Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular Music

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

MORISSETTE, Alanis

(b 1 June '74, Ottawa, Canada) Singer-songwriter who combines youthful brio with a mature musical outlook. She won critical respect early on for her no- nonsense lyrics (if not for her hopeless harmonica playing), then swiftly gained leading light status among a new generation of female performers. Having started piano at age six, dancing classes at seven and songwriting at nine, at ten she landed a part in a Canadian cable-TV kiddie show (aimed at the USA) called You Can't Do That On Television. With the money she financed her first single and album before she had reached her teens. She signed a publishing contract at 14, leading to two albums on MCA: Alanis '91 and Now Is The Time '92 did well in Canadian terms (one gold at 25,000, the other platinum at 50,000) but she resisted pressure to release them elsewhere. She left home at 17, moving first to Toronto, then to LA, looking for a songwriting collaborator; finally met producer Glen Ballard (co-writer with Michael Jackson of 'Man In The Mirror'); with Ballard she wrote and recorded Jagged Little Pill on a shoestring budget and made a deal with Madonna's Maverick label: released mid-'95 the album was no. 1 for nine weeks in the USA without a hit single (though two tracks, 'You Oughta Know' and 'Hand In My Pocket', topped the Billboard 'Modern Rock Tracks' chart, which compiles radio plays of album tracks), and also reached the top in the UK, netting four Grammys and a Brit. She began as a child enamoured of the entertainment business, she told Alan Jackson for The Times, then 'it was only when I stopped running towards the things I wanted that they started coming to me ... it works for me every time'. Anyone who can sell 18 million albums in a little over a year without a Hot 100 single must be doing something right. The apparent anger in Jagged Little Pill is from her experiences coming up, but she seems self-possessed enough to deal with the traditional problem of the Second Album: she probably won't do it until she's good and ready.