Learning to share

In the run-up to the Christmas Battle Of The Giants (popular music division), the smart business money is on Alanis Morissette. The release of her new album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, around the same time as REM's Up (now that's what I call a user-friendly album title) will undoubtedly take the pressure off the rock band. But it means the pressure is on Morissette to really deliver. Theoretically, that is.

The Alanis Morissette I meet in London's Metropolitan Hotel (clearly the pop/film star hotel du jour - Natalie Imbruglia breezes past me, Vincent Gallo sneaks a swift ciggie away from the receptionist's steely eyes) doesn't appear to have any problems with pressure, or anything like it.

"I feel very good, very peaceful," she says in a voice that sounds as if she has intoned words from The Little Book Of Calm too often for her own good. At 24, Morissette exudes a hippie sensibility that would be damning if it wasn't for her wry, realistic sense of humour. Now isn't that ironic? "I suppose I have felt some degree of pressure, but not so much that anyone would actually come up to me and say anything. It was more the cosmic pressure I felt from people, the main pressure being the time one - that people wanted the record out yesterday.

"I wanted to be able to reach a point where I wanted to instinctively write the record, rather than having to write it. Because any time I've written anything out of fear or pressure, I've never really liked it. I didn't want that to be the case this time. "I finally reached the point where I felt I didn't need to write anything, and once I reached that point, all that I was left with was an inspiration to write. That was great."

Following an immensely successful record (Morissette's 1995 breakthrough album, Jagged Little Pill, has sold in excess of 28 million copies, making it the biggest-selling album of the 1990s) has inherent difficulties. While there's little doubt Jagged Little Pill introduced Alanis Morissette - mostly to teenage females - as the pissed-off, slightly shrill voice-of-a-generation, three years have passed since its release. The familiarity of that album's key songs - the majority of them, such was its world-wide ubiquity - has heightened expectation. The new album is selling, but to these ears the lyrical and musical clarity of Jagged Little Pill has been replaced by a verbose stream of lyrical consciousness and a musical strategy that borders on the lethargic. With a running time of more than 70 minutes, this is not a record for the fair-weather Alanis Morissette fan.

Judging by the enthusiastic response to Jagged Little Pill, however, there aren't many of those around.

Embraced by girls and women who can only too easily relate to her lyrics of soured, fractious relationships and mental anguish, Morissette appears equally to be loathed by a large number of males, who view her either as a threat to their masculinity or as a transparent cipher for female rage. Such perceptions, correct or not, are grist to the mill for someone so famous. Do people get things wrong about her all the time?

"I don't know whether those perceptions are wrong, as much as that they're indications of what the person's mindset is," she reasons. "People would focus on my sexuality, my take on religion, the honesty in my songs as elements of their own lives. I would see my own sexuality and evolution or growth as something that was valid. Yet that was reacted to in a way which said that perhaps people weren't necessarily ready to have women speak about seemingly masculine things in a seemingly masculine way. Or in a sexual way.

"I see all of the parts of myself as being of equal value - my sexuality, my emotionality, my physicality. It was interesting to see which parts would be focused upon."

What of her documentation of her many relationships through her lyrics? Have they really been that awful?

"They have been, but they're getting much better. My heart has been broken many, many thousands of times. The difference between now and then is that there was a lack of consciousness as to why relationships even existed, and why I would even dance with the idea. I didn't know. I thought they were random, inexplicable heart-palpitating experiences. Now, I see them as an opportunity to heal, to have our issues or our wounds triggered in a safe enough environment to be able to heal them. Relationships make more sense to me now.

"If you're in a relationship when you're 12, platonic or whatever, there's a level of responsibility you can probably only start taking once you get older. There were certain relationships where there was . . . Let's say it's more difficult to feel peaceful about them due to the fact that in some cases people were much older than I was. They were in a position of being a guardian of sorts, but they didn't necessarily . . . Hmm . . . I look back on my relationships now with a sense of closure, let's put it that way."

Does she believe in unconditional love? "I think so. I have it. I give it."

In some of the record's songs Alanis Morissette seems invulnerable, in others completely downtrodden. In Sympathetic Character she comes across as violent and turbulent. What gives?

"There was a pendulum swinging when there were times when I felt powerless and weak," she explains. "For a while, I went to the other end of the spectrum, trying to compensate for it and realising that by going to the other end of the spectrum I wasn't compensating for anything. Finding the grey area is probably the best way. I'd rather share my power now. I never thought it was possible for two people to remain strong and in their power - I always thought that one person had to give it up.

"As for Sympathetic Character, it's another grey area. We can express our rage and not stifle it and not have it be destructive. I only figured that out over the past year or so."

Something else which Alanis has figured out over the past year or so is the number of female singers who have taken her blueprint of emotional release and invective and converted it for their own purposes.

"I think some people were inspired by it," is her straight, sweet response. "Others were further motivated by what they saw me achieving. Either way, it's their choice. For me to think that there are women out there who are influenced to write in a personal, introspective way is heartening. "That said, this is the music business, and there is a huge part of that which is motivated by external success. It would be amazing for record companies to have a developmental, nurturing environment for artists, but I don't see a lot of that. I myself have rarely experienced it. There is a lack of understanding coming from people who are very business-minded towards the concept of someone who is an artist. So it's no mystery to me that record companies would want to capitalise on someone or copy something, whether it's me or anyone else."

Does she listen to any of her obvious imitators? "I've always been the type of person who would much rather write a song than listen to one. I love silence."