|
|
Alanis Nadine Morissette (born in
Ottawa, 1 June 1974) is a Canadian and naturalized
American singer-songwriter, record producer, and
occasional actress. She has won twelve Juno Awards and
seven Grammy Awards, and has sold more than forty
million albums worldwide.
Morissette began her career in Canada, and as a teenager
recorded two dance-pop albums, Alanis and Now Is the
Time, under MCA Records. Her international debut album
was the rock-influenced Jagged Little Pill, which is the
best-selling debut album by a female artist in the U.S.,
and the highest selling debut album worldwide.
Morissette took up producing duties for her subsequent
albums, which include Supposed Former Infatuation
Junkie, Under Rug Swept and So-Called Chaos.
Early life: Alanis Morissette was born in Ottawa,
Ontario, Canada, to a French-Canadian father, Alan, and
Hungarian mother, Georgia. Alanis has a twin brother,
Wade, and an older brother, Chad. At the age of six, she
began playing the piano and realised she wanted to
express herself through the arts. In 1984, Morissette
wrote her first song, "Fate Stay with Me",
which she sent to a local folk singer, Lindsay Morgan,
who recruited Morissette as his protégé.
In 1986, Morissette had her first stint as an actress:
five episodes of the children's television show You
Can't Do That on Television. Using money she saved from
that role, she released "Fate Stay with Me" as
a single via a label she founded with Morgan. A limited
number of copies were pressed, and it received little
airplay. She appeared onstage with the Orpheus Musical
Theatre Society in 1985 and 1988. During her high school
years, Morissette attended Glebe Collegiate Institute in
Ottawa.
At a New York City audition, Morissette landed a spot on
Star Search, a popular American talent competition on
which she used her stage name, Alanis Nadine. Morissette
flew to Los Angeles to appear on the show, but lost
after one round. In 1988, Morissette signed a publishing
deal with MCA Publishing, which helped to fund her
record deal with one of its independent subsidiary
labels.
1990–1993: Alanis and Now Is the Time: MCA
Records released Morissette's debut album, Alanis, in
Canada only in 1991, and Morissette co-wrote every track
on the album with its producer, Leslie Howe. By the time
it was released, she had dropped her stage name and was
credited simply as Alanis. The dance-pop album went
platinum, and its first single, "Too Hot",
reached the top twenty on the RPM singles chart.
Subsequent singles "Walk Away" and "Feel
Your Love", which was accompanied by a sexually
suggestive video, reached the top forty and were played
frequently on contemporary hit radio stations.
Morissette's popularity, style of music and appearance,
particularly that of her hair, led her to become known
as the Debbie Gibson of Canada; comparisons to Tiffany
were also common. During the same period, she was a
concert opening act for rapper Vanilla Ice. Morissette
was nominated for three 1992 Juno Awards: Most Promising
Female Vocalist of the Year (which she won), Single of
the Year and Best Dance Recording (both for "Too
Hot").
Between the ages of fourteen to eighteen, Morissette
suffered from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, which were
catalysed by "hardcore" professional pressure
and managerial demands from her work towards making her
first album. She recalled returning to the studio to
re-record some vocals, only to be told that the person
who summoned her there wanted to discuss her weight, and
that she couldn't be successful if she was fat. She
lived on a diet of carrots, black coffee and Melba
toast, and her weight fluctuated by fifteen to twenty
pounds. She subsequently began therapy, which she called
"a long process to un-program [my brain]. I try to
remember, whatever my body is, it's perfect the way it
is."
In 1992, she released her second album, Now Is the Time,
a ballad-driven record that featured less glitzy
production than Alanis and contained more thoughtful
lyrics. Morissette wrote the songs with the album's
producer, Leslie Howe, and Serge Côté. She said of the
album, "people could go, 'Boo, hiss, hiss, this
girl's like another Tiffany or whatever'. But the way I
look at it ... people will like your next album if it's
a kick-ass one." As with Alanis, Now Is the Time
was released only in Canada and produced three top forty
singles — "An Emotion Away", the minor adult
contemporary hit "No Apologies", and
"(Change Is) Never a Waste of Time". It sold
little more than half the copies of her first album,
however, and was a commercial failure. With her
two-album deal with MCA Canada complete, Morissette was
left without a major label contract.
During this period, Morissette dated Dave Coulier of
television's Full House fame. In 1993, she appeared in
the film Just One of the Girls starring Corey Haim,
which she called "horrible".
1993–1995: Move to Los Angeles: In 1993, after
graduating from high school, Morissette moved from
Ottawa to Toronto. Living alone for the first time in
her life, she met with a bevy of songwriters, but the
results frustrated her. A visit to Nashville a few
months later also proved fruitless. In the hopes of
meeting a collaborator Morissette began making trips to
Los Angeles and working with as many musicians as
possible.
During this time, she met producer and songwriter Glen
Ballard, and within ten minutes of meeting each other
they had begun experimenting creatively. According to
Morissette, Ballard was the first collaborator who
encouraged her to express her emotions. The two wrote
and recorded Morissette's third album, Jagged Little
Pill, and by the spring of 1995, she had signed a deal
with Maverick Records.
As Morissette later revealed,[citation needed] during
her stay in L.A., a thief confronted and robbed her on a
deserted street, although he did not take the writing
and brainstorming notes in her purse; they were the
scribblings that soon made up Jagged Little Pill.
Morissette subsequently developed an intense and general
angst, which manifested in random daily panic attacks,
including on planes. She checked herself into a hospital
and attended psychotherapy sessions, but with no
improvement. She focused her inner problems on the
soul-baring lyrics of the album for her own health.
1995–1998: Jagged Little Pill: Maverick Records
released Jagged Little Pill internationally in 1995. The
album was expected to sell enough for Morissette to make
a follow-up, but the situation changed quickly when a DJ
from an influential Los Angeles radio station began
playing "You Oughta Know", the album's first
single. The song instantly garnered attention for its
scathing, explicit lyrics, and a subsequent music video
went into heavy rotation on MTV and MuchMusic.
After the success of "You Oughta Know", the
album's other hit singles helped send Jagged Little Pill
to the top of the charts. "All I Really Want"
and "Hand in My Pocket" followed, but the
fourth U.S. single, "Ironic", became
Morissette's biggest hit. "You Learn" and
"Head over Feet", the fifth and sixth singles,
respectively, kept Jagged Little Pill in the top twenty
on the Billboard 200 albums chart for more than a year.
According to the RIAA, Jagged Little Pill is the
best-selling international debut album by a female
artist, with more than fourteen million copies sold in
the U.S.; it sold thirty million worldwide, making it
the second biggest selling album by a female artist, and
the biggest selling debut album of all time.
Morissette's popularity grew significantly in Canada,
where the album was certified twelve times platinum and
produced four RPM chart-toppers: "Hand in My
Pocket", "Ironic", "You Learn"
and "Head over Feet". The album was also a
bestseller in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Morissette's success with Jagged Little Pill was
credited with leading to the introduction of female
singers such as Tracy Bonham, Meredith Brooks, Patti
Rothberg and, in the early 2000s, Avril Lavigne and
Pink. She was criticised for collaborating with producer
and supposed image-maker Ballard, and her previous
albums also proved a hindrance for her respectability,
particularly in her native country. Morissette and the
album won six Juno Awards in 1996: Album of the Year,
Single of the Year ("You Oughta Know"), Female
Vocalist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Best
Rock Album. At the 1996 Grammy Awards, she won Best
Female Rock Vocal Performance, Best Rock Song (both for
"You Oughta Know"), Best Rock Album and Album
of the Year.
Later in 1996, Morissette embarked on an eighteen-month
world tour in support of Jagged Little Pill, beginning
in small clubs and ending in large venues. Taylor
Hawkins, currently with the Foo Fighters, was the tour's
drummer. "Ironic" was nominated for two 1997
Grammy Awards — Record of the Year and Best Music
Video, Short Form — and won Single of the Year at the
1997 Juno Awards, where Morissette also won Songwriter
of the Year and the International Achievement Award. The
video Jagged Little Pill, Live, which was co-directed by
Morissette and chronicled the bulk of her tour, won a
1998 Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Long Form.
During the tour, Morissette became disillusioned with
the music industry and declared being tired of constant
travelling, quick and superficial relationships and
parties full of drugs — subjects that made her
consider ditching her career.[citation needed] She
started practicing Iyengar Yoga for balancing, and after
the last December 1996 show, she headed to India for six
weeks, accompanied by her mother, two aunts and two
female friends.
1998–2001: Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and
Alanis Unplugged
Morissette was featured as a guest vocalist on Ringo
Starr's cover of "Drift Away" on his 1998
album, Vertical Man, and on the songs "Don't Drink
the Water" and "Spoon" on the Dave
Matthews Band album Before These Crowded Streets. She
recorded the song "Uninvited" for the
soundtrack to the 1998 film City of Angels. Although the
track was never commercially released as a single, it
received widespread radio airplay in the U.S. At the
1999 Grammy Awards, it won in the categories of Best
Rock Song and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and
was nominated for Best Song Written for a Motion
Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. Later in
1998, Morissette released her fourth album, Supposed
Former Infatuation Junkie, which she wrote and produced
with Glen Ballard. Most of the tracks, including
"Would Not Come" and "Unsent",
challenged traditional song formulas: they included
one-chord drone melodies and Morissette singing over
letter-like prose texts; some songs lacked choruses or
took a long time to reach them.
2005: Jagged Little Pill Acoustic and The Collection:
In February 2005, Morissette became a naturalized
citizen of the United States while maintaining her
Canadian citizenship. Morissette refers to herself as a
Canadian–American. The same month, she made a guest
appearance on the Canadian television show Degrassi: The
Next Generation with Dogma co-star Jason Mewes and
director Kevin Smith.
To commemorate the tenth anniversary of Jagged Little
Pill, Morissette released a studio acoustic version,
Jagged Little Pill Acoustic, in June 2005. The album was
released exclusively through Starbucks' Hear Music
retail concept through their coffee shops for a six-week
run. The limited availability led to a dispute between
Maverick Records and HMV North America, who retaliated
by removing from sale Morissette's other albums for the
duration of Starbucks' exclusive six-week sale. Jagged
Little Pill Acoustic sold around 300,000 copies in the
U.S., and a video for "Hand in My Pocket"
received rotation on VH1 in America. The accompanying
tour ran for two months in mid 2005, with Morissette
playing small theatre venues. During the same period,
Morissette was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.
Morissette released the greatest hits album Alanis
Morissette: The Collection in late 2005. The lead single
and only new track, a cover of Seal's "Crazy",
was a U.S. adult top 40 and dance hit, but it achieved
only minimal chart success elsewhere, as did the album.
A limited edition of The Collection features a DVD
including a documentary with videos of two unreleased
songs from Morissette's 1996 Can't Not Tour: "King
of Intimation" and "Can't Not" (a
reworked version of the latter appeared on Supposed
Former Infatuation Junkie). The DVD also includes a
ninety-second clip of the unreleased video for the
single "Joining You". Morissette contributed
the song "Wunderkind" to the soundtrack of the
film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and
the Wardrobe, and it was nominated for a Golden Globe
Award for Best Original Song.
2006–present: In April 2006, MTV News reported
that Morissette would reprise her role in The Exonerated
in London from May 23 through the May 28.
Rolling Stone reported in January 2006 that Morissette
was in between "intense" writing sessions for
her upcoming studio album, which was to be co-produced
by Mike Elizondo, and that she was going to spend 2006
working on a memoir. She said of her book, "it will
be all the wisdom I've accrued in the thirty-one years
of my life [...] A lot about relationships, fame,
travel, body-image issues, spirit — with a lot of
self-deprecating humor peppered throughout, 'cause I
just can't help it." 2006 marked the first year in
the recorded history of Morissette's musical career that
she had not a single concert appearance showcasing her
own songs, with the exception of an appearance on The
Tonight Show with Jay Leno in January when she performed
"Wunderkind".
During this period, she delved back into
acting, guest starring in an episode of Lifetime's
Lovespring International and three episodes of FX's
Nip/Tuck, playing a lesbian. In October 2006, Morissette
said in an interview with TV Guide that she was going to
start writing new material over the next few weeks,
saying "I usually fill two journals for each record
and at the present, I have seven journals full. I have a
lot within me ready to burst out."
In June 2006, People magazine reported that Morissette
had split from her fiancé, Ryan Reynolds, but neither
party confirmed the report. The following month, a
source said that they were together, Contact Music
reported that their split was a "rumor", and
they were pictured holding hands in Los Angeles. In
February 2007, representatives for Morissette and
Reynolds announced that they had mutually decided to end
their engagement.
On April 1, 2007, Morissette released a parody of The
Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps", which she
recorded in a slow, mournful voice and accompanied only
by a piano. The accompanying YouTube-hosted video, in
which she dances provocatively with a group of men and
hits the ones who attempt to touch her "lady
lumps", had received nearly five million views by
April 13.
Morissette did not take any interviews
to explain the song, which some believe is a harp on
commercial music, showing how silly some song lyrics
are.[weasel words] Some believe it is a parody of the
frequency with which she performs cover songs.[weasel
words] It is also believed that Morissette herself did
it as an April Fools' Day joke. Black Eyed Peas vocalist
Fergie responded by sending Morissette a buttocks-shaped
cake with an approving note. By July 2007, the video had
reached the top forty on YouTube's list of the most
viewed videos of all time, having garnered more than
eight million hits.
Morissette performed at a gig for The Nightwatchman,
a.k.a. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, at the
Hotel Café in Los Angeles on April 24, 2007. There, she
said that she and producer Guy Sigsworth had been
"sequestered in London and L.A. over the last few
months writing a bevy of new songs". Accompanied by
Sigsworth on piano, Morissette played a new song,
"Not as We".
On June 4, 2007, Morissette performed the "The
Star-Spangled Banner" and "O Canada", the
American and Canadian national anthems, in Game 4 of the
Stanley Cup Finals between the Ottawa Senators and the
Anaheim Ducks in Ottawa, Ontario. |
Snoron Celebrities and Models Wallpapers 
