This is sepia-toned music (which is appropriate, since the cover itself is a sepia-toned replication of the original's artwork), with all of the excesses and eccentricities of youth either romanticized or dismissed with a soft chuckle. Jagged Little Pill Acoustic is the sound of an artist who is comfortable and settled, fondly reminiscing about her crazy past for an audience that is also comfortable and settled. Unlike the 1995 original, this is not a dense, glossy pop album that slyly co-opts and repackages ideas from the musical fringe for a mass audience, nor is this akin to her 1999 acoustic album Alanis Unplugged, where Morissette was still sorting out exactly which direction to take in the aftermath of her phenomenal success. This may not have been the genesis of her 2005 album Jagged Little Pill Acoustic - initially for sale only in Starbucks stores, but released to mass retail in late July - but that performance not only offers a clue to the sound of this acoustic-based reinterpretation of her blockbuster breakthrough, but also to its target audience. Jagged Little Pill opened up a doorway to a complexity of oscillating emotional states.There's an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm from 2002 where Alanis Morissette is performing at a benefit concert that's eventually held at Larry David's home, where she sings a stripped-down acoustic arrangement of "You Oughta Know" with guitarist David Levita for an audience of wealthy Hollywood liberals. In trusting us not to judge her in that moment, she helped us be a little more empathetic too. She dared to speak the ugliness of her despair and anguish out loudly. Words like ‘ Every time I scratch my nails down someone else’s back, I hope you feel it’ do not come from someone who's even trying to pretend to be handling the fallout of a relationship break up well. She sang of her doubts, her shortcomings, using desperate, obsessive tones. The language she used, the rawness of her voice, and how she presented herself was undeniably from a place of lived experience. Years of placating and appeasing others was boiling over in frustrations aimed at music moguls (‘Right Through You’), bullying parents (‘Perfect’), her Catholic upbringing (‘Forgiven’) and ex-lovers. You can just imagine the record execs quivering in their snake skin boots trying to figure out how to market this torrent of emotional intensity.Īs a child star, Morissette had been subjected to plenty of expectation and exploitation.
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December 2022
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