Alanis Morissette: ‘Without therapy, I don’t think I’d still be here
Jagged Little Pill made her an icon of female rage – and 25 years later, with a brand new album, there’s still plenty to be angry about
In the video for her new single, Reasons I Drink, Alanis Morissette appears in a group addiction meeting. The song, set to stabbing piano, traces the difficulty of being in recovery when succumbing to addiction feels so freeing. “I’m such an addict,” says the 46-year-old, Grammy-winning firebrand, howling down the phone from her home in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Morissette ticks off her top three addictions: “Work addiction, love addiction and food addiction,” she says. She traces her work addiction back to “when I was single digits” (she was always a driven performer), and her eating disorders to her teenage years and 20s, during which she was always “yo-yo-ing”. In the video, she portrays herself as multiple characters: a businesswoman; the 90s MTV star in the same scarf and hat she wore in the video for her biggest hit, Ironic; a mother; the chairperson holding space for others.
Recovery is a complex, lifelong endeavour, and lockdown has been triggering, says Morissette, who is juggling life at home as a mother of three with promoting her ninth album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road. “At 3pm, I might feel: ‘Wow, this is a huge gift, I’m so overwhelmed with gratitude.’ By 3.15pm, I’m raging. By 9pm, I’m despondent. Isolation is the lighting of the match.”
Medication has helped. Most recently she has been dealing with post-partum depression. Her youngest child, Winter, was born last August, a brother to her nine-year-old son, Ever, and three-year-old daughter, Onyx, her children with the rapper Souleye, whom she married in 2010. She has endured the condition after every birth. Previously, she delayed dealing with it; this time, she sought to expose it as it happened, appearing on TV after the birth to tell viewers it is like “being covered in tar and underwater”.
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