Alanis Morissette
Such Pretty Forks In The Road
Epiphany/Thirty Tigers
Buy via Official Store | Listen Below

You don’t just listen to a new Alanis Morissette album. You unpack it.

Her studio long-players are sonic suitcases stuffed with layers of puzzling revelations and candid specifics about how far she’s traveled along this mortal coil since her last studio offering—and what moments have carved their silhouettes into her psyche during that journey.

Normally, there would be the typical two to four years in between these life markers from the seven-time GRAMMY® Award-winning singer-songwriter. But for her new LP Such Pretty Forks In The Road, there was a lengthy eight-year break after offering up 2012’s Havoc And Bright Lights.

Back then we were in the fourth quarter of Barack Obama's first term as president, had graduated from the iPhone 4S to the 5, and met Honey Boo Boo for the first time. So, yeah, that was ages ago.

During those eight years, Morissette wrestled with some huge life changes. She gave birth to two children (the youngest of her three kids was born last summer) after suffering multiple miscarriages with her husband, the rapper-songwriter (and biohacker!) Mario “Souleye” Treadway.

She was also very involved with the development of the Jagged Little Pill musical (which opened on Broadway in 2019), while planning a big 2020 world tour to celebrate Jagged's 25th anniversary (both projects are on ice at the moment due to the coronavirus pandemic).

And then, after being embezzled out of almost $5 million by her former business manager and robbed of $2 million in jewels by a home burglar, Morissette packed up her family, pulled up stakes after twenty-five years in Los Angeles, and moved to Northern California to begin the next phase of her life far from a company town whose main industries Morissette no longer feels much a part of these days.

Also during this period of, you know, living life, Morissette's activism blossomed at warp speed, as she fervently raised her voice through various platforms, podcasts and postings to educate, normalize public discourse and encourage self-expression around important issues like mental health, addiction, attachment parenting, sexual abuse, eating disorders, postpartum depression and trauma recovery.

If you follow her on social media (her hashtags are snatched for the gods), you know she's incredibly passionate and public about these and other hot-button issues. It’s her personal experiences within many of these realms that fire up the engine inside Such Pretty Forks In The Road—her most inward-looking and outwardly forthright album in years.

As is mandatory with all Morissette songs, the narrative structure and linguistics ping-ponging within it are the main focus. When Such Pretty Forks In The Road opens with the stark and spacey guitar-led “Smiling," Morissette's pensive delivery of her first lyric lines telegraph the album's travel itinerary (“This is a life of extremes / Both sides are slippery and enticing / These are my places off the rails”).

Her powerful revelations in the song about crashing and burning on the inside ("This is my first wave of my white flag / This is the sound of me hitting bottom,") while keeping up appearances on the outside ("And I keep on smiling / Keep on moving / Can't stand still,") bring up familiar confessions Morissette has presented to us before (see "Guardian" from Havoc And Bright Lights).

But, obviously, she is still wrestling with how to deal with it all. Just because she's now in her mid-forties with a husband and three children doesn't mean she's got all her shit figured out. None of us do, no matter how blessed our Instagram page scroll presents.

It's that continual search to understand traumas she's repressed, and the penning of lyrics and music (with a co-writing assist from bandmate/songwriter Michael Farrell) related to the emotions percolating out of her unconscious that deliver (with the guidance of producers Alex Hope and Catherine Marks working separately from each other) a heady mixture of stories and sonics to tangle with in the album.

On many of its more haunting compositions, where unfussy arrangements give Morissette’s surprisingly widened vocal range ample space to mold itself around her syntax, she simultaneously weaves detailed recollections of time and place with more magical lyrical devices to dramatically illustrate her moments of crisis and catharsis.

Like in the beginning of the prayerful "Her," where Morissette drops a pin right inside her house during a moment of crisis ("I am on the floor / I am in my kitchen / This place is so familiar on my knees") as she's calling out to the Divine Feminine for help ("She's coming in warm all like Kali / And coursing through my veins like liquid Mary").

Or the piano ballad "Diagnosis," in which Morissette locates where the lonely thickets of postpartum depression and anxiety have imprisoned her ("I've not left the house in a while / I've not felt a glimpse of ease") while she's healing from the battles of childbirth ("And I have not made much headway / Since I have come back from the war").

While the album's punchy lead single "Reasons I Drink" (about addiction) and the marriage-focused "Missing the Miracle" are more straightforward in their storytelling, other songs on Such Pretty Forks are total head fakes. At first spin, they demand repeated dives, dissections and diversions to Google Search to fully achieve onboarding their intention.

In fan favorite "Ablaze," what first presents itself as a motherly love song to her three children ("This nest is never going away / My mission is to keep the light in your eyes ablaze,") is also sly commentary on the religious theory of Dualism ("There was an apple, there was a snake, there was division / There was a split, there was a conflict in the fabric of life,") and its perceived opposite of Oneness ("All our devotions and temperaments are pulled from different wells / We seem to easily forget we are made of the same cells").

Or take "Pedestal," whose initial impression reads as a vengeful recollection of those in her past who traded on her star power for their own gain—until they got their fill ("I'm sure you've enjoyed the ride, who wouldn't?"). Is it about her thieving ex-business manager? A shady record label exec? Or that ex-fiancé from '06?

After additional intakes of the chorus ("One day, I won't be craved the way you crave me now / As this pedestal crumbles down and crashes me to the ground"), you're left wondering if the entire song is actually about Morissette's fear of losing her husband for the same fame-weary reasons.

But the real head scratcher on Such Pretty Forks is the celestial barn burner "Nemesis," which, during an inaugural listen, could be a depiction of a God-seeking psychedelic drug trip ("Right here, we sat and we tripped out / Saw celestial mosaics, and I fell and I crawled over and held your hand").

But tucked between repeated refrains about resistance to life's unexpected road forks ("Change, you are my nemesis / Transition, I hold my breath"), Morissette regales moments of cosmic intervention in her bedroom via a "starseed,” her backyard wedding to Treadway, and the harrowing middle-of-the-night home birth of her second child (Google "Morissette" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" for the details).

Suddenly, you’re wondering if the song is about the movies that play in your mind when you’re tripping out and your mind’s windows are blown wide open. Is the "starseed" an Alanis-ism for the conception? Or is the song actually chronicling Morissette's descent into her animal-ness in order to deliver her daughter in the middle of the night? Perhaps, it's simply a love song about navigating life changes with the partner you've chosen to go into battle with.

Aided by her grand, propulsive vocal delivery, “Nemesis” becomes Morissette’s welcomed matriculation into mysterious and oracular storytelling territory. It's one of the most adventurous and perplexing songs she's ever laid to wax and the crowning achievement of parable and soundscape on Such Pretty Forks—worthy of its assumed immortalization in enhanced photographic form on the album's cover.

With all of Morissette’s hopeful and haunting revelations packed inside, Such Pretty Forks triggers (for those open to the experience) a deeper understanding of the human condition and, most importantly, empathy.

In these volatile and scary times, empathy is exactly what we should bring along wherever the forks in our own roads take us.

Notable Tracks: “Ablaze” | “Losing the Plot” | “Nemesis” | Smiling”

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