Alanis Morissette on life after 'Jagged Little Pill': 'I was really lonely'
Alanis Morissette is at a "good juncture" in life.
Having recently celebrated her 50th birthday and wrapped up "The Triple Moon Tour," a 31-city North American trek with guests Joan Jett & The Blackhearts and Morgan Wade, it's a pivotal moment for the singer-songwriter.
"It's this beautiful perimenopausal unraveling," Morissette told Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager during a recent segment on the fourth hour of TODAY. And with it has come a rush of reckonings, she says, starting with reconciling with her chronological age, both physically and emotionally.
"It's this catching up, and this losing and gaining and reframing and redefining," she says of the experience.
"It's biochemical, neuro, spiritual, identity, loss, grief and no more people-pleasing – if that's our survival strategy," Morissette says.
Being a people-pleaser is all too familiar to the musician, especially in the years following the release of her 1995 record, "Jagged Little Pill," one of the best-selling albums of all time.
“At that point, I was still in the pattern of being supply for narcissists,” Morissette says while reflecting on that chapter of her life during a sit-down interview with TODAY.com.
"I didn’t have a lot of people who saw me and saw what I was up to, saw my being an empath or highly sensitive, or my temperament. I was commodified and exploited. I was sort of a thing as opposed to a human being,” she says.
Having gotten her start in children's television sketch comedy, Morissette found modest success in music after releasing two pop-inspired albums in the early '90s.
However, it was her third effort, "Jagged Little Pill," an edgy collection of alternative rock songs including "Ironic" and "You Oughta Know," that sent her to the top of the charts, turning the Canadian singer into a superstar almost overnight — something she says came at a cost.
“I was really lonely,” she says. “I was having a blast when I was making art and the collaborative element is pure joy for me. So, there’s a lot of smiling and it was pretty lonely.”
Someone who values a sense of community, Morissette says the lack of kinship and guidance during the early days of her newfound celebrity led to some difficult times.
"There was no handbook written on how to handle fame that is intense," she recalls. "I just kept thinking, 'I'll find someone, I'll just pin them down and ask them to tell me everything.' But they weren't open in the '90s to having those mentory kind of relationships."
Chillin' with Joan Jett – literally
It took about 30 years, but the universe finally delivered the mentor Morissette sought when she met Jett.
"I pulled up to meet her and I saw her at the front door and I said to myself, 'We're going to be fine,' because she was smiling and quick to bust my chops. And, yeah, it was instant adoration on my part," says Morissette.
Inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with her band in 2015, Jett is best known for her hit "I Love Rock 'N Roll," which spent seven weeks atop Billboard's Hot 100 in 1982. Considered one of rock's biggest trailblazers for her contributions to the genre, Jett is often referred to as "The Queen of Rock 'N Roll."
To Morissette, however, she's simply "my dream."
"When I was in the '90s, I kept looking for a mentor or somebody. You know, 'Will you be my mom?' And the broad answer was, 'No, you're on your own, Alanis.' Whereas, now, there's some leaning I can do and I've never leaned."
The pair became friends while performing together on "The Triple Moon Tour," eventually leading Morissette to invite Jett to join her for one of her favorite pastimes: cold-water plunging.
"One day I was walking by and I said, 'Joan, you want to do it with me?' She was like, 'Yeah.' So, there we were. I was explaining to her some of the positive effects and cognitively, you can feel it right after you do it and your dopamine levels go up 200% for the rest of the day. So, it's really hard to be depressed when you do cold plunges," says Morissette.
According to the "Hand in My Pocket" singer, her plunge with Jett ranks among the best moments of her life.
"It's so great," she says of the experience.
'I had so many opinions before I had kids'
In the years since the release of "Jagged Little Pill," Morissette says her priorities have shifted, in large part, due to her three children, Ever, 13, Onyx, 8, and Winter, 5, whom she shares with husband Mario "Souleye" Treadway, a hip-hop artist.
"I had so many opinions before I had kids, and the second I had Ever, my firstborn, I was like, 'I have nothing to say.' And any parent who's surviving, any mom who's surviving, I bow. That is all I have to say ... forever."
Beyond that, Morissette says that becoming a parent has been life-changing in other ways, too.
"It also obliterates things that you thought you could sustainably keep in your life when, no. It's a loss, it's clearly a rebirth and a whole new skew and priorities."
As part of a recent collaboration with UScellular, Morissette says she's been contemplating how she and her family interact with technology and finding ways to meaningfully use their devices to enhance learning rather than distract from it.
"I'm always thinking, 'What can we do to enhance this experience for them?'"
The answer, she says, is offering an integrated approach that fosters learning in music, math and other beneficial skills.
"The key piece for me is not leaving kids alone to interpret content that's too sophisticated for them to interpret alone," she explains.
And when they reach a point where they're maxed out and become "cranky and irritable," Morissette says they take a break.
"How we live is very hippie-meets-whatever we are as a family. But the doors are always open, so there's this invitation to go outside and the kids are calling it 'touch grass,'" she laughs.
As far as balancing her career and being a parent, Morissette says there really isn't a balance, but rather a back-and-forth between being a mom and an artist.
"The vocation-macro-serviceperson part of me and then the mom, they're fighting a lot, because they seem at odds, but once in a while they can overlap," she explains.
What's next for the Grammy-winning musician?
"I'm launching a platform within the next year that is all about addiction, recovery, trauma recovery, somatic artistic expression, temperament, personality disorder, awareness, community art," says Morissette. "So, I'm so excited about that."
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
