Alanis Morissette muses on Broadway musical inspired by 'Jagged Little Pill' album

Alanis Morissette is three decades removed from the release of her 33 million-album-selling third release, "Jagged Little Pill."

However, that doesn't mean that the pop icon could've been, while recently speaking to The Tennessean, sitting with "one hand in (her) pocket and the other one holding up a peace sign."

A five-year-old Grammy and Tony award-winning musical that shares a name with the 1995 album — bearing the handiwork of Morissette, the album's producer Glen Ballard and Academy Award-winning author and director Diablo Cody — visits the Tennessee Performing Arts Center on Friday and Saturday.

The musical is best described as an ensemble cast taking an artistic, political and spiritual journey into the life and times of what a press statement calls "a perfectly imperfect American family."

Tickets are available at https://www.tpac.org/event/2024-03-01-to-2024-03-02-jagged-little-pill.

Riding 'the back of a megalodon'

Morissette is on the brink of turning 50 and has become a wife and mother of three in the past decade.

Thus, what she describes to The Tennessean as the "sadness, terror, joy and anger" that fueled a quartet of global top-10 singles in 1995 and 1996 — "You Learn," "Hand in My Pocket," "Ironic" and "Head over Feet" — has, via what she offers in a dynamic waterfall of statements, mellowed with age.

In 1994, Morissette's breakout album was constructed via what she described in a 2015 blog post as a "(not so) precious" "aikido," or a process akin to a Japanese martial art that attacks bodies but harmonizes spirits in equal measure.

"I (grabbed) my glittery surfboard and rode that wave like a feisty androgyne on the back of a megalodon," she added.

"There will always be commentary needed to keep the larger cultural and social and relational and spiritual, emotional and psychological conversation going. If I can continue to be a part of it by singing, writing, performing, speaking publicly, writing articles, making art, being a mom, a wife, an educator, a perpetual student, and a friend ... I will, till I am gone, and likely after."

"Anger at 21 is not anger at 50," states Morissette in the present day.

"Now that I'm a parent, I contemplate emotions differently," says Morissette about how three decades of sharing emotional space with her fanbase reveals itself on the Broadway and off-Broadway stage.

The "complexity, subtlety and activism" that taking self-ownership of aggressive responses to unsuccessful relationships yielded for Morissette at 24 has evolved into the existence of "Jagged Little Pill" as a play where the "permission for the allowance of feelings — speaking, yelling and crying" is the expectation.

A writer and artist's shared journey

Diablo Cody turned 17 the day after "Jagged Little Pill" was released in 1995.

Contemplate Morissette as the protagonist of her album and Cody as, similarly, the superstar of her existence.

"Jagged Little Pill" and Cody's life bear stunning parallels.

Cody's 20s were spent traveling across America. As she paused her journey, she often penned drips and drabs of brilliant character sketches and realities snatched from the chasms, seams and splits in 21st century America. That work dotted everywhere from the blogosphere Minneapolis-St. Paul indie publication the City Pages and Entertainment Weekly.

Her 30s were filled with award-winning acclaim arriving from her memoir "Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper" and "Juno," a coming-of-age story-turned critically acclaimed film about a teenager's unplanned pregnancy.

Cody notes that in a 2019 Vulture feature, Morissette wanted to make a non-autobiographical musical featuring her songs. Cody felt a "gut feeling that you have to trust," drawing her toward the project.

'A psychotherapeutic moment everyone deserves to share'

What arrives is directly analogous to the 1973 PBS documentary "An American Family." That program chronicled the Loud family's daily existence. For three months, millions of weekly viewers watched the story of an affluent upper-middle-class Santa Barbara, California, family that, as The New York Times noted, was having their reality "fall apart as America watched."

Comparatively, as the result of a Venn diagram of Cody's life, Morissette's art and interaction with a live crowd, songs that have long escaped her lips, exist as deep narrators of a play that highlights how fans breathe life into a musician's craft that makes them "activists by mistake."

Seeing her 10-track album as a an award-winning musical featuring "deeply realized" characters evolving through "stages and ages of dysfunction to liberation" has advanced her "cohesive relation" to her three-decade-old, Grammy-winning album.

For the forthcoming, 34-date Triple Moon tour, 2024 for Morissette also involves her work onstage nationwide — alongside Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and Morgan Wade.

Extend two decades from "Jagged Little Pill" to Jett's days alongside Lita Ford, Sandy West, Jackie Fox and Cherie Currie as the Runaways to Morissette's '90s-era work alongside acts like Fiona Apple and Meredith Brooks. Fast-forward that to angst-ridden singer-songwriters like Tracy Bonham, P!nk, Michelle Branch and Avril Lavigne in the 2000s and parts of Katy Perry's early 2010s pop songbook. Then include the previously mentioned Wade's developing post-COVID-19 quarantine moment enveloping Americana-to-country hybrid sounds and caustic rock vibes.

More music: Grand Ole Opry announces 2024 NextStage class

There's a solid argument to be made that women's actions, beliefs, and thoughts in their teens and 20s are uniquely human and worthy of a significant depth and scope of respect.

Make a note of this concept to Morrissette and she pauses, attempting to encapsulate the power of the freedom related to walking naked in a living room after having the weight of a symbolic cross to bear removed following "getting your heart trampled on."

"The communal intelligence (arrived at) from a message of autonomy is a biochemical, neurobiological and psychotherapeutic moment everyone deserves to share."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: 'Jagged Little Pill': Alanis Morissette talks album, musical at TPAC