Alanis Morissette, the big-voiced Canadian who jumped from child TV star to musical phenomenon with 1995’s Jagged Little Pill, was set to celebrate the 25th anniversary of her breakthrough album with an extended tour when the pandemic shut things down in 2020.
“It’s been a huge social, relational, spiritual, cultural, economic, political fart storm over the last while,” Morissette told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. “And, one thing, there’s so many silver linings. It almost feels sacrilegious to bring them up while we are still in the middle of this, but so many themes of expression are available.”
The now 47-year-old performer is likely referencing her ironically busy previous two years: the arrival of her third child in August 2019, which was followed in December with the long-gestating Broadway debut of a musical version of Jagged Little Pill. She capped things off with her first new album in eight years, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, which dropped in July 2020.
And now Morissette is ready to finally hit the road in celebration of an album that has sold an astonishing 33 million copies worldwide and found listeners singing along to unblinkingly confessional lyrics like, “Is she perverted like me?/Does she go down on you in a theater?”
Listening to Jagged Little Pill today, the album’s so-called feminist bombshells somewhat give way to a rush of ’90s nostalgia for a time before the internet was ubiquitous and MTV was still known for music videos (isn’t it ironic?). With that era in mind, Morissette is bringing along a pair of equally expressive women to support the tour: Shirley Manson, the frontwoman of Garbage, and Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power.
Alanis Morisette, Cat Power and Garbage play Riverbend Music Center 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 17. Cat Power plays first.
Lawn seats start at $51. Tickets at riverbend.org.
Watch the music video for Alanis Morissette's "You Oughta Know" below.
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