Time and Place
Date: Tuesday, Feb 26 @ 7:00 PM
Venue: Qwest Center Omaha
Street: 455 N. 10th Street
City: Omaha
State/Province: Nebraska
Date: Wednesday, Mar 5 @ 7:00 PM
Venue: Broomfield Event Center
City: Broomfield
State/Province: Colorado
Alanis Nadine Morissette (born June 1, 1974 in Ottawa, Ontario) is a dual-citizen Canadian-American singer-songwriter, record producer, and occasional actress. She has won twelve Juno Awards and seven Grammy Awards, and has sold more than sixty 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 in music history. She is one of the top 20 best selling female artists in music and is the best selling female rock artist ever. Morissette took up producing duties for her subsequent albums, which include Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, Under Rug Swept, So-Called Chaos and her upcoming release Flavors of
Entanglement.
Biography of Alanis Morissette
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.
Privately, the label hoped to sell a million copies of the album on initial release; instead, it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart with first-week sales of 469,000 copies — a record, at the time, for the highest first-week sales of an album by a female artist. The wordy, personal lyrics on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie alienated many fans, and after the album sold considerably less than Jagged Little Pill, many labelled it an example of the sophomore jinx. However, it received positive reviews, including a four-star review from Rolling Stone. In Canada, it won the Juno Award for Best Album and was certified four times platinum. "Thank U", the album's only major international hit single, was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance; the music video, which featured Morissette nude, generated mild controversy. Morissette herself directed the videos for "Unsent" and "So Pure", which won, respectively, the MuchMusic Video Award for Best Director and the Juno Award for Video of the Year. The "So Pure" video features actor Dash Mihok, with whom Morissette was in a relationship at the time.
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.[32]
Morissette delved into acting again, for the first time since 1993, appearing as God in the Kevin Smith film Dogma and contributing the song "Still" to its soundtrack. Smith, a fan of Morissette's, asked her to be in the film several times.[citation needed] She had to turn down the female lead, and by the time her schedule allowed her to participate in the film, only the role of God, which involves virtually no dialogue and only an appearance at the very end of the film, was left.[citation needed] She also appeared in the hit HBO comedies Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and starred in the play The Vagina Monologues.
2002 – 2003: Under Rug Swept
In 2001, Morissette was featured with Stephanie McKay on the Tricky song "Excess", which is on his album Blowback. Morissette released her fifth studio album, Under Rug Swept, in February 2002. For the first time in her career, she took on the role of sole writer and producer of an album. Her band, comprising Joel Shearer, Nick Lashley, Chris Chaney and Gary Novak, played the majority of the instruments; additional contributions came from Eric Avery, Dean DeLeo, Flea and Meshell Ndegeocello. Shortly after recording the album, Morissette hired an entirely new band, featuring Jason Orme, Zac Rae, David Levita and Blair Sinta, who have been with her since.
Under Rug Swept debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, eventually going platinum in Canada and selling one million copies in the U.S. It produced the hit single "Hands Clean", which topped the Canadian Singles Chart and received substantial radio play; for her work on "Hands Clean" and "So Unsexy", Morissette won a Juno Award for Producer of the Year. A second single, "Precious Illusions", was released, but it did not garner significant success outside Canada or U.S. hot AC radio.
Later in 2002, Morissette released the combination package Feast on Scraps, which includes a DVD of live concert and backstage documentary footage directed by her, and a CD containing eight previously unreleased songs from the Under Rug Swept recording sessions. Preceded by the single "Simple Together", it sold roughly 70,000 copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Juno Award for Music DVD of the Year.[33][35] In late 2003, Morissette appeared in the off-Broadway play The Exonerated as Sunny Jacobs, a death row inmate freed after proof surfaced that she was innocent.
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 tongue-in-cheek cover 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 over eleven million views by January 2.Morissette did not take any interviews to explain the song. It was theorized 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.
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.[3]
It was released on Morissette's website that she will be starring in a film adaptation of Philip K Dick's novel Radio Free Albemuth. Morissette will play Sylvia, an ordinary woman in unexpected remission from lymphoma. "I am a big fan of Philip K. Dick's poetic and expansively imaginative books," Morissette said. "I feel blessed to portray Sylvia, and to be part of this story being told in film."
Alanis Morissette - The Couch & Vatican Concert (highlights)more info
No comments:
Post a Comment