Like Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells II and Meat Loaf's Back Into Hell, it doesn't so much play as fall out of the speakers with a flump: the sound of a towel being thrown in.Īn air of pointlessness pervades the exercise, along with the softly-plucked guitars, gentle percussion and occasional Bollywood-influenced strings. Despite all the face-saving hoopla about 10th anniversaries and the necessity of reinterpreting "timeless" songs, Jagged Little Pill Acoustic smacks of weary resignation. If the sitcom doesn't succeed in putting Jagged Little Pill to the back of the public's consciousness, well, neither has anything else. She explained her move to comedy thus: "I think there is a levity that comes as I grow and hopefully mature." Boom boom. The advance publicity does not augur well. Most recently, in an attempt to shake her worthy, humourless image, she has starred in and co-produced her own sitcom: We're With the Band premieres in America this autumn.
She has appeared nude in videos, fired Ballard and presented the Canadian Juno Awards in a flesh-coloured bodystocking with outsized false nipples and pubic thatch. Jagged Little Pill sold a boggling 30m copies - that's three times as much as the last Coldplay album - and Alanis Morissette has spent a decade trying everything to escape its shadow. Prior to its making, Morissette's relationship with an older music industry figure had collapsed, leading her to write screeds of self-obsessed vitriol instead of lyrics.
In the credit column, the album's accusatory despair rang true. In the debit column, Jagged Little Pill was clearly a cynical and calculated move, an attempt to simultaneously jump aboard two passing alt-rock bandwagons (grunge's angst-ridden guitar overload and the confessional female singer-songwriter style of Tori Amos and Liz Phair) by a singer previously known for big-haired dance-pop, and a producer called Glenn Ballard, famed for working with bleeding-edge artists including Curtis Stigers and David Hasselhoff.
In 1995, she hit barely believable paydirt with her third album, Jagged Little Pill, an odd curate's egg of a record. A t risk of causing Britain's record company boardrooms to collapse in hysterical laughter, it is worth noting that some albums can be too successful.