Alanis MORISSETTE has felt heartbreak before, as anyone who's listened to her ripped-from-life songs knows. But last year's split with her fiance, actor Ryan Reynolds, turned out to be the big one.
"I think it's the straw that breaks the camel's back," Morissette says. "It's having had too many of them. And I was a full-blown love addict, so it was like, 'I can't keep doing this, my body can't take it.' Breakups are a horrible thing for almost everybody I know. For someone who is a love addict, it's debilitating.
"I've been on a constant journey toward finally surrendering and hitting the rock bottom that I've been avoiding my whole life. . . . So this was a huge, critical juncture for me. Everything broke, and it was an amazing and horrifying time."
Not surprisingly, you can hear all about it on Morissette's new album, "Flavors of Entanglement," due out today. While it touches on other themes, and isn't framed as a literal blow-by-blow account, the 11 songs describe knotty conflicts and the pain of separation.
"I miss your warmth and the thought of us bringing up our kids / And the part of you that walks with your stick-tied handkerchief," she sings in "Torch," dealing out vivid details in her distinctively conversational style.
But more of the songs -- "Not as We," "Moratorium," "Giggling Again for No Reason" -- are drawn from the prolonged aftermath of the breakup, a process leading to what she calls "the Phoenix rising."
"I entered into my own version of rehab. I went to therapy five days a week, I journaled, I had a lot of support from this incredible group of friends. . . . It was just really moment by moment, step by step, snail's pace . . ."
She also gutted and remodeled her Los Angeles house (one of her favorite forms of expression, she says, equal to making two or three albums), rode motorcycles, worked on a book and designed jewelry.
And made music, this time with English producer Guy Sigsworth, who helped her return on some tracks to an electronic dance style reminiscent of her records as a teen star in her native Canada.
While Morissette has been known for raw candor since her landmark 1995 album "Jagged Little Pill," parts of "Flavors" take it to a new level. This time she didn't need to call on the journals she usually uses as a catalyst, because the events were unfolding as she was working on the music in London and Los Angeles.
