Meeting Alanis Morissette
On persistence...
Meeting my Heroes is an occasional essay series from Matt Carmichael.
Sometimes you hear a record and you just know. Wow, this is full of hits. Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill was one of those records for me. I got a promo copy at the magazine I was interning for, CoverStory. It was easy to see it would be huge, though I’m not sure anyone would have really guessed how huge. It’s one of the best-selling of all time with over 33 million copies.
I reached out for an interview, hoping to do something in person on her planned visit to Chicago a few weeks later. I figured I had a decent shot as her record had just dropped and no one knew who she was. But that all changed shortly. After quite a bit of back and forth with the publicist, she got too big too fast for our magazine. How big? She became the first artist allowed to break the long-standing unwritten rule that you couldn’t be on the cover of Spin and RollingStone at the same time. She was on the cover of both magazines within weeks.
To add a lot of insult to my injury, the Spin interview was conducted right before her Chicago show on her Detroit tour stop. And the guy interviewed her while walking around the campus of my high school. Ugh.
CoverStory was a kind of magazine called a “total market coverage” magazine, which meant it got included with the market fliers and coupons and distributed to every home in a town. So it had a distribution of over 4 million in mostly small and mid-sized cities. I interned there my junior year of college and couldn’t have been happier with the assignment. Oddly I was initially assigned to work for a Crain publication called Electronic Media and likely would have been working for someone who eventually became a colleague and a friend, Betsy. I don’t remember why I got switched over to CoverStory but it was a perfect fit. I got to do a little bit of everything from pitching and writing to editing and proofing. And every Thursday we would pack a disk with the files for the issue and a set of pre-proof pages into Fed-Ex tubes and ship them to our client papers in places like Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin. Shipping was an all-hands process, literally. I had to wake up really early to get there and take the purple line downtown on the el to the blue line and take that almost out to O’Hare, then walk or bus a mile from there. Sometimes I got a ride with a classmate who worked there And often I got a ride home with a friend who was interning nearby that quarter.
Through CoverStory I got to build my writing portfolio and interview fun people (though not Alanis). You’ll hear a couple more of those stories later. The best part was that I was able to freelance for them when the internship was over. It was my first paid journalism gig, and they paid quite well. I wrote for them all through senior year – one of several jobs I had while trying to balance schoolwork and figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life and some hobbies and hanging out with friends enjoying the last year of college before Adulthood.
But back to Alanis…
While I failed to get the interview, I did get to cover that first Chicago show at Metro. It was sold out and packed and everyone already knew every word of every song. There’s nothing like moments like that where you catch an artist just as they break in a venue so small they’ll never be able to play it again. I think I still have the set list, too. All 11 songs of it.
I shot the show on both black and white and color film.
So now I had original photos. I looked around and there was basically nothing about Alanis on the Web yet. But since I had my own content, I put up what would be the first Alanis site. I hosted it on the same server as my Lou Reed and Poi Dog Pondering pages on one of the Unix workstations. Then I moved it to a mac-based web server that I helped administer. But it got so much traffic I eventually needed to move it off-campus (also I was graduating).
Maybe I’ll tell some more Alanis web stories later, but let’s get to the part where I met her…
It would be almost another decade.
By now I was a pretty established writer and photographer. I was shooting a lot for Billboard.com and WXRT radio and represented by the wire service, Getty Images. I was house photographer for Metro. And through Pam, I was also house photographer at the big outdoor amphitheaters, Alpine Valley and what was then the Tweeter Center. We’ll talk more about all of that as we go.
I saw Alanis perform several times over the years. Never again at some place as small as Metro. But places like the United Center. And a Yahoo! Music awards show where she performed just a couple of songs as did Isaac Hayes, Aimee Mann and David Bowie. You might remember that’s where I met Martha Stewart the first time. Finally I saw Alanis at the Tweeter Center. After I shot the show I was also asked to do a quick favor for her label, Reprise.
I therefore wound up shooting a bunch of people meeting their hero, too. But we had some down time between groups of folks so I told her some of the story and asked her to sign my original metro photo pass from a decade earlier.
Alanis had a really interesting career (see some history in the story below), as a child star and performer. Then she grew up, and totally reinvented herself. She took her experiences and turned them into art. Since Jagged Little Pill dropped she never had another hit that large, but still put together a decent catalog, reinventing herself a few more times along the way, as a mother and a role model among other new hats she wears.
I too, am not the me I was when I first tried to meet her. Nor the me I was when I finally did meet her. But one thing you learn, as a young journalist, is persistence. And when you hear a hit, jump as fast as you can because others will hear it too.
While I didn’t get the interview, I did get to write about her for CoverStory:
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It wasn't always this way for Alanis. Sure, she's been famous almost since she was born. She was a running character on You Can't Do that on Television the hit Canadian kids' series that made it big on U.S. cable as well. Sure, she had a pop music career at an age when girls are supposed to be worried about their homecoming dates, not their chart position. But she has never been famous like this.
She had left Canada for Los Angeles, trying to drop her pop star image, often compared to Debbie Gibson and Tiffany, and hit it big for real. Although the change of scenery was important for the young Miss Thing nee Morissette, something more vital happened. From the looks of it, someone broke her heart.
Everyone deals with hurt differently, for Morissette, her experience became one of the biggest selling albums of 1995 and has her nominated for five Grammy awards including best new artist and best album. Alanis opened up her personal life and poured it into an album called Jagged Little Pill which took the world by storm and shot up the charts. The listener gets a stark glimpse of Morissette's childhood, growing up always two steps shy of where her parents wanted her to be. "Be a good girl / Try a little harder / That simply wasn't good enough / To make us proud," she sings on "Perfect." She deals with catholicism, with the difficulty of getting signed to a record deal and with the day to day ironies of life. But the song that set it off was addressed to a former lover who left her in the lurch for an older version of herself.
And You Oughta Know by now that bitterness sells. Her audience, many of whom haven't even seen Morissette’s scant twenty one years, identify with the straight forward lyrics. "I picked up the album and she sang about all the things in my head," says one typical fan. "I swear, we think alike, and she must have dated my ex."
It's a formula that has worked for many young, female artists. The comparisons to Tori Amos, Liz Phair, and Melisa Ethridge abound. However many of Morissette's critics wonder if she will be able to sustain this level of success, or if she will be another flash in the pop culture pan.
Yet if nothing else, Morissette has shown again and again that she can reinvent herself and keep her image fresh. Some argue that this takes away from the strength of the album. Critics of all forms have wondered aloud if these songs reflect what is really going on behind Morissette's image, or if they are just a calculated attempt to capitalize on the "young angry female" craze. Whatever it is, and Morissette insists that it's as real as the glitter in her hair, it's working. The image, the artist, and the songs have an appeal to an audience that knew her entire album, by heart -and had taken it to heart- just two weeks after the single broke in the U.S.
These days it seems that more child actors wind up in the public eye for going to jail rather than for going to the top of the charts. After her stint on YCDTOT, she put out two albums under the name Alanis (no Morissette). These early offerings, "Alanis" (1991) and "Now Is The Time" (1992) sound as much like Jagged Little Pill as Billy Joel's "California Flash," sounds like "Piano Man."
Sure, very little time passed between these recordings, but the growth of the artist is palpable. Morissette's works shows a great maturity in both handling the issues, and in writing about it. Her style is approachable and clear. The music, which was co-composed by her producer, Glen Ballard, provides an excellent back drop to the emotions she conveys. Some help from the Red Hot Chilli Pepper's Flea, and Dave Navarro (formerly from Jane's Addiction) on some tracks didn't hurt either.
She has also matured in concert becoming much more familiar and comfortable with her tour band. She jokes with them on-stage, and dances around with her blue fingernails to sold-out show after sold-out show. She still never stands still while she sings. Her live arrangements have become more complex and she has been adding new material to each leg of the tour in the form of a Radiohead cover and some new songs of her own.
If the new songs are an indication of what is to come for Morissette, the it looks like a change of image isn't on the agenda just yet. "King of Intimidation," which has been gaining favor with the live crowds continues on where "You Oughta Know" left off. Taking a feminist approach, it begins to deal more with the ways in which men and women interact in general rather than in one relationship.
Whether this is representative of a new album remains to be seen. Her second album, more than charts, Grammys and concert receipts, will probably make or break her. Even at 21 she has shown that she can handle pressure. But she's never had pressure like this.