S$# 023 Alanis Morissette | Everything

When Alanis Morissette cast aside her teenybopper persona in 1995 and released the super successful Jagged Little Pill, I wasn't sure what to make of it. I never listened to any of her early stuff, so it wasn't that I didn't like the switch of image. (Let's set the record straight, folks. JLP was *not* her first album.)It's just that the confessional singer/songwriter style she was now into seemed like so much posing.

But after a while I began to appreciate her - moreso through her later work - and saw the honesty and candour in it. When I first heard a cut from 2004's So-Called Chaos, it was this weeks's spotlight track, Everything.

In many ways, Everything is the yin to the yang of her breakthrough hit You Oughta Know. In this song Alanis is not riffing on a jerk who mistreated her. She's showing a vulnerable character, with many faults (the first line is, after all, "I can be an asshole of the grandest kind")who has a soul mate who appreciates her, warts and all.

I blame everyone else, not my own partaking
My passive aggressiveness can be devastating
I’m the most gorgeous woman that you’ve ever known, and you’ve never met anyone (who’s)
As everything as I am sometimes

You see everything
You see every part
You see all my light
And you love my dark
You dig everything
Of which I’m ashamed
There’s not anything
To which you can’t relate. And you’re still here

The best line is "And you love my dark". Alanis Morissette is a poet!

Everything is on So-Called Chaos and the compilation album The Collection.