Alanis Morissette Biography

Birth name : Alanis Nadine Morissette

Born : June 1, 1974 (age 37)

Origin : Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Occupations : Singer, songwriter, actress, record producer

Alanis Nadine Morissette was born in Ottawa, Canada, on June 1st 1974. Alanis' Greek name is a feminine version of her father's name, Alan. Her mother's name's Georgia and she has two brothers: Chad and Wade (Alanis' Twin). She learned to play the piano at age 6 and the guitar at age 21. In 1986 Alanis made a single called Fate Stay With Me (b-side: Find The Right Man). She recorded two albums as a dance-pop singer in Canada: Alanis (1991) and Now Is The Time (1992). At age 18, she moved to Toronto and worked with several musicians and songwriters, but the collaborations didn't work. In 1994, she finally found the right partner: producer and songwriter Glen Ballard, who had already worked with many artists, including Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson and Barbra Streisand. Then she moved to LA at age 19. On June 13th 1995 "Jagged Little Pill" was released by Madonna's Maverick Records.

Morissette's success with Jagged Little Pill was credited with leading to the introduction of female singers such as Shakira, Tracy Bonham, Meredith Brooks, Patti Rothberg and, in the early 2000s, Pink and fellow Canadian Avril Lavigne. She was criticised for collaborating with producer and supposed image-maker Ballard, and her previous albums also proved a hindrance for her respectability. 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.

Morissette contributed vocals to "Mercy" and "Innocence", two tracks on Jonathan Elias's project The Prayer Cycle, which was released in 1999. The same year, she released the live acoustic album Alanis Unplugged, which was recorded during her appearance on the television show MTV Unplugged. It featured tracks from her previous two albums alongside four new songs, including "King of Pain" (a cover of The Police song) and "No Pressure over Cappuccino", which Morissette wrote with her main guitar player, Nick Lashley. The recording of the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie track "That I Would Be Good", released as a single, became a minor hit on hot adult contemporary radio in America. Also in 1999, Morissette released a live version of her song "Are You Still Mad" on the charity album Live in the X Lounge II. For her live rendition of "So Pure" at Woodstock '99, she was nominated for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the 2001 Grammy Awards. During summer 1999, Alanis toured with singer, songwriter Tori Amos on the 5 And A Half Weeks Tour in support of Amos' album To Venus And Back.

Morissette hosted the Juno Awards of 2004 dressed in a bathrobe, which she took off to reveal a flesh-coloured bodysuit, a response to the era of censorship in the U.S. caused by Janet Jackson's breast-reveal incident during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. Morissette released her sixth studio album, So-Called Chaos, in May 2004. She wrote the songs on her own again, and co-produced the album with Tim Thorney and pop music producer John Shanks. The album debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 chart to generally mixed critical reviews, and it became Morissette's lowest seller in the U.S. The lead single, "Everything", achieved major success on adult top 40 radio in America and was moderately popular elsewhere, particularly in Canada, although it failed to reach the top forty on the U.S. Hot 100. Because the first line of the song includes the word asshole, American radio stations refused to play it, and the single version was changed to include the word nightmare instead. Two other singles, "Out Is Through" and "Eight Easy Steps", fared considerably worse commercially than "Everything", although a dance mix of "Eight Easy Steps" was a U.S. club hit.

In 2005, Morissette released an acoustic version of ‘Jagged Little Pill’ to commemorate the album’s tenth anniversary. In the autumn of 2005, she opened for The Rolling Stones on tour, and also released a greatest hits album, ‘Alanis Morissette: The Collection’ (2005). She contributed the song ‘Wunderkind’ to the soundtrack of the film ‘The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’ (2005).

In 2007, she recorded a tongue-in-cheek cover of the raunchy and provocative Black Eyed Peas song ‘My Humps’, which she reworked into a piano driven, mournful number. In 2008, she released ‘Flavors of Entanglement’ (2008), where she collaborated with producer Guy Sigsworth (Madonna and Björk). Allmusic.com called her lyrics “a mangled web of garbled syntax, overheated metaphors, and mystifying verbal contortions”, while Rolling Stone saw the music as possessing a “vaguely New Age grandeur”. ‘Flavors of Entanglement’ was called a “classic breakup record” by Allmusic.com, referring to Morissette’s high publicity split with actor Ryan Reynolds and his subsequent defection to actress and bona fide bombshell Scarlett Johansson.