It's cliche to point out that Meredith Brooks is hardly the bitch she celebrates in song, but it's still striking how down to earth the singer-songwriter is. Well, maybe down to earth isn't exactly the best phrase to describe a woman who says she wrote a pop hit about Jungian archetypes, but Brooks is nothing if not multi-faceted. In the three months since her debut album, "Blurring the Edges," was released, she has become a reclaimer of misogynist epithets, an MTV icon, a gold-certified rock star and most recently -- somewhat to her amusement -- one of Esquire's "Women Who Rock Our World." All this in addition to being a bitch, a lover, a sister, a mother, a joker, a toker and a midnight smoker.

\\During a phone conversation from her Los Angeles home, Brooks is actually an exerciser -- she's logging miles on a stationary bicycle during the interview. ("I'm not going to be going so crazy [that] I'll be huffing and puffing," she says.) She just got back from a Portland, Ore., radio station's promotional concert, where she played in front of a mosh pit for the first time, and she's preparing for a substantial U.S. tour that will take her heavily textured pop-rock to the masses. Before heading out on the road again, Brooks slows her peddling to talk about pop psychology, psychological pop and why she's tired of journalists who ask her if she's tired of being compared to Alanis Morissette.

\\You've talked a bit about how you're trying to reclaim the word 'bitch' using 'semantic realignment.' What's that about?

\\There's a woman, Dr. Pat Allen, she has a couple of books out and she's a friend of mine and a psychologist who I used to go see speak. She came up with the term semantic realignment in relationships: She's a Jungian psychologist, so she would talk a lot about how the breakdown in communication between couples [comes from] the words we use with each other ... I took that idea and applied it to a very derogatory word aimed mostly at women.

\\I got tired of feeling ashamed for not always being happy. It's kind of a curse in our society to be pretty and smart and talented -- sometimes you feel like you don't have the right to also be a bitch.

\\So you can be a bitch or a lover or a sister or a mother. What's today's archetype?

\\Oh, I love that you used that word. That's really what I'm about. I think I'm changing the idea of archetypes. I'm not trying to change peoples' idea of my personality so much as just the whole consciousness of what the archetypal person should be.

\\Right now I'm in a really good flow. I had a day off where I really rested, I've seen a couple of my friends, I just watched my new video, I accepted my platinum and gold awards and I just saw my family, so I feel very centered and grounded again.

\\The video for "Bitch" is very striking. How did they make it look like you're floating through the air?

\\I hope the people from my fan club read this, because I get asked that question a lot and I keep thinking, 'How am I going to write all these people back?' What we did is, they hung me from a harness like in "Mission Impossible" when Tom Cruise came down and was using that computer. [They used] that harness -- it's exactly that one, the shape and everything ... That's how I was laying and the camera was underneath me and what they did was ... they flipped the room up [so] the door was on the bottom and the window was on the top.

\\Did that give you vertigo?

\\It was intense. I was scared a few times. I was up 20 feet in the air -- the room went 20 feet in the air. The only thing underneath me was the cameraman. So, yeah.

\\Are you sick of being compared to Alanis Morissette?

\\Well, I think it's very lazy journalism when it does happen. I don't know if I see the comparison as much as people ask me if I'm sick of it.

\\So are you sick of people asking you if you're sick of it?

\\Yeah. [laughs] I think I'm over it, and I hope we can all just realize that we all have all unique voices.

\\You've been a musician for a long time -- both on your own and in the Graces. How does it feel to finally have a big hit?

\\Thank God it was now. I think my message needs to be heard now. I think my optimism needs to be heard now. I don't think it could have been heard five years ago or four years ago or even two years ago.

\\Why not?

\\There was a voice out there -- call it grunge. There was a trend and a voice that needed to be heard at that time. There was an awareness that things are bad and we're not happy and people needed to hear that. Everything's cyclical, and it just turned around again until it was time for optimism to come back. It always spirals that way.

\\Do you think it's because the Dow is so high?

\\The Tao of Pooh or the stock market? [laughs]

\\No, I don't think it has anything to do with that. I think the [rising] stock market was probably a result of hope coming back.

\\I think that people have gotten off their asses and they got tired of being apathetic and living like they were living. I've always been that kid in a room full of shit shoveling to find the pony, because there can't be a room full of shit without a pony in it.

\\Have you found the pony yet?

\\Yeah. Definitely. But while I was looking for the pony I became kind of a thoroughbred myself.

\\A lot of people think of you as sort of a New Age artist ...

\\I hate that term. That's so fucking cosmic woo-woos. Don't you hate that term?

\\I'm not really sure what it refers to, specifically.

\\Maybe you're right. I think I'm living from an old thought that New Age is always kind of a put-down on Californians. But maybe that's [limited] thinking for me. I have a great interest in metaphysics. I feel like this record was written from a very spiritual place, you know.

\\Hey, maybe we could do se