Cover Story: The Adventures of Miss Thing

With confidence, Morissette leads her crack four-piece backing band — none of whom played on Jagged Little Pill — through looser, more explosive versions of the album's material. Her young band comes from journeymen backgrounds: Guitarist Jesse Tobias, a former member of Mother Tongue, was very briefly a Red Hot Chili Pepper before being replaced by Dave Navarro; guitarist Nick Lashley and drummer Taylor Hawkins played together in Sass Jordan's backing band. Then there's bassist Chris Chaney, whose prior gigs include time with '80s soft-pop star Christopher Cross. In a 65-minute set, Morissette and the band play everything on the album except "Head Over Feet." They include no covers, but they've rehearsed a ska version of the Beatles "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and the Human League's "(Keep Feeling) Fascination."

Morissette connects with her audience in a way that — when viewed without fashionable cynicism — is moving. The dynamic is less like a concert than modern-rock group therapy with Morissette serving as a sort of twentysomething Joni Mitchell backed by thrashy guitar. Despite having a song called "Ironic," she's as unironic an artist as they currently come. "Thank you for understanding," she meaningfully tells the crowd before launching into her encore number. "Perfect," an anthem about the pressures of youth.

According to Madonna, the woman whose label, Maverick, Morissette records for, Morissette is handling those pressures just fine. "She reminds me of me when I started out: slightly awkward but extremely self-possessed and straightforward," says Madonna. "There's a sense of excitement and giddiness in the air around her — like anything's possible and the sky's the limit."

Who has earned more of a right to sing the postmodern blues than a former Canadian child star who was washed up before she turned 18, an impressionable youth who once opened for Vanilla Ice?

Morissette was born on June 1, 1974, in Ottawa. Her French-Canadian father, Alan, worked as a high school principal; her Hungarian-born mother, Georgia, was a teacher. Morissette describes her parents as "very free-spirited, curious people." The family moved frequently when Morissette was young, as her parents skipped from school to school, teaching the children of military personnel. From the ages of 3 to 6, she lived in the former West Germany with her parents, her older brother, Chad, and her twin brother, Wade, before moving back to Canada.

Morissette got the performing bug early. At 6, she took up piano, and at 9 she started writing her first songs. Her acting career, however, took off first. By age 10 she had made a splash on Nickelodeon's cable-TV kids series You Can't Do That on Television. "It was a good, stupid, sarcastic kind of show," Morissette says. "Very obnoxious and very tongue in cheek." Recently, MTV News aired footage of a virtually unrecognizably young Morissette being slimed by her co-stars on the show. At that time, jealous viewers wanted to slime Morissette, too. "I got hate mail because I played the girlfriend of the two lead guys on the show," she says, "so I represented a threat to them ever having these guys. It wasn't the best experience." She went on to other acting work, including a "horrible" movie in which she appeared as a rock singer named Alanis, and future Friends star Matt LeBlanc played her boyfriend.

"But music has always been my priority," says Morissette. At 10, she used some of her acting money to cut an indie single called "Fate Stay With Me." At 14, she signed a song-publishing deal, which led to two MCA/Canada albums. And so it was that the year Nirvana told the world Nevermind, 16-year-old Alanis Morissette released her first album of vaguely Madonna-esque dance pop. She was credited simply as Alanis.

Morissette says her parents never pushed her into showbiz. Still, she adds, "I don't think there's such a thing as a dysfunction-free family. My parents, I love them, I'd jump in front of a truck for them, but no matter what family you're in, there are going to be obstacles, and I'd be lying if I said there weren't any." Asked if her parents pushed her to perfection, she says simply, "I just wanted to do whatever it took to get the approval of my parents and the people I was working with at the time."

Morissette's early musical output is fairly generic. Her pipes were already powerful but the only quality that ties her first two albums to her current material is a healthy sense of adolescent lust. "You're just a party, party, party boy/From the moment I walked into your life/I knew right then it was a serious thing for you," she sings on "Party Boy," from 1991's Alanis. Things took a darker turn on "Big Bad Love," from her 1992 follow-up effort, Now Is the Time. "I'm having dreams in the night of you, baby," she sings, "and Sigmund Freud would have thought I was crazy."

"No, I'm not scared people might hear those records," says Morissette. "I never did any Playboy centerfolds. There's nothing I regret. Maybe people will just understand my lyrics now a little bit more if they hear those records. It validates this record." (Hey, unless you're Stevie Wonder or Michael Jackson, how would you like to listen to a record you did when you were 16?)

Alanis sold more than 100,000 copies in Canada and earned Morissette a Juno Award as Most Promising Female Artist, while Now Is the Time sold in excess of 50,000 there. She doesn't disavow the earlier recordings, but she considers Jagged Little Pill her "real" debut. "There was an element of me not being who I really was at the time," she says of her first two albums. "It was because I wasn't prepared to open up that way. The focus for me then was entertaining people as opposed to sharing any revelations I had at the time. I had them, but I wasn't prepared to share."