A Conversation with Alanis Morissette – 8.20.12
Mike Ragogna: Is this Alanis Morissette or is it God? Who is this?
Alanis Morissette: It’s both, really. Whatever you want.
MR: (laughs) I loved your appearance as God in Dogma. So let’s talk about your new album Havoc and Bright Lights. You worked with Guy Sigsworth and also Joe Chiccarelli in LA on this one, and it’s about four years since your last album. You had about thirty songs going into this album. What was it like approaching a project this time around?
AM: I was at that critical juncture, that according to my mom-friends is not an unusual one, which was an alpha-mom vocational/serviceful living imperative combined with really wanting to be the kind of mom that I aspire to be–the attachment mom that requires me to be fully available to my son. I also value my marriage and I know the energy that needs to be put into marriage to nurture it. So I had these huge priorities that are all kind of battling each other right at the top three. And by the way, you might notice that my self-care is nowhere up there, so I had to push that one up there once in a while. Basically, I invited Guy Sigsworth from London to come into our home; we created a makeshift studio and I went between writing and “mom-ing,” back and forth.
MR: I wanted to get into “Guardian,” your single and first track off of your new album. That’s a beautiful video, how it pays tribute to Wings of Desire and it’s got the balance between the concept of “angel” and “guardian.”
AM: Well, “City of Angels” is a song I wrote uninvited for and it was the remake of the Wim Wenders’ movie, so there was some sweet poetry to that–just tipping the hat to the original generative idea. And then the twenty-fifth anniversary of his movie came while we were on tour, and I came up with a treatment that I wanted to have for the video that included a touch on bullying and postpartum conversation and children in general and caring about the developmental stages of their life…and then wanting to have that empathy and compassion and otherworldliness that is just part of this mama bear thing. So that was the best way to do it, and we were going to be in Berlin, which was all very fortuitous.
MR: Obviously, between the mom-ing and the recording, you’re balancing a life, trying very hard to make sure your mom-ing does not get lost to the recording career aspect. How does this tie into your overall outlook on life as far as wellbeing, physical, spiritual, the whole deal? It’s like a big package for you, isn’t it?
AM: It is, and they’re all integrated to the degree that I can do it. I think that’s the new frontier of 2012 and onward–integrating everything, whereas before, everything was very compartmentalized and sometimes, things would fall through the cracks, and they still do because I’m human. Boundaries are one of the greatest leading forces. Setting boundaries is a profoundly spiritual act because in order to do that, I need to connect within my own self, I need to be aware and be in reality with what’s going on with my relationships–professionally, my marriage, with my son–and then I need to be reverent and respectful of the intuitive process, and then I need to connect with spirit to know what to do at any given juncture. So I have to keep all of those soils tilled in order for me to know what choices to make. There are choice points a trillion times a day as a mom–and I know moms can testify to that, and dads too, frankly. I need to know what source to call upon when I’m making these choices all the time, and also, I have this huge imperative to serve as my vocation and my calling and my career. It’s getting what I can here and there, and that’s here for seventeen minutes. Instead of shopping for three hours, now it’s a sixteen-minute concentrated power-shop. Everything’s really concentrated.
MR: And one of the major qualities, you might say, is “Empathy.”
AM: Yeah, empathy and connection. With the women’s movement and, quite frankly, all movements, it was all about men going to war and women going into the workplace and saying “I’m autonomous…individuation…individuality.” That was the order at the time, and then it segued now, thankfully, into “I can be empowered, I can be individuated and I need you.” It’s hip and cool and sexy now to be interdependent. The whole Days of Old where we thought we were overly dependent, way earlier, where we were property; we were owned as women, and that turned into, “No way, I’m burning my bra.” It was a beautiful rite of passage, a lovely link in the chain, mandatory, and now we’re into this whole pace where it’s okay to say we need each other. So that’s why I wanted to write “Empathy” and the whole idea of partnership and win-and-win, because that’s the new world.
MR: “Woman Down” puts a slant on the concept of how we think of that concept, too.
AM: Yeah, and I think also what’s emerging is this archetype of being the alpha-woman, which I always was. In days of old, we’d be burned at the stake and have our heads chopped off just for being who I am, and for our sensual selves being expressed. So this fear, too, of expressing anger directly or just being authentic, this fear of retaliation, fear of being hit, there’s misogyny and being on the receiving end of the sexually-traumatized North American way, which can be really predator-esque. There are so many things to take into account as a woman that sometimes we’ve buckled in the past, but understandably so. And now there’s a new world where we’re being championed for who we are, if we happen to be alpha.
MR: Nice. Wonderfully said. And you have the song “Lens,” as in the lens we all look through, it being revised.
AM: It has to be, and it is or it isn’t. It happens to be revising and revised and updated as we go, and then some of us keep our lens where it was and we don’t want to update our religions, and we don’t want to update our traditions, and some of that, I think, is really awesome and adorable and reverent, you know? And humble. But then, there’s some other element of that that’s anti-life and doesn’t allow us to evolve.
MR: Which might lead us to our next question, which is about the good ol’ concept of “Celebrity.” You took a good swing at our obsession with fame. Working off of a lot of what you just said, you’ve got to balance some things. Doing everything for fame doesn’t allow for an individual to be themselves, be real, because they’re so busy chasing this idea of what a human should be when they’re famous.
AM: And we’re certainly sold that bill of goods, right? And we’re told it’ll raise our self-esteem, it’ll have us be surrounded by lovely friends, everything will be lovely. But I found that in and of itself, with fame as an end rather than a means to an end, it really just amplified everything, so if there’s any self-hatred or self-sabotage, it just amplifies it tenfold. Later in the nineties, I decided that I wanted to use fame as a tool to serve my agenda of service and social commentary and engaging in the larger conversation with whomever would join me in there and there are tons of us. So now, I think it’s just fun, that’s not to say that I don’t enjoy my sixteen-inch heels and my glitter and my ShivAChi purses, because I really do. But they’re not the end, you know?
MR: By the way, do you really think we’re at the “Edge of Evolution”?
AM: Oh, yeah. And not all of us really want to be there. It’s literally, adorably, aversion of volunteering. Somewhere along the way, consciously or otherwise, I just put my hand up and I said, “I’m going to join whatever million amount of people who want to push those front lines,” and have this warrior-willingness to get our heads chopped off. We’re willing to stand up and say something unpopular, we’re willing to consciously evolve our awareness. It’s a small blip–this lifetime, in the grand context of things, is a tiny bit of lifetime, and if I can contribute an ant’s sand-piece-worth then I’m happy.
MR: Alanis, I love that you were in The Vagina Monologues.
AM: I think in the West, we’re all really sexually traumatized; we’re all completely dissociated from our bodies. It’s a terrible, scary, dangerous thing, and I can be a part of the conversation that can assuage that and shine another light on the body experience while I’m going through it myself in real-time.
MR: What advice do you have for new artists these days?
AM: That’s it’s totally appropriate to reach out for support. If I could say anything to my twenty-one year-old self, it would be, “You don’t have to insulate.” I appreciated that I needed to kind of hide away, in a sense, in order to protect myself. But at the same time, I realize that I could have benefited from having a lot of people around me that could just pet my head.
MR: (laughs) Among your albums is the classic Jagged Little Pill. Looking back to then and now, what do you think is the biggest growth for “Alanis Morissette”?
AM: I think being steadfast with embracing each emotion–frustration, anger, depression, sadness, lust, infatuation, fear–just having them all continue to show up. They transmute a little bit, there’s a little less reactivity in some of them, and thankfully, I’m applying some of the courage it took to write those songs to my personal life, because I used to be a coward and think that I could just write the song and I wouldn’t have to deal with anything directly in my relationships. Songs are cathartic to write, but they’re not healing. I’d sing “You Ought to Know” night after night and then I realized that I wasn’t healing anything around that relationship, and I actually was going to benefit from being courageous and showing up with my authenticity in actual day-to-day life. So those were some revelations over the last few years.
MR: Now you as a leader–and you’ve got to look at it like that, because people buy yours and albums by like Joni Mitchell to you for a little bit of life advice. Well, after someone has listened to Havoc and Bright Lights, what are a few things you want people to come away from that with?
AM: So many things. One of them is just for people to know that I love them. That’s a big one. The other one is that I want to support relationships. I want to support the nurturance of the relationship and the spirit with each other–where there are marriages, parenting, professional relationships–how to render them functional, and then also the relationship within one’s own self with the inner parent and the inner child. The verses for “Guardian,” it’s really about my having seen the kind of love and attunement that I was offering my son twenty-four hours a day, that I might benefit actually from checking in with myself more often than once every six months. So if there’s a message at all, it would be to nurture those three relationships and that healing for this planet is not going to be through concepts and through intellectualism, it’s going to be through nurturing our relationships and being brave and attempting to be more intimate.
MR: Beautiful. This was really sweet and very special. I appreciate your time, Alanis. Thank you very much.
AM: Thank you, and thank you for your thoughtful questions, I appreciate that.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne