People: Tough pill to swallow? Well, she oughta know
Alanis Morissette was so happy for a while. And there was no new music.
Then early last year, the 34-year-old singer-songwriter split with her actor fiance, Ryan Reynolds, after a 4 1/2-year relationship.
And lo, the product of that broken relationship landed on store shelves last week in the form of “Flavors of Entanglement.”
Like her Grammy-winning 1995 major label debut, “Jagged Little Pill,” the new album is at once biting and vulnerable, optimistic and angry.
In person, Morissette laughs easily at the creative rush that came as things fell apart with Reynolds, who is now engaged to Scarlett Johansson.
She had lots of people laughing when, seemingly out of the blue, she put a tongue-in-cheek cover of Fergie’s “My Humps” up on YouTube in April 2007. It’s since been viewed more than 13.5 million times.
Q: Tell me about the process of recording this album.
A: In the middle of my breakup, I went to London for 12 days, wrote 12 songs. It was all very immediate and visceral. Then I came back to L.A. and wrote 12 more songs with a gentleman named Guy Sigsworth, whom I adore. So the writing itself was very immediate … it was very in the moment. It was like a little life raft for me. The structure of going in the studio every day was very helpful for me.
Q: It seems like half the album is looking back at your relationship with Ryan and half is these moving-forward songs. Was that intentional?
A: One of the main themes of this record is this recovery, rising up from the ashes so to speak. So it’s sort of an unraveling of my own personal life, hitting my own rock bottom and rising up. … I didn’t even realize it while I was writing the record, but it definitely goes through all the stages of grief.
Q: Why the “My Humps” video?
A: Guy Sigsworth and I were in the studio, and I was writing the 20th song. The running joke with him was I would come into the studio and he’d say, ‘What horse from the Apocalypse is coming in today, Alanis?’ So that particular day I was like, ‘God, I wish I could write something really simple.’ I said ‘A song like “My Humps” would be great.’ So I with him interpreted it on the piano. And then within a week we were recording the video for it with my friends in my garage at my house.
The birthday bunch
Singer Steve Walsh (Kansas) is 57. Actor Jim Belushi is 54. Actress Julie Hagerty (“Airplane”) is 53. Actress Helen Hunt is 45. Actress Courteney Cox is 44. Rapper-actor Ice Cube is 39. Actress Leah Remini (“King of Queens”) is 38. Actor Neil Patrick Harris is 35.