Alanis Morissette has finally learned to live in the moment. The change, call it her evolution, is evident in the lyrics on her latest, Flavors of Entanglement, which you can add to the list of strangely titled albums she’s released over the past 13 years including her groundbreaking Jagged Little Pill, which has sold more than 30 million units worldwide.
“A lot of times, I’ll write a song about something that happened six months prior or even something that happened in my childhood and I’ll take on that persona and sing in the first person,” she explains in a recent interview. “Whereas (Flavors) wrote itself with what was happening that day. I barely, if at all, needed to bring in my journal because I would just show up and write about what was going on. So it was all written in retrospect.”
To listen to Morissette, now 34, speak about the act of writing and recording Flavors, you begin to realize it represents her most mature album to date. Something happened in between the release of So- Called Chaos in 2004 and today. She calls it “rock bottom,” a “personal unraveling of a couple of very significant relationships in my life at the time.” Morissette brings the pain to the Taft Theatre this Wednesday. For a full interview feature with Alanis, go to citybeat.com. 513-621-2787. (See Music.) — COLE HADDON
This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2008.
