I shouldn't be here. From a vantage point not ten feet away, I'm watching Alanis Morissette grind her arms and legs through a vigorous workout on an obsolete stationary bicycle-the kind where the handlebars go back and forth. Minutes earlier, her tour manager had firmly instructed me to keep my distance.

"She'll be in the gym," he said, "but we'll see you at dinner." "I could just go down to the gym..."

I squeaked.

"That's not what I said," he growled.

But how could he expect me to obey orders knowing that, over in the hotel exercise room, the pop banshee of the moment was sweating her booty off? Fueled by 1995's anthem of the jilted, "You Oughta Know," the 21-year-old Morissette has successfully packaged female anger and sold it back to ex-boyfriends worldwide at an incredible markup. Her American debut, Jagged Little Pill, is racing up the Billboard album chart with all the fury of a ravenous she-wolf hunting her prey, and her blurry form dominates MTV much the same way her record label CEO, Madonna, once did.

The sweathog grunting before me, though, doesn't at all resemble the royally pissed-off alterna-grrrl who refused Sinead O'Connor's abandoned Lollapalooza spot, the siren whose show Alicia Silverstone, the summer's slickest teen, clamored to see. As if. Clad in plaid shorts and a baggy white tee, her long brown hair pulled back, Morissette could be Typical Girl History Major at Liberal Arts College. In a space as cramped as this, hardly 20 feet square, she's forced to exchange a tentative "Hi." Her monosyllable provides few clues as to whether or not she'll bite my head off when my espionage becomes clear. But when she abandons the noisy bike and approaches the bench press machine, she smiles and turns to me. Noticing my confusion at a padded contraption attached to the weight-station, she comes around to help out. "It's for curling, I think," she offers after some tinkering. The vengeful video vixen, it turns out, isn't Tank Girl after all; she's friendly and sweet, almost flirtatious. And a samaritan of sorts.

Lousy with guilt, I confess to staking her out. Her shoulders tense momentarily, but she quickly rules me out as a potential stalker. "Nobody ever recognizes me," she sighs, as if saying so will keep it true.

"I was thinking about your song," I shyly begin.

"Which one?"

" 'Your House,' " I admit.

"Uh-oh." Those shoulders stiffen once more. "Are you some kind of stalker?"

"Your House," for those uninitiated, is the super-secret track at the very end of Jagged Little Pill. Search past track 13, the uncredited remix of "You Oughta Know," until you get to 5:12, and you'll hear an a cappella Morissette seeking absolution from a lover whose house she has broken into-she takes a bath, plays his Joni Mitchell albums, puts on his cologne-as she sings, "I shouldn't be here without permission / You might be home soon / Would you forgive me, love / If I laid in your bed?" Saturated with reverb, the track possesses a chantlike, religious quality that leads me to wonder if the one-time Catholic is actually singing to some deity.

"That is the only song on the record that's not 100 percent true," she confides. "I was staying in this guy's house in Hollywood and he wasn't there for a week. I remember being overly curious and sleeping in his bed. It felt eerie and unnerving; I also had kind of a crush on him. I get burned at the end of the song because if I had really snooped around as much as I wanted to, it would have been wrong. I probably would have found something I didn't want to find. I deserved it." She laughs. "So do you."

That evening, when Morissette appears for dinner, a mild transformation has occurred. Her hair, extending just about to her elbows, falls perfectly straight until it reaches her chest, where it freaks out into zig-zaggy tentacles. She's wearing a white oxford fastened together by a safety pin in only one place despite its fully functional buttons, baggy satin sweatpants, and no-name tennis sneakers-very Haight-Ashbury '90s love child. I can't help but notice her fingernails, decorated in a lovely shade of robin's-egg-blue nail polish. Not only do I notice it on Morissette, but on several members of her band, a Muppet Show of longhaired L.A. session dudes. "I've made everyone put it on," she smiles before glancing at my own fingertips with devious intent. "Would you like me to do yours?"

I make some small talk with the Muppets, but I can't help watching Morissette sideways. Not because I fear an unauthorized manicure, but because she knows how to get your attention without demanding it. She's a hair twirler. If you've got it, twirl it, I suppose. She claps her hands in front of her mouth and squeals when she gets excited about things, particularly the temporary tattoo she plans to buy and affix to her guitarist's butt, a drawing of a hand with the inscription, "Grab My Love." When a cake arrives for the table next to us, she croaks "Happy Birthday" just as out of tune as everyone else.

"Hey, you can't sing!" I exclaim.

"You're right," she deadpans. "You'd better go home."

The next time we meet, just before the evening's Pontiac, Michigan, show at 7th House, a tiny rock club just beyond the affluent edge of Detroit's suburbs, the metamorphosis is complete. Morissette is devastating. She's done little more than slap on some foundation and accentuate that big Carly Simon mouth with a smidgen of burgundy lipstick, but that proves plenty. She warms up her voice by outsinging the Motown on the radio. Now I recognize her. You only have to flick a switch to turn on a light.

7th House looks to be about two-thirds full, the twentyish pop music consumers almost evenly divided between guys and gals. Strangely enough, this miniature cult following includes a large number of couples, who nuzzle in the balcony or stand on each others' toes down front. All of them have long feathered hair, and, it seems, at least one item of cut-off clothing.

Morissette's band, sans their frontwoman, swarms the stage, launching into a ferocious Zep-like groove. For all their offstage goofiness and Sunset Strip hairspray residue, the four Muppets are ear-poppingly good musicians, with the kind of enthusiasm that results in lots of flying drumsticks. Guitarist Jesse Tobias, formerly of the band Mother Tongue, came recommended by the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea and Dave Navarro, who backed Morissette on "You Oughta Know." The rest-drummer Taylor Hawkins (a self-described "cross between Brad Pitt and Animal"), bassist Chris Chaney and one-time King Swamp guitarist Nick Lashley-"all just showed up and worked out," says Morissette. "If I wasn't in a band with them I would probably have dated each one of them already, except Nick, who's married. But it's too sacred for us to jeopardize our professional relationship."

When Morissette finally races onstage, flinging her tresses from side to side before ripping into "All I Really Want," the crowd whoops like an Arsenio audience. The sleeves of her button-down shirt flapping at her sides, Morissette looks like she's taking orders from some other planet. With her eyes practically rolled back in her head, and her left arm waving spasmodically, it's clear that Typical Girl has been left behind at the hotel gym. After a few impressive tosses of her hair, Morissette begins to resemble those terrifying teen starlets of '70s horror films-pig-bloodied Sissy Spacek in Carrie, Linda Blair growling "Your mother sucks cocks in hell" in The Exorcist. You'd best believe that all she really wants is deliverance-"a way to calm the angry voice."

Morissette isn't all revenge fantasies and spewed split-pea soup. The flower child with the light-blue nail polish emerges in the lilting singalong "Hand In My Pocket," which finds Morissette exploring the central dichotomies of her existence: her private life versus her stabs at reaching out, apathy versus engagement with the world. "I'm high but I'm grounded / I'm sane but I'm overwhelmed / I'm lost but I'm hopeful," she drawls. Astonishingly, her cult following at 7th House has developed a little routine for the song's chorus. In the lyric, one hand always remains in the aforementioned pocket, while the other goes through a series of easily imitable functions-hailing a taxicab, giving a high five, flicking a cigarette-which our feathered friends demonstrate at the appropriate moments. In perfect unison. Sure it's cheesy, something you'd expect of, say, Hootie & the Blowfish fans-and you know there's gotta be some overlap-but the entire audience partakes, without any prompting from the stage whatsoever. Sometimes cheese is Brie.

Morissette doesn't have a clear-cut explanation for the song. When she tells me that she never watches TV, reads nothing but books-she's presently plowing through Marianne Faithfull's autobiography-and that fun for her is climbing a tree with a friend and not speaking for four hours, I suggest that said concealed hand symbolizes the Glenn Gould-like depth of her self-imposed isolation.

"Sure, that could be what it's about," she hedges. "Most of those songs were written so quickly that I would write something and sing it, and the next day not remember doing it. It was just exactly the way I was feeling at the time."

Morissette has a dark secret, several even, but she's not showing her hand for nothing. She's keeping it in that damn pocket.

The following afternoon, Morissette and I commandeer the tour van and spend a Zen-like afternoon on the campus of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, home to more beautiful sculpture gardens than you can shake the Venus de Milo at. We sit in the sun, by a reflecting pool filled with multicolored carp and water lilies and flanked by spitting cherubs, and talk, ironically, about pain.

Morissette speaks wisely and authoritatively about her fans' connection with the hurt and anger of her music, recognizing both their need to identify and her own need to purge. "Everybody has to release it somehow," she says. "If you don't, it'll take its toll on you, and it'll either be a physical thing, or all your relationships will be really negative and full of conflict or something. So you have to deal, whether you go through therapy or get into relationships, or music, or write it out in diaries. Smoking cigarettes isn't enough. There's no way around pain. That's part of the charm of being alive."

Indeed, Jagged Little Pill's calculatedly eclectic pop-a hip-hop beat here, a folk guitar there, a little extra feedback on the bridge-gets its power from Morissette's willingness to push a little harder emotionally and lyrically than any woman currently working the Buzz Bin. Her voice goes from quirky punches at the ends of lines and awkward, expressive breaths to high piping siren territory, and is all the more impressive for her lack of formal training. "Never had a singing lesson," she beams. "I'm getting a vocal coach, though...."

Taking cliches like "you live, you learn" and exploding them into painful conclusions-"You bleed, you learn / You scream, you learn"-Morissette mines the nitty-gritty too often relegated to mere subtext in pop music. Grrrls can't be girls because the media defines them through their anger, and that just makes them angrier. The way in which Morissette carves out space for a broad emotional range is more typical of men: She simply assumes it. "Being able to express both your masculine and feminine sides is a great advantage," asserts the former tomboy.

Morissette's gentler (but not necessarily "feminine") side, as heard on "Hand In My Pocket" and the sympathetic "Mary Jane," nestled alongside rants like "You Oughta Know," effects a sea change in pop music by affirming that "angry" and "woman" don't have to add up to "angry woman." "The day that there's no need for feminism, this society has truly woken up," she says. She hasn't even heard Throwing Muses or PJ Harvey.

Her career, however, began long before either of theirs, despite her just having turned the legal drinking age last June. Alanis Nadine Morissette, the only daughter of military high school teachers Alan Morissette and Georgia Feuerstein, respectively French Canadian and Hungarian-born, spent most of her first few years in Germany before being whisked back to Ottawa, along with her twin brother Wade and older brother Chad. At nine years of age, before you learned three-place multiplication, she took up piano, and at ten she began to write songs and act, landing a recurring spot on Nickelodeon's wacky kids show, You Can't Do That on Television, where she unsuccessfully dodged falling buckets of green slime for the 1986 season. Back when you were a big Kajagoogoo fan, the determined Morissette took all the money she made on You Can't Do That and recorded the self-penned single "Fate Stay With Me" with help from a couple of Canadian music biz veterans. She had 2,000 copies of it pressed on her own indie label, Lamor Records, and MCA Publishing was impressed enough to snag her a contract with their Canadian division at age 14. You'd just popped your first zit.

Because of her ample confidence, not to mention the cross-legged Buddha posture she's assumed, it's easy to forget that Morissette has only walked the earth for 21 years. Her precision masks her unruly sentiments. When she says she believes in "that whole concept of having to hit rock bottom in order to make any changes," I remember that she's dealt with her problems in the past-realizing that her heart wasn't in the music she'd become so successful performing-by dropping everything and moving to Toronto at age 18, and then again to Los Angeles at 20. She explains: "You have to reach a point that you're so consumed by whatever it is that you can't take it anymore, and until you reach that point you just coast along like a bottom-dweller."

We stumble upon a man-made swimming hole. "We're going in, right?" she declares. Neither of us has a swimsuit. I strip to my skivvies. She dives in fully clothed. Talk turns to relationships.

She insists that she's ready to love somebody, but lets it slip that she's never been in a positive relationship before, citing examples of dalliances with older men who were "emotionally unavailable" to her.

"How will you handle it the next time you get dumped?" I ask.

She immediately responds, in all seriousness: "I'm never going to get dumped again."

She intimates that the last good time she had in bed resulted in bruises up and down her arms.

"Hickeys?" I hope, worrying that the sex might have taken an ugly turn.

"Hickeys, bite-me's. It was great."

"So what happened to him?"

"He's coming back. Definitely." With that, she inverts herself in the water and lets her legs finish the conversation.

Not until I rejoin her in Toronto do I uncover Alanis Morissette's dark secret. None of her press people have been particularly forthcoming about her first two albums, the 1991 Canadian platinum Alanis and its 1992 near-gold follow-up, Now Is the Time. No one carries them in the U.S. As soon as I land in Canada, I'm praying I can find at least one of her previous releases at the local mall. Unbeknownst to me, the time I spend hunting down these rarities coincides with our scheduled interview session. I am embarrassing her and pissing her off simultaneously. Would you forgive me, love?

I know I can't mention to her the exact nature of my disappearance when I get a look at the cover of Alanis, from which a younger version of Morissette, still swaddled in baby fat, pouts defiantly. Inside, she sings of "party boys" and "supermen," and sassily exclaims "My name is Alanis / I'm a white chick singer / The drums are a-smokin' and so's the bass." It's as if her high school yearbook picture came to life and made an album designed to haunt her forever. Sometimes cheese is Velveeta.

"There are certain mistakes that you make when you're 16 because you're ignorant," she demurs the next morning, realizing I'm in on the musical make-over that has made Canadians skeptical of Morissette's newfound alternative status. No wonder she refers to Jagged Little Pill as "my debut album," and lowers her head in shame when referring to her two dance-oriented, teen-spirited chartbusters. Alanis was the Debbie Gibson of Canada.

When her contract with MCA Records ex-pired, the 20-year-old HI-NRG queen exiled herself to Los Angeles. "It was kind of a blessing that it was over," she muses, "because I wanted to start out with a clean slate, not only personally but career-wise, too. It left me sort of naked. Leaving Toronto to go to L.A. gave me a severe dose of disillusionment that was really necessary. I was finally in a position where things weren't working out. And it was good for me. It made me realize that certain people I'd blindly trusted let me down. My intuition was saying 'Don't trust these people, don't work with these people,' and I went against it."

She keeps her bitterness over her early career in check, though.

"I've had people cheat me out of a lot of money. Let's just say that I'm still paying for the mistakes I've made. I think of it as my tuition for The College of Music Career."

Still, everyone resembles their high school yearbook picture a little, no matter how much they mature. It's worth noting, therefore, that most of the love songs on Alanis-"Jealous," "Walk Away"-consist of diatribes against unfaithful or unsuitable lovers. Even a 16-year-old Morissette crackles with angst, in sharp contrast with the peppy Paula Abdul-esque computerized backup. "Feeling lost in a world full of lies / I can't help thinkin' that love is just passin' me by," she moans in "On My Own," a song for which Morissette retains a reasonable amount of respect, probably because it describes her lack of control over the final product. How ironic that Jagged Little Pill producer/collaborator Glen Ballard, who rescued her from MIDI hell, has also helped trap Paula Abdul and Michael Jackson there.

Ballard brought Morissette to the attention of Maverick Records, playing "Perfect" for A&R whiz-kid and Freddy DeMann-protege Guy Oseary. Though the 22-year-old Oseary denies that the song touched off a synergistic prodigy vibe between the two, he tends to stress Morissette's precociousness. "She and I are about the same age, and people are always so amazed that we've accomplished anything since Generation X-ers are supposedly not ambitious. We're showing people we're as ambitious as anyone else." Oseary, who also inked Candlebox to Maverick, has yet to see or hear Alanis' first two albums, though. "I don't even want to," he says.

Morissette downplays it, but this evening's Toronto show means a great deal, as much a vendetta as a homecoming. "It feels good to have a country understand and appreciate my growth as opposed to questioning it," she declares. With two wildly successful albums' worth of ripe cheese to live down, Morissette's trying to pull off the entertainment business's toughest trick: the Janet Jackson/Tori Amos/Ron Howard how-ya-like-me-now. As the young and underpaid hoser who sold me her previous releases quipped with more admiration than scorn, "She's a trend-jumper."

The sold-out show, at Lee's Palace, has a much friendlier vibe than the exciting chill of the Pontiac bloodletting. It's the first show after a week's vacation. She spent it in Ottawa with family, catching up by taking long walks down train tracks with her brothers, who thankfully never discuss her career with her. "We couldn't be more different," coos Morissette, "but I feel closer to them than I ever have." She takes care to explain that her parents aren't phased by hearing their daughter refer to oral sex and fucking to the cheers of an enthusiastic throng. "A lot of people ask my parents, 'Aren't you embarrassed that your daughter speaks like that?' and they say, 'No, she's been that way her whole life, she just wasn't doing it publicly. And we're glad she is now.' " Morissette laughs. "My mother's raunchier than I am."

Old friends from her Toronto days drop in, including former roommate Mike Levine of the Canadian cheese-metal band Triumph. Her parents come down to see the show. Even old enemies from her mallrat days, busily promoting the opening act, have shamelessly appeared.

"Right now is pretty pinnacle-ish," she tells me when I ask about her goals. "I went to the beach just the other night and I sat on the same rock I sat on when I first moved to Toronto, which was probably the hardest time in my whole life. I remember sitting on that rock in such major pain. And then I sat on it the other night-same rock-and I just went, 'Man.' "

That's why it looks strange when she squints a little and arches her back during "Right Through You," sternly indicating the band as she growls, "Hello Mr. Man / You didn't think I'd come back / You didn't think I'd show up with my army / And this ammunition on my back." After the show, she tells me that she spotted in the audience some of the same record execs who inspired the song. Her eyes light up. "When this one guy approached me backstage," she whispers, "I looked him in the eye and said, 'See you on the way down.' "

David Wild (Rolling Stone - November 2, 1995)

Here's a clue for the clueless generation: If you're going to worship someone, you ought to know what she looks like. Outside the Mercury Cafe Brewhouse, in Denver, where Alanis Morissette is playing a club gig, a desperate young man approaches the singer in the hopes of buying an extra ticket, unaware that he's talking to the headliner. It's a few hours before show time, and already a crowd of ticketless fans--a mix of intense young women, bookish lads and preppy couples--has gathered to try to buy scalped tickets to this sold-out show.

Just because fans of Morissette connect with her heartfelt, earnest songs--in fact, they seem on the verge of annointing her rock's Generation X-rated diva--doesn't mean they could pick their heroine out of a police lineup. They're not to blame: The hit clip for that unltimate bad-breakup anthem, "You Oughta Know," is so atmospherically photographed as to make its star a barely recognizable MTV icon. Similarly, the photo of Morissette on the cover of her smash album, Jagged Little Pill, has a hazy, elusive quality.

"I've been told a few times now that I don't look like my songs," Morissette says. "People expect me to have purple hair and a pierced nose and boobs. Then they meet me, and I'm just...me." In this instance, "me" is a petite but curvaceous young woman who wears little makeup. "I hate to let anyone down, but I'm not the cleavage sort of aesthetic babe. I've been down that road before, and that's not what I'm about."

Exactly what Morissette is about has become a subject of passionate debate on the Internet and everywhere else music fans meet since "You Oughta Know" started its long reign atop the modern-rock radio charts. She has been called everything from brilliant to naive, naysayers are pissed that the public has chosen to make Morissette a star instead of the critically lauded Liz Phair. In any case, the masses have spoken with their wallets. Want to know how hot Morissette is? The other day she got a gushing love letter from the other queen of 1995's pop culture prom, Alicia Silverstone.

On Jagged Little Pill's "Right Through You," Morissette sings about a time that sounds like the present: "Now that I'm Miss Thing/Now that I'm a zillionaire." Although actually written when she was broke and sleeping on friend's couches in Los Angeles, the lines appear to have come true.

"I guess in a way, I am Miss Thing right now," Morissette says, shaking her head. "I laugh now when I sing the song onstage because the whole thing's so ironic. When I wrote those words, I was the furthest thing in the world from it." Not that she's complaining. Unlike some of her contemporaries, Morissette says she's excited by her success: "I asked for this."

Partly because Morissette collaborated on Jagged Little Pill with Glen Ballard--a successful songwriter and pop producer known for his work with Wilson Phillips, among others--her critics suggest she's simply a contrived creation of the studio. But for the crowd in Denver, there's no question that Morissette is for real. From the moment she kicks into "All I Really Want" with furious harmonica-blowing accompaniment, it's obvious that a healthy percentage of this packed audience has not only taken these songs to heart, it knows them all by heart--and this for an album that at the time of the Denver show had been released only five weeks. Morissette's uncensored documentations of her psychosexual former-Catholic-girl torments has become the resonant fodder for the rest of the entire listening world. As she sings on "Forgiven": "I sang halleluhah in the choir/I confessed my darkest deeds to an envious man/My brothers, they never went blind for what they did/But I may as well have/In the name of the Father, the skeptic and the Son/ I had one more stupid question."

"The reaction of the audience has been so amazing and open," says Morissette. "It's comforting and bittersweet to know that I'm not the only one who's gone through these things. At the same time it's a little disturbing that apparently there's a lot of people out there having gone through such painful things. The reaction has been pretty intense." Sometimes the reaction is so intense, it shocks even Morissette. "There was a mosh pit in Minneapolis when we played there. Is it me, or is this music not about mosh-pitting?" Still sings with conviction and whipping her long mane of hair around the stage, Morissette brings the Denver crowd to a frenzy. Some may find her powerful voice--which at times recalls Sin_ad O'Conner's and Kate Bush's--overly mannered, but she really is one of rock's most gifted vocalists. Like the Counting Crows' Adam Duritz and the Cranberries' Dolores O'Riordan, she's a brave lead singer willing to go to an emotional level just millimeters below over the top.

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 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 pressure 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 Playboy centerfolds. There's nothing I regret. Maybe people will just understand my lyrics now a little 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."

As you might gather from listening to Jagged Little Pill's "Forgiven," some of Morissette's revelations involved her feelings about sexuality and spirituality. She went to church every Sundy while growing up and attended a Roman Catholic school. "Then I rejected the whole concept of organized religion," says Morissette. "Still do. But now when I'm onstage, it's very spiritual. I feel very close to God when I'm up there."

Morissette says that part of her problem with the Roman Catholic church is its sexual repression. In "You Oughta Know" she describes herself as "perverted." Today she simply describes herself as being "a very sexual person." "I was active and physically doing the things that were sexual when I was younger," she says. There was one side of me that was crazy and deviant, doing things ahead of my time, and another side that was very held back, wanting to remain virginal for the sake of being the good white Catholic girl."

These sorts of tensions led the overachieving Morissette to a few episodes she characterizes as breakdowns. "I had a few," she says. "That sort of comes from a passive-aggressive approach. From the time I was 10, I was working with all these people trying to control me and tell me what they thought I should be and what I should look like. And I tried to control myself to be what they wanted me to be." Morissette says drugs were never a problem for her "because my getting into drugs would have meant that I wasn't perfect."

In an attempt to find more fulfillment musically and perhaps even grow up a little, Morissette moved to Toronto after graduating from high school at 17. "The idea was to let her live on her own and see what's life's about," says Scott Welch, who became her manager around that time. Morissette calls these "a couple of the most growthful years for me." Creatively, however, she searched with little luck for the right musical collaborator.

Eventually, Morissette found free articstic expression in a most unlikely location: Los Angeles. "It was a sort of baptism by fire when I got there," she says. "I was held up at gunpoint in Hollywood when I first moved here. Still, depite all the negatives, it was like in 'Hand in My Pocket': I was broke, but I was happy."

Professionally, Morissette went on about 10 bad "blind dates" with various songwriting pros and in the process "learned only what I didn't want to do." Things turned around in February '94 when she knocked on Glen Ballard's front door. A onetime protˇgˇ of Quincy Jones, Ballard cowrote Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" and has worked with everyone from Evelyn "Champagne" King to David Hasselhoff.

The two hit it off famously. both had gone the safe commercial route before and were anxious to try something more adventurous. "Glen had a certain history, as I had, and when we met, we immediately connected," Morissette says. "We just started with a clean slate."

"What struck me about Alanis was that she was so incredibly self-possessed," Ballard says, "I just connected with her as a person, and, almost paranthetically, it was like 'Wow, you're 19?' She was so intelligent and ready to take a chance on doing something that might have no commercial application. Although there was some question about what she wanted to do musically, she knew what she didn't want to do, which was anything that wasn't authentic and from the heart."

Feeling safe in the nurturing environment of Ballard's home studio, Morissette's creative floodgates opened. "It was the most spiritual experience either of us ever had with music," she says. "The whole thing was very accelerated and stream of consciousness.

"The record is my story," Morissette says. "I think of the album as running over the different facets of my personality, one of them being my sexual self. To isolate 'You Oughta Know' is a misrepresentation of the whole story. By no means is this record just a sexual, angry record. That song wasn't written for the sake of revenge, it was written for the sake of release. I'm actually a pretty rational, calm person."

Despite her youth, Morissette says the songs on Jagged Little Pill are based on numerous relationships. "Yeah, I've met a lot of people and done a lot of things," she says matter-of-factly.

The album title comes from a lyric in "You Learn," which for Morissette expresses the idea that "a lot of times when you're immersed in something painful, you don't realize there's any lesson. A lot of what I wrote about was difficult times from which I walked away a better person."

Much of Jagged Little Pill was recorded with only Morissette and multi-instrumentalist Ballard in the studio. She wrote all the lyrics and worked out musical ideas with Ballard. Only later did some of the other musicians on the album--keyboardist Benmont Tench and the Red Hot Cili Peppers' Flea and Dave Navarro--add overdubs. "We'd literally write and record a song in a day," says Ballard. "That process was so much a factor in us capturing the moment."

Confident they were onto something special, Ballard sent a tape of some of the early songs to a friend at Atlantic. Although a full-out bidding war never materialized, a couple of companies expressed interest. "The process was difficult for me," says Morissette. "Since I was 14, I've spent a lot of time with people focused on everything except the music. For me this was not about money or getting patted on the back. I met with some people who'd tell me, 'Why don't you change this lyric, and the kids will respond more.' And I'd say, 'I didn't write it for them. I wrote it for me.'"

Finally, Morissette found a new corporate home shortly after she and Ballard took a meeting with Maverick's A&R executive Guy Oseary, who heard "You Oughta Know" and "Perfect" and went straight to his colleagues Freddy DeMann and Abbey Konowitch. After seeing Morissette sing a few songs live in Ballard's studio, Oseary signed her late last year.

Asked what initially drew her to Morissette's music, Madonna answers, "Her honesty, her pain, her hopefulness." Morissette returns the compliment. "I respect Madonna very much," says Morissette. "I respect her strength and her resilience in a crazy business. I still remember seeing her in an interview when I was younger, talking about freedom at a time when I was coming to terms with my own sexuality. She's a great CEO."

Jagged Little Pill came out this past June, and Los Angeles' influential alternative station KPOQ jumped on it immediately. "I guess we're all so callous that if people start responding to a record, everyone just assumes it's hype," says Welch, Morissette's manager. "We were just hoping to sell maybe 250,000 or maybe 300,000 albums by the end of the year and build a base. Look what happened."

Jagged Little Pill is now double platinum and shows no signs of slowing down. Obviously the music-buying public approves of the new, grown-up Morissette in a big way. But more important, what do her parents think?

"They're happy because they know a lot of what I've gone through, and they're happy I got it all out of my system," Morissette says with a smile. "My did called me up when he heard the record and said, 'So you're expressing a lot of emotion. That's good.' And I laughed and said, 'Yeah, I am, to say the least.'"

Over lunch in New York a few weeks later, Morissette says she's again ready to do a little acting. She says portraying another character would leaver her feeling less vulnerable. "It takes a lot out of me, singing every night," she says, "knowing there are people listening to things I never thought you could even share with one person, let alone everyone."

Final preparations for one of the biggest days of Morissette's life are being made as she speaks. Last night she collapsed from exhaustion after an important New York show that she nearly cancelled hours before show time. Later this afternoon she's taping The Late Show With David Letterman before rushing to the night's gig in Philidelphia. Tomorrow there's a video shoot for Jagged Little Pill's second single, "Hand in My Pocket." Still to come are the MTV Video Awards. But as she chats away in a Manhattan health-food restaurant, the self-confessed bohemian comes off like the calmest person in the Top 10.

Offers are pouring in for tours, soundtracks and movies. "I just have to make sure I do things for the right reasons," Morissette says emphatically. "I've got to remember what brought me to this place, which was being honest. If I stop doing that, I'm disrespecting what got me here."

Already, Morissette has learned that she doesn't want to do more innuendo-laden radio interviews like the one she did on KROQ's Loveline, a sex-oriented listener call-in show. "I owe it to myself and Glen and this album not to demean it," Morissette says. "Jokes about me taking guys out to theaters are not funny." (Not that she doesn't have a sense of humor about her angst-in-her-pants image: One of the slogans on her new tour T-shirts is INTELLECTUAL INTERCOURSE.)

Retaining the spirit of the album was also a goal in finding her band, according to Morissette. "We auditioned 50 people just through word of mouth," she says. "The idea was not just to make sure the musicianship was amazing but also that we didn't want jaded people who had done the road thing one too many times and spent their time rolling their eyes. And as you can see, I got real lucky."

While traveling around in a crowded van and staying in cheap hotels, the Jagged Little Pill tour mates have shared an authentically grungy experience. Part of the idea of this tour--booked before the album took off--was to give them the chance to become close-knit, which they have. The only thing the band is lacking is a name, although Morissette reports that the boys in the band are pushing for the Sexual Chocolate.

To stay sane on the road, Morissette reads, meditates, and exercises. Socially, she says, "I've just been dating a whole bunch of people and kind of making up for lost time." More chastely, she has made a habit of painting the fingernails of many of the men she encounters. She started with her own band mates and has moved onto other men she has met, including the members of Better Than Ezra. "It's a good excuse to get a guy to put his hand on your knee," she says.

As its namesake paints away, Morissette-mania spreads worldwide, even to Canada, an early holdout. Apparantly some of her old fans initially had trouble with the way in which she has grown up in public. "For obvious reasons, they're a little more apprehensive in Canada," Morissette says. "A number of interviews I did turned into adversarial situations up there. They'd tell me my records sucked and that what I'm doing now is contrived. If it was that calculated, I must be pretty darn smart. Don't give me that much credit."

Since Morissette's work is so autobiographical, does she think she has to endure more fucked-up romances and other miseries before she can write another powerful album? "I think it's inevitable that you go through the hard, fucked-up stuff," she says. "If you're alive on this earth, it's going to happen, so I'm not worried."

Her performance of "You Oughta Know" on Letterman goes well. Morissette sings the song's uncensored lyrics, knowing full well she'll get bleeped because you really can't do that on television. As she makes her hasty exit out of the studio, Morissette runs into fellow Canadian Paul Shaffer. "Great performance," the bandleader tells her warmly. "Even more anguished than the album version."

The next morning--too few hours after returning from the Philly show--Morissette and the Sexual Chocolate gather in their lobby and head out to Brooklyn, N.Y., for the "Hand in My Pocket" video shoot. On the way the rest of the band members scant two newspaper reviews of the New York show. The New York Times is extremely respectful; the Daily News is extremely savage. SHE DOES THE TRITE THING is the News' headline. The piece calls Morissette "pop's latest and most transparent poster girl for female rage." "You don't want to read that one," Lashley tells her.

"I don't want to read either one," Morissette retorts before quickly offering to paint the guitarist's fingernails black.

Upon arriving at the shoot, Morissette's thrilled to see that the vision she has been brainstorming in recent weeks with director Mark Kohr, know for his work with Green Day, has come to life. An entire picturesque Brooklyn block has been transformed into a colorful, Fellini-esque parade route. An eclectic cast of characters, including skateboarding punks and the police on horseback, lend the scene a nicely surreal feel. The Cadillac that Morissette will drive in the parade awaits her. The locals, meanwhile, are trying to figure out what the hell's going on. "I think it's some foreign group," says an elderly lady standing in front of the All for Paws pet store.

The band members will only appear as bored parade observers. Morissette, on the other hand, has settled in for an all-day shoot that will end with an artificial rainstorm. In a moment of down time, they all sit in a trailer and watch a replay of their Letterman performance. Suddenly there's a knock at the door. A New York policewoman has spotted Morissette and requests an autograph on, of all things, the Daily News review. DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ.

Transformed from a huge-haired teen poppet into a venom-spitting adult - with six million album sales. Ladies and gentlemen: the fully-grown, Madonna-sponsored phenomenon that is Alanis Morissette. "I have a lot of hunger," she tells Tom Doyle.

It reads like the cheesy climax of some ropey child star bio-pic. Teenage all0singing, all-dancing starlet permanently filled with cheer finally flees the parental nest. Free of her loving family and those uncaring business acquaintances who propelled her into platinum-selling success, she is living alone in a rodent-infested apartment, deperately trying to cope with life on her own and slowly fraying at the edges. Eighteen-year-old Alanis Morissette, the perm-haired puffball pop star (Canada's answer to Debbie Gibson! Or Tiffany!) is beginning to feel increasingly isolated and confused, panicky even.

"I knew that I had to get away from everything, I knew that I was really clinging to my family and desperately afraid of so many things," she now admits. "But it was just anxiety attacks every few hours. It wasn't a good time, and now I can say that with a smile on my face only because I know that I will never be as broken as I was then."

Even more emotion-drenched and script-friendly is the fact that her mood of black misery was swept away with the discovery of one album. "The first time I heard Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes," she says, "I played the record in its entirety, lying on my living room floor, and I just bawled my eyes out. It felt like it was the first time I could relate to a woman on that level through her music and I was so grateful. I felt that she'd been through a lot of the things I'd gone through."

Flicking to the last page, we discover the inevitably heartwarming epilogue. Turning her experiences into sturdy, confessional rock songs inspired by her newfound heroine, her first post-teen album, Jagged Little Pill, goes on to sell nearly six million copies worldwide and Alanis Morissette, almost overnight, becomes an international star.

"I think you become a true adult when you can hit rock bottom and then walk away from that experience and transcend it," she muses, "and until that happens, I think you're not fully alive. It was a horrible time, but it was the greatest time because of how horrible it was. I look back on that and I know that if I were to take that link out of the proverbial chain, that I would not be here right now."

Right now being a dull, grey Wednesday in Birmingham. Out of her rain-flecked window in this Midlands business hotel, isolated within an industrial estate, Morissette has a perfectly framed view of the oversized carbuncle that is the NEC, the venue where she will soon enjoy the twin honours of being one of the "turns" at the confectionery-sponsored Twix Mix rock concert jamboree (hosted by the ever-ebullient Gary Crowley) and appearing on the same bill as David Bowie. Significantly free of make-up and lank of hair, she speaks in clear, measured tones, with only a frequently recurring hint of excitement in her voice giving away her 21 years.

On Jagged Little Pill, she is brimming with contradictions, a fact best exemplified by Hand in My Pocket (the second radio and MTV dominating release in the LP's continent conquering worldwide campaign), in which she admits in turns to being broke but happy, sane but overwhelmed, green but wise, and brave yet entirely chicken shit. Lyrically casting aside Catholicism, lecherous record company MD's and former lovers with chest expanded pride and no little venom, the album has elevated Morissette's profile far higher than any of her Janet Jackson inspired aerobic pop hoppings back home could have ever done. Initially, of course, her countryfolk were entirely perplexed by the fact that one of their squeakiest pop icons (responsible for two major Canadian hit albums, 'Alanis' in 1991 and 'Now is the Time' the following year) was now, in her new hit single, enquiring of her ex-boyfriend, "Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?"

"When I let go of the motivation to achieve the adulation and external success that I had in Canada," she reasons, "that was the minute it all started happening. I entered into this whole new territory personally and spiritually and emotionally, and inevitably that came out in the music. It just reached a point where if having to do music for the rest of my life meant that I'd have to do it on the street corner, I would have done it. "

On stage this evening at 8:50 sharp, off again by 9:20, Alanis Morissette performs an intense yet pointedly sexless set. Clad in black leather and silk with her long black tresses obscuring her face for the most part, she paces back and forth like a rabbit caught in the headlights, while puffing away with Dylan-like adequacy on her harmonica and providing note perfect vocal renditions of songs which showcase a voice that can slip between a breathy murmur and toe-curling falsetto in the space of one intensely delivered line. By the end, she is skipping awkwardly from one side of the stage to the other with no regard for how ungainly this might appear. Ttuly, she oozes all the disregard for pop etiquette of a nonchalant veteran.

"When they first heard the record," she reasons, "a lot of people said to me, 'This does not sound like a debut; this sounds like you've been through so much. How could this be?' Part of me just wants to say, 'Well, listen to this old record of mine, watch a couple of the videos, then maybe you'll understand a little more.'"

Her career began, remarkably, at the age of 10, when she auditioned for a Canadian cable TV show. On landing the job, she began ferreting away her not insubstantial wages and within months released her first single, Fate Stay With Me ("It was a story about somebody leaving somebody. A little foresight there probably...") on an independent label set up by her parents who, she insists, were neither pushy stage mother types nor, perhaps even more feasibly, hippies.

"If anyone were to meet my parents, they would quickly realise that it was self-motivated," she argues. "They were open minded enough to realise that if I was that passionate about something, they should encourage me in it. They were the kind of parents who, if I came home with a report card and I had Fs in certain subjects and As in others, they'd encourage me in what I was interested in as opposed to questioning why I was doing badly in other things. They were very supportive and they let me do things that the rule books on parenting would probably say not to. they let me travel and do a lot of things well before I was 15 years old."

Is the PR description of you as a child prodigy an accurate one?

"Pretty much. I was doing a lot of things from an early age. I spent a lot of time with adults and I just never thought that I couldn't do anything, so I did it. At that time I was listening to everything from Abba to Bob Dylan, whose voice I didn't enjoy, although I liked what he was trying to communicate. I probably didn't understand half of what he was talking about, but it sounded interesting. I loved pop music, anything I could hold onto, just chord changes that provoked some sort of emotion in me."

Are any accusations of brattiness reasonable?

"I don't think I had enough self-esteem to be bratty. But I was precocious and I held myself like I was 40 when I was 11 years old. But I wasn't a brat at all, though I teetered on being obnoxious now and then. I had a lot of energy and it was hard to sort of...come down."

Signing to MCA Records, she embarked on a pop career that would yield a string of lightweight dance hits and a fame that would last throughout her "difficult" teenage years. Boyfriends, as with most fledgling pop artistes, were not on the agenda ("I was a very flirtatious person, but I don't think I was emotionally able to be in a relationship"). The marriage to her record company ended acrimoniously and she left for Toronto to attempt to pick up the pieces. On resurfacing from the aforementioned hell, she relocated to LA, where she met Glen Ballard - a renowned Californian producer living largely off the royalties of Man in the Mirror, the hit he penned for Michael Jackson - who became her musical collaborator on Jagged Little Pill, the majority of which comprises their original demos, with vocal and guitar parts committed to tape within a matter of one, or at the most, two takes.

An extended trawl of record company A&R departments began, the trials of which are documented in Right Through You, a song that includes the widely-quoted line concerning the MD who, as she claims in the lyric, wanted to "wine, dine, 69 me". One 15 minute meeting with Guy Oseary at Madonna's Maverick label bagged a deal, though not the highest potential figure ("I don't want a lot of money, I want a lot of faith") - and the release of You Oughta Know, the searing debut single from the record, was accompanied by statements from her conical-bra sporting company boss about how she could relate to Morissette being "slightly awkward but extremely self-possessed". The singer herself is keen not to draw any parallels.

"I have a lot of hunger, which I'm sure she had," she reasons, "but I think we're motivated by different things. I have no problem with making mistakes and falling on my face publicly; she's been pretty flawless with her public persona. That can be argued about, of course: I guess it depends on what your perception of falling on your ass is. I don't know...I could talk about the differences between Madonna and me for hours, but I don't want to."

In keeping with her relaxed approach to public embarrassment, she is fiercely defensive of her past and her shift from sugary disco to filthy-mouthed rock, although, rather notably, she went to great lengths to ensure that MCA couldn't re-issue her previous albums in an attempt to cash in on her recent successes.

"Yeah, I initiated those records not being available anywhere, and I think it was misconstrued as my being ashamed of it. But actually part of me wants people to hear my old music because it validates the emotions and the reactions that I write about on Jagged Little Pill. The main reason behind it was that I din't want people going out and buying this record and then going back to the old records thinking they were part one and part two because they're not, and so people would feel very disappointed. But I have absolutely no regrets. How can I possible spend the next 80 years of my life feeling bad about who I was or what I was doing when I was 16 years old?"

Another noteable knock-on effect from that period is Morissette's current image, founded upon anything other than flesh-revealing titillation.

"Sure, that's in reponse to what I felt was the emphasis when I was 15 or 16," she admits, "the big hair and nice outfits, and alittle cleavage here and there. When I first went to LA, I went almost to the opposite end of the spectrum: I didn't wear an ounce of make-up, I didn't wear anything that was uncomfortable and I still don't. Even recently there has been the odd photo shoot where I think, 'Am I wearing this because I want to or because I feel I have to? And if ever there's that question, I don't do it. There was one photo session I did showing a bit of cleavage and I freaked out at first when I saw the pictures because it brought back so many memories."

It is her image, combined with the often graphically sexual nature of her lyrics, which makes Morissette so fascinating. Still, if her music wasn't quite so marvellous, the cynic could say, Kooky woman, shock provoking couplets, softly purring voice which periodically mutates into a banshee yell...it's all sounding a bit too familiar.

"I guess some people do write lines to court controversy," she reckons, "but I wouldn't do that. It's not in my nature to do something in order to get a reaction from somebody. None of this is affected. I think we're all crazy. I think we're all fucking nuts. It's simply a matter of how much you display it."

And Alanis Morissette wears it very, very well.