Alanis Morissette: Beyond infatuation

Dangerous lovers, breakdowns, an insecure mentor... Alanis Morissette has seen it all and come out the other side. Or has she? Glyn Brown meets a star with a need to talk

Boy, do some people dislike Alanis Morissette. It's quite an eye-opener. There are websites, all run by men, that are highly entertaining in their nastiness. One, ironically, rants for pages about Morissette's "malice and spite". Duh. That righteous anger is exactly what Kelis delivered later on "Caught out There" ("I hate you so much right now..."); Ani DiFranco, Liz Phair and Shirley Manson do it, too, and there aren't hate-filled websites about them. But then, Morissette was really the first to air her vitriol in a big-selling, truly accessible way. Jagged Little Pill was stuffed with gems, a blend of passionate, intelligent, wounded lyrics and macho, driving rock – half-Sylvia Plath, half-Bruce Springsteen, as someone said at the time.

Still, other dissenters insist that her whole schtick is contrived, so, at a showcase earlier this year to promote her new LP, Under Rug Swept, I attempted a healthy cynicism. Not for long. Flanked by a band of wild larrikins, Morissette appeared and was the most awkward performer I've seen, wringing her hands and dragging her feet. Then she did a bizarre thing with her hair, throwing it orgasmically about, bending down and swirling until she – whoops – bumped into the mic-stand and almost knocked herself out. She recovered. She then jumped up and down. The songs, meanwhile, in all their grungy Led Zep-ness, were very good indeed. At the end, I asked another critic for his opinion. A shrug: "Seemed like a 12-year-old. And I assumed she was thinking, 'I really am the cleverest girl in school.' " Sometimes, you can't win.

I meet Morissette the next day at her rehearsal for Top of the Pops. I thought she'd be Amazonian, but she's about 5ft 2in, with Medusa hair and a face like Sandra Bullock's, but elongated. I'm interested in the idea that her troubled demeanour is calculated, a notion based on the fact that, at 14, she became famous in her native Canada as a Debbie Gibson clone, turning out albums of rampant pop fluff. You see how odd that seems, I suggest: the transformation from Shirley Temple to introspective misery-guts?

Morissette bunches up her legs. "Well, the early songs weren't exclusively party-girl. But at that age, I definitely wasn't trying to be autobiographical. I didn't know myself well enough to even write autobiographically." Did you have a diary? "I did, and still do. It's right here." So you write in it frequently? "Yeah. I just wrote in it 20 minutes ago." Which would be seconds after coming off stage. Not necessarily the act of someone unemotional or wholly at ease.

To prove the point, in any case, Morissette had a breakdown at 16. Bit of an anxiety attack? "Non-stop anxiety attacks, for a while. I stopped having them about two years ago." And they were caused by? "Oh, stress and pressure. The expectations I placed on myself at that point." Because you're quite driven? "Yeah. And what you're forced to think is, driven toward what? In my case, toward some sort of approval and visibility, because I'd always felt so invisible. I wanted to be heard, to be understood. But whatever I was trying to get away from didn't go away; it just got amplified." And then the breakdown. "Yup. When I was a teenager; and then a bigger version around Jagged Little Pill. I literally felt I was having a heart attack: shaking, chest pains."

Her very first LP, Alanis, sold 100,000 copies in Canada. Its follow-up, Now Is the Time, did less well. At 17, Morissette quit the marketing meetings with middle-aged record executives (one of whom, you may conclude, took unfair advantage, if you read later lyrics and put two and two together); she left home, got a place in LA and met the producer Glen Ballard. It's rumoured that Ballard created the new Morissette persona for her breakthrough LP, Jagged Little Pill. But as we know, her dark side was there already.

"What Glen did was encourage me to be fearless about sharing it. I investigated that painful stuff in my journal; it's all I ever did. But putting it in my songs – I thought, 'What? I'm supposed to show this to everyone?' "

And what painful stuff it was. "You Oughta Know" is a woman in extremis. Then there's "Right Through You", about someone who regards the narrator as a child, who shakes her hand, pats her on the head, "took me out to wine, dine, 69 me." (You see the point about the record-industry libertine.) Were those songs about the same man?

"Two different men." Ah. You've been quite unlucky. Morissette chucks her hair back. "Well, I have to take responsibility. I'm the thread of continuity, after all. And I'm picking that kind of guy less often."

The closing song, "Wake Up", is about giving up: on romance, on all of it. When is the disappointment enough to make you give up? "It's not disappointment that would make me give up. It would be... excruciating pain and depression." That strikes both of us as incredibly funny, and it's some time until we get a grip. "I can be disappointed for a long time and still keep going, clearly. But I can't be depressed for too long. I've spent long periods of time depressed, but I have the recipe to deal with it, which goes from something as mundane as getting enough sleep to speaking my truth more. Because I find that, as soon as I stop doing that, even to a boyfriend, I'm slowly gonna get just more and more depressed."

Jagged Little Pill sold 28 million copies in 1995. Which must be cathartic in its way. Did Morissette realise that there would be a backlash among the male population? A sigh. "Yes and no. I knew that some men would hate me the way that, when I was younger, my brothers hated me. But I did spend a lot of time feeling men hated me then, so... well, I just thought, I'm kinda used to that."

After a break to backpack around India, the second LP, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, appeared in 1998. It did only moderately, and people assumed Morissette had gone off the boil. She didn't seem to mind, and spent a considerable amount of time in the interim doing benefit gigs and charity work. Now, however, we have the new venture. Under Rug Swept is a return to form: fully fledged, assured, open-minded. Surprisingly, Glen Ballard's not involved. What happened? Has he been dismissed and gone off weeping into the sunset? "Nope." Rueful grin. "I just want to be around people who are excited by my work and not suddenly feeling threatened by it, God bless 'em all." Deeply tactful.

Apart from the latest single, "Hands Clean", presumably about our music-biz friend of yore and written in his words ("If it weren't for me, you'd never have amounted to very much... Make sure you don't tell on me, especially to members of your family"), the album shows quite a change in the perception of men. At 28, Morissette has had therapy till it's coming out of her ears and has some optimistic tracks to show for it. Lasting romance clearly wouldn't go amiss, but, being a multimillionaire and all, she probably has to take the initiative in dating, doesn't she?

"I like being asked out, so what I do is, I'm very obvious in my invitational vibe." It's so much nicer (I observe in a Margaret Rutherford kind of way) if a man can still play that male part.

"Isn't it? But they're confused, because they think chivalry is part of what we're angry about. They don't entirely understand that a feminist woman can still adore chivalry, and why that makes sense."

So are you in a relationship now? "I'm spending time with someone." She looks at her hands. "I don't know if we're... we're not officially... " Ah, very bashful. "But this is a guy who does see why women occasionally, despite themselves, feel drawn to the frisson of dangerous men. He totally gets it."

Hmm. I think they're coming on, the new breed. Morissette snorts, then starts almost weeping with laughter. "I do, too." She mops her eyes. "I do, too."

'Under Rug Swept' is released on 25 February on Maverick