist who musically repeated herself made no sense to her. 'These people didn't get it—they didn't understand my evolution and what music meant to me,' she recalls. 'I wanted to write a record that marked what was actually happening.' She silently vowed never to be anyone's echo chamber: 'I said to myself I'm writing a record that is a direct fucking reflection of where I'm at or bust,' she adds. Many of the lyrics were ripped from her own experience. Jagged Little Pill's fifth track, 'Right Through You,' for example, calls out talent managers who prey on young women artists instead of supporting their careers: 'You pat me on the head/ You took me out to wine dine 69 me/ But didn't hear a damn word I said.' Setting the lyrics to an alternative rock melody felt rebellious and not only conveyed her anger, but also drove the accusation home. 'These were the things that were keeping me up at night,' she says. To say that Jagged Little Pill was far from a bust is a gross understatement. The gut-wrenching 12-track compilation not only gave Morissette global recognition and commercial success—it took on a life of its own, becoming what media outlets like Rolling Stone called 'a landmark moment for the music industry and the soundtrack of a generation.' Thirty years, five Grammys—including one for Album of the Year—and 33 million copies sold later, the record continues to permeate pop culture and be an effective conduit for female rage. 'Her epic war against Mr. Man, begun when both of us were teenagers, still appeals,' Megan Volpert, author of Why Alanis Morissette Matters, writes in her book. 'She is our raging sage. She is our punk rock. Something inside of me is frozen there, at 14 going on 40. And whatever that thing is, it's got Alanis on repeat because there is the laugh of Medusa in it.' In the 1990s, angst among women was practically endemic. As increasing numbers of women defied gender expectations and attained power, the more noxious the misogyny grew to counter their progress. Those who excelled faced a special kind of sexism that reduced them to chauvinistic stereotypes and repulsive, often violent, sexual fantasies—what Time magazine called ''90s bitch bias' and 'bitchification.' 'Women have been having their asses kicked since forever, but there was an abject hatred of women at that time,' says Morissette. But the retribution motivated women like her to push back harder: 'I won't do the thing you're telling me and indoctrinating me to do,' she adds. When Volpert first heard the album, she felt Morissette was giving voice to her own angst. She was a teenager at the time and 'was doing my best just to stay alive,' she tells me from her home in Atlanta. 'There was my fledgling consciousness as a queer woman and no elders to shepherd me through the wilderness of becoming an adult.' When Jagged Little Pill came out in 1995, Volpert felt seen for the first time in her life. 'Culturally, this was the moment of grunge, so there was a lot of dislocated, misplaced hostility in the air,' she says. 'Alanis was able to tap the vein more effectively than anyone else.' Volpert became a teenaged 'subject matter expert in the jagged little pill'—or what she describes as 'the thing that kind of sticks into our craw.' 'It's the emotional baggage of living through times where women feel unsourced, disempowered, and oppressed—like when we're facing violence: big violence and little micro-aggressive violence.' Volpert reminds me that this was decades before 'micro-aggression' was in the vernacular. 'There was no word to describe what was happening to us,' she adds. Like many listeners, Volpert felt like she was the subject of the album. 'At 15, I already knew that the people were doing harm to me and that the systems were out to keep me low-down and in my place, boxed-in and quiet,' she says. Women not only resonated with the album's rage, they ran with it, and their reverence for it was music to Morissette's ears. 'It was enough for me to keep going,' she says. Thirty years later, that anger rages on. 'I believe it's worse,' Morissette says with a short laugh. 'I feel like if we're paying attention, and if we're learning everything we can about patriarchy and gaslighting and narcissism—the more I learn, the feistier I am.' American women are contending with all of the above under President Donald Trump. During one of his final campaign speeches, the president—who himself was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in 2023—said he will protect women 'whether the women like it or not.' After his victory, a report from the nonpartisan Institute for Strategic Dialogue, highlighted a surge in online misogyny. That's why the album feels so poignant, even now, says Diane Paulus, director of the Tony Award-winning Broadway jukebox musical Jagged Little Pill—written by Diablo Cody and based around the original compilation—that had a theatrical run on and off (because of COVID restrictions) from 2019 to 2021. 'Alanis tapped into something—she challenged something so deep and profound about human nature and how we exist on the planet together,' she says. 'That album wasn't a period album for the nineties. It was from the nineties, but it feels like she could have written those songs yesterday, for these characters in the world we're living in today.' When Paulus, a theater and opera director at Harvard University, joined the Broadway adaptation, there wasn't even a story yet. 'I just knew that her music demanded to be made into theater—epic, visceral, physical, ritual theater,' she tells me from New York in between rehearsals for a new show. Morissette was adamantly against the musical being a biopic. 'She didn't want it to be 'The Alanis Morissette Story,'' Paulus says. 'She wanted an entirely new story that speaks to our lives today. And that was exciting.' At its core, the album is all about the human condition. 'What the musical dealt with was how the songs just naturally break people open,' says Lauren Patten, the 32-year-old actress, who had a starring role. 'Like the album, the musical was about navigating trauma and coming out the other side—something that was very important to Morissette.' Over time, Morissette has learned to harness her anger as a force for good. 'Part of it is what I'd like to think is my maturity, so I channel that rage through activism, showing up, answering in a certain way, or setting a boundary when something isn't working for me,' she says. As Volpert adds, 'Her ideas are everywhere—she's keynoting at psychology conferences and writing forewords for books.' There was also an advice column called 'Ask Alanis' for The Guardian for 1.5 years. More recently, there's Conversations with Alanis, a podcast series where she calls on experts to discuss in-depth subjects like neurobiology and philosophy. Morissette will also begin a residency in Las Vegas this fall. And she's still producing new music. 'Alanis is one of the very few artists from the nineties that is actually doing new work—new, evolving, musical work, and not just reunion tours or summer festivals,' Volpert explains. Just last month, Morissette tells me she was back in the studio to start on what will be her 11th studio record ('I'm terrified,' she adds). She isn't one to listen to her own music for self-soothing or inspiration, but there have been times in her life when she has gone back to Jagged Little Pill to reconnect with her younger self. 'I haven't done it in like 15 years, but there were times when I lived alone on and off where I felt lost and I would listen to my own music,' she says, adding in a mock-whisper: 'Don't tell anybody,' with a laugh. 'I would listen to it just to be reminded that there's a human here, there's a perspective here. I was raised in women-hating and narcissistic environments, so the sense of self that maybe looks obvious from the outside wasn't happening in here,' she says pointing to herself. 'Songwriting is amazing for that—anytime I could express myself it was my way of existing.' The now 51-year-old Morissette is able to continually perform songs she wrote at age 19 because she still believes in the unwavering truth behind them. 'I wouldn't be able to perform them if I didn't believe any of these narratives anymore,' she says. 'Thankfully, I still do.' And the tracks continue to age with her. 'Perimenopause helps us to reattune our evolving identity as women,' she says of her current phase of life. 'We're also contending with what it means to age as a woman in a culture that continues to hate us.' There's a lot to be angry about, still. A smile creeps up on Morissette's face, growing into a wicked grin. 'Except now, we're conscientious as fuck.'
CBC
10-03-2025
- Climate
- CBC
Starving owls ending up at northern Ontario wildlife rescues in triple their usual numbers
Social Sharing A wildlife rehabilitation centre in Val Caron, Ont. says it's seen triple the number of injured and emaciated owls this winter that it typically sees in a winter season. And it blames the situation on snow. "They're starving," said Gloria Morissette, the authorized wildlife custodian at the Turtle Pond Wildlife Centre. "The deep snow is making it harder for the owls to find their prey, the mice and rodents." The centre has cared for between 12 and 15 of the birds so far this winter, Morissette said, far more than the three or four they'd typically see. "I think we've seen just about every native owl to northern Ontario this year," she said. "We've seen snowy. We've had great greys come through – the great horned owls. We've had several boreal owls, which is not something we admit every year, and we have a little saw-whet." This winter is in irruption year, explained Jenn Salo, an authorized wildlife custodian for birds of prey in Thunder Bay. An irruption year That means there's been a crash in the vole population in the Arctic, prompting owls and other birds that would generally stay in the north to fly south in search of food. "A lot of them are coming into our areas in starving conditions," she said. "And then when the weather gets tough or we get huge dumps of snow — like southern Ontario has gotten record amounts of snow -- that makes it extremely hard for the owls to hunt." Salo, like Morissette has taken in more than a dozen owls this year. That's up from an average of five in a typical season, she said. The Owl Foundation, a specialist raptor rescue on the Niagara peninsula, issued an Ontario Owl Alert on its Facebook page in February saying that eastern screech owls were struggling to catch prey due to deep snow. It urged people to call a rehab organization if they see an owl in distress. Owls typically fly away from humans, Morissette said, but emaciated owls will just stay in one place. "We had one little barred owl just admitted last week, and he'd been sitting on a person's deck railing for three days," she said. "And by the third day, he was sitting on the railing and kind of leaning into the side of the house. And so they called us, and they were able to bring it into us, and if they hadn't brought it in when they did, I don't think that bird would've survived another day." Wildlife rehabilitator says stay away from the owls Any owl that stays in one place for more than 24 hours probably needs help, she added. Many of the owls at Turtle Pond have arrived from cities to the north, such as Timmins, Morissette said. But one was discovered in downtown Sudbury. Salo urged people who see owls to stay away from them and not to encourage others to crowd around them and take photographs. "Humans flock to the locations where these owls are trying to hunt, not realizing that these owls are on the verge of starvation, and human presence makes it much more difficult to hunt," she said. "And it stresses the bird out having all these eyes on them." Turtle Pond has not seen any owls with avian flu yet, Morissette said, but wildlife rescues in southern Ontario have warned people not to approach sick birds and to call rescues to come and collect them. The Windsor Essex County Health Unit has warned anyone wanting to interact with wild birds to don personal protective equipment such as a mask and gloves.
BBC News
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Alanis Morissette: Megan Wyn on 'unbelievable' support role
A 20-year-old singer from Anglesey described how her mum cried when she told her she will support superstar Alanis Grammy award-winning Canadian will perform in the Welsh capital on 2 July, and demand for tickets has been so high organisers have had to move the gig to a bigger Wyn said she is still in shock at being asked to perform as a special guest at Blackweir fields. The indie-pop artist has listened to Morissette her entire life, adding her mum was a big fan and would play her songs in the house. Morissette, now 50, had huge international success when her album Jagged Little Pill was released in 1995. Songs such as Ironic, Hand In My Pocket and Head Over Feet helped her sell millions of copies worldwide. "It's unbelievable, I can't believe it," Wyn told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast."It's nuts. I never thought I'd get to support her."The singer said she and her live band would have to treat the concert like "any other gig"."Once I start thinking about it as something completely different, I think that's when things go wrong," she laughed."We're just going to put on the best show we can." US rock singer-songwriter Liz Phair will also perform before Morissette takes to the stage at Blackweir performance was initially planned for Cardiff Castle but organisers said demand for tickets was "like nothing we have experienced previously" and moved the show to a new site with a capacity of up to 35,000 people.
CBC
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Alanis Morissette reveals 2025 Las Vegas concert residency
Alanis Morissette is headed to Las Vegas for a new concert residency taking place in October and November. The Grammy-winning star, who recently performed at FireAid's benefit concert for victims of the L.A. wildfires, will play her first night of the residency on Oct. 15 at Caesars Palace. The rest of the shows are scheduled for Oct. 17-18, Oct. 22, Oct. 24, Oct. 25 and Nov.1-2. Tickets for the shows will go on sale March 7 at 1 p.m. EST. The concerts will mark Morissette's first Vegas residency. The rest of her performances for 2025 are mostly festivals, including performances at Lollapalooza Argentina, Madrid's Mad Cool Festival, Belfast's Belsonic festival and more. Morissette is among a lengthy list of artists who have scheduled residencies in Vegas this year, as Janet Jackson, Rod Stewart and more have announced dates in Sin City. WATCH | Alanis Morissette's official music video for 'You Oughta Know':
