Singing Her Anguish Alanis Morissette Vents Her Anger And Rails Against The World With Smart, Strident Lyrics And Addictive Melodies

‘Do I stress you out?”

These are the first words Alanis Morissette sings on her extraordinary debut, “Jagged Little Pill,” and she doesn’t wait around long for an answer. You could say she doesn’t care: The song, “All I Really Want,” is her account of the psychological aftershocks of constant bickering between lovers, and as it describes the charged emotional environment, her bleating, broken voice strives to agitate:

“There I go jumping before the gunshot has gone off

“Slap me with a splintered ruler

“And it would knock me to the floor if I wasn’t there already

“If only I could hunt the hunter.”

Anger. Frustration. Violence, both verbal and physical.

All in a day’s work for Alanis Morissette, 21, the Canadian-born singer and songwriter.

Morissette doesn’t mince words. Her music, a strident distillation of old-fashioned singer-songwriter confession, is full of anguish - but it’s anguish with a purpose, communicated with serious lung power. Her acidic songs vent rancor, right wrongs, expose narrow-minded thinking, and rail against all types of controlling forces, from parents to priests.

And yet, remarkably, these songs are never just whining sessions. They turn on effortless, deceptively addictive melodies. They overflow with something often missing from popular music: a sense of personal investment. They elevate age-old rock ‘n’ roll rebellion to a slightly more intellectual plane, utilizing a language that bounces between raw vitriol and the detached jargon of the therapy movement.

Hers is a new approach to generational angst, and it’s striking quite a chord: “Jagged Little Pill” is at No. 3 on Billboard’s 200 albums chart.

“I write as a release, not a revenge,” she said recently. “Some of the things I’m singing about, I have to release them in order for me to continue on and not be cynical and upset all the time.”

Courtney Love would probably say the same thing. But Morissette, like the blues-conscious songwriter Jennifer Trynin and Helium’s celestial-sounding Mary Timony and a few other emerging female artists, isn’t just going for simple catharsis: She wants art, too. She’s fueling her music with stress and giving voice to long-held feelings of rage - against duplicitous men and patriarchal society. Morissette substitutes nuanced whispers and dizzying intervallic leaps for Love’s screams, and allows her voice to reflect a wider range of emotions. She’s not afraid to be sensual or raunchy or downright enraged.

And she craves direct contact: Morissette turned down the chance to replace Sinead O’Connor on the Lollapalooza Tour because she felt at this point, “it was wrong to detach myself” from the audience.

For a new artist, particularly a woman, this openness is a risky thing. While the alternative rock world welcomes female artists, in the larger pop world the stereotypes - tramp, high-minded singersongwriter, dance-pop diva - still prevail at the top of the charts.

Morissette wants to challenge that thinking. “When I was 16, I would have said, ‘Yeah, put me on the cover.’ But it’s not about my cleavage, and I think people are a lot more open now to hearing what (women) have to say. And there are a lot more women being emotionally honest and naked about things than men are.”

Though she’d been recording since she was 10, and even had a few hits as a teenager in Ottawa, she didn’t appreciate the closed-mindedness of the music business until she moved to Toronto.

One of the most scarring times, she says, was a two-year period when she was collaborating with Canadian musicians who kept trying to “mainstream” her songs, who found no value in the stark, open-hearted stuff that would later become so successful.

Morissette didn’t explode right away. She moved to Los Angeles two years ago with only a publishing contract, and began to make the rounds. She did open-mike gigs. She had meetings with lots of successful songwriters. And then she met writer/producer Glen Ballard, known for his work with Wilson Phillips and other pop stars.

Both Morissette and Ballard recall hitting it off instantly. “We knew within five minutes that neither one of us wanted to do something conventional,” Ballard says.

“We made a decision to challenge each other to be clear about things, to not hide anything.”

For Morissette, the fact that people are responding to her personal explorations is downright astounding. “I think what I learned from this record is that writing these songs was the only way I could transcend pain,” she says.

“You have to be courageous and open to transcend it, because life is fundamentally painful… . My being introspective like this, that whole mind-set has made me far more peaceful than I have ever been. That was its own reward: Doing it the pure, honest way, you can never lose.”