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Acoustic angst

Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill lyrics still sting after 10 years, though some songs have gone a bit soft in the intimate setting of this tour, which includes Ruth Eckerd Hall.

By BRIAN ORLOFF
Published June 23, 2005

	[Getty Images.
	Alanis Morissette, sporting her new hair style, sings June 9 before the first game of the NBA finals in San Antonio, Texas.

When Alanis Morissette first issued the stinging You Oughta Know, the song that marked her her as a songwriter to be reckoned with, it was 1995, and she was 21. The words, written when she was just 19, smarted with anguish and devastation. "Did you forget about me, Mr. Duplicity," she sang, and millions of record-buyers - 30-million worldwide - took notice.

Ten years later, Morissette's Jagged Little Pill album still feels relevant as both a passionate document of a young woman's self-realization, and as a bold introduction to an important artist. Unflinchingly raw, yet confident and mature, Jagged Little Pill influenced a spate of female musicians who struggled for radio airplay and popular audiences. Today, the record holds up lyrically and musically as some of the strongest material Morissette has written.

To celebrate the milestone anniversary, Morissette has decided to rerecord the material in a new album, Jagged Little Pill Acoustic and a similarly acoustic tour that will stop at Ruth Eckerd Hall on Saturday. The disc is now being sold exclusively at Starbucks, but will be released to record stores at the end of July.

Artistically, the decision was tricky. Jagged Little Pill Acoustic finds Morissette negotiating between awakening her songs with a new perspective, creatively reinventing and reconditioning their melodies or simply just cashing in on the nostalgia value. The same is true in concert: Morissette is playing the entire album, in intimate venues.

There is little that's radical about revisiting old material acoustically. Morissette has done it before, in 1999, with a live recording from an MTV Unplugged session. But on Jagged Little Pill Acoustic she tackles the entire record - in order - including a bonus track, Your House.

Certain songs, like All I Really Want, feel markedly different. They benefit from their acoustic makeovers, and brim with exotic percussive elements like the Eastern-tinted wheezing of the perapaloshka and the breezy drive of the pump organ that carries Morissette's plea. On Ironic, Morissette slightly tweaks her lyrics to reflect political questions of the day, supplanting the word "husband" for "wife" in the line, "It's like meeting the man of my dreams and then meeting his beautiful wife." But few changes are as overt.

On some songs, like the touchstone You Oughta Know, the acoustic arrangement actually softens the emotional impact of her lyrics, and not in way that could be attributed simply to maturity.

"Listening to the song now, I just feel compassion for the part of me that reacted in the way that I did then - that I took him leaving me that personally," Morissette says of the song in accompanying press materials. "As a 19-year-old I made his leaving mean that I was this terrible, rejectable, horrible, useless, easy-to-throw-away girl."

Though her approach now attempts to reflect that distance and her adult confidence, sonically some of the new arrangements struggle. The soft drumming and churning, guitar-led introduction to the reconditioned You Oughta Know lacks its primal edge. It now sounds like, well, perfect Starbucks background music. But customers might not enjoy hearing Morissette yelp, "Every time I scratch my nails down someone else's back, I hope you feel it" over their morning lattes. The new arrangement divests itself from the song's original urgency.

Morissette addresses the tension between the electric You Oughta Know and her more resigned new take. "One aspect of what people were responding to was the anger - no question," she says in the press materials. "But another aspect was the urgency and an explosiveness in the songs I was writing . . . For instance, the electric guitar on You Oughta Know makes it sound more overtly rage-filled. Broken down into its acoustic form, the vulnerability and heartbrokenness emerges more obviously."

Heartbroken, sure, but with its sluggish tempo and acoustic accoutrements, the new You Oughta Know actually sounds anemic. It's not that a blistering arrangement is required to register rage - the song is actually more complex than its vituperative reputation - but, here, the actual melody piddles out. It deflates. Too bad Morissette did not really shake things up. It would have been intriguing to hear You Oughta Know backed only by cellos, or radically reworked structurally.

"Would you forgive me love, if I danced in your shower," Morissette sang, a cappella, on a bare stage at a recent Chicago concert. Opening her acoustic show with a stark version of Your House, sans musical backup, broke from convention, and marked the concert early with an intimacy that rewarded and delighted longtime fans. Morissette led her fine five-piece band through the Jagged Little Pill tunes, performing on a stage set with sofas, strategically placed wine bottles and television sets. It all added up to a homey enough environment.

Morissette spoke frequently with the crowd and soaked up the adoration. Like the rerecorded tunes, the stage show felt safe, and slightly nostalgic. And Nostalgia is integral to the project.

At times, Morissette sat on a stool, seeming to channel a subdued, coffee-shop vibe. Perhaps it was a nod to, or justification of, the Starbucks distribution deal.

"When people walk into Starbucks, beyond the fact that they're focused on getting coffee, there's a real openness and a focus to behold and take in whatever may be on that counter," Morissette recently told the Boston Herald about the controversial marketing strategy.

In recent weeks, music distributors, especially in Morissette's native Canada, started pulling her albums from stores in protest. HMV Canada, the country's largest retail chain, removed her entire catalog from its shelves, criticizing Morissette and claiming some responsibility for supporting her career early on. And in the United States, Boston-based Newbury Comics is also pulling most of Morissette's music from its 26 stores.

Starbucks, which owns the Hear Music label, has been fabulously successful with its CD sales, perhaps most famously with Ray Charles' Grammy-winning Genius Loves Company disc. It has sold millions of discs by other artists, and even Bob Dylan is reportedly negotiating a special sales deal with the company. But the Jagged Little Pill Acoustic deal is really rankling distributors for its exclusivity factor. While Charles' album, for instance, could be purchased simultaneously at Starbucks and other retailers, Starbucks gets a six-week lead on other stores.

But Morissette says her distribution deal was motivated by innovation, not greed. "For me, it was just about coming up with a creative new way for people to share this music," she told the Toronto Star. "If people don't choose to go into a Starbucks and take that few minutes between the time they order a coffee and receive their coffee to focus on music, then they're welcome to get that music where they typically get it. Or not get it at all. It's really their choice."

This isn't the first time she has embraced new distribution means. In 1999, she linked with Tori Amos for a joint tour sponsored by MP3.com, a then-controversial medium.

Though so much has changed in the past 10 years - her perspective, her success in the industry and her business sense, especially - Morissette also points to a comforting continuity in revisiting this material, albeit under different circumstances.

"This was like going back somewhere in your past you thought you'd never return to again, only to find that place was plentifully safe, and even fun," she says. "There is a full circle aspect in having returned."

[Last modified June 22, 2005, 10:45:07]