’90s pop rock grandee Alanis Morissette joins the Bluesfest 2020 lineup.
You probably thought the artist roster for this year’s Bluesfest couldn’t get any more elaborate, but the folks in Tyagarah are determined to make this their biggest festival to date.
Morissette’s performance will coincide with the 25th anniversary of her seminal album Jagged Little Pill. She’ll be playing the whole friggin’ thing in celebration. Come on, don’t pretend you’re not stoked.
Jagged Little Pill was the first Morissette album to be released outside of Canada. Morissette made her first couple of albums – Alanis and Now is the Time – when she was just a teenager. They alternated between accessible dance pop and lyrical naiveté.
For Jagged Little Pill, she made a concerted left turn into alternative rock and pop rock. The results were… well you know all about the results. The record birthed a veritable treasure chest of singles including ‘You Oughta Know’, ‘Hand in My Pocket’, ‘Ironic’ and ‘All I Really Want’.
Watch: Alanis Morissette – ‘Ironic’
‘Ironic’ was certified Gold in Australia. And while pedants insist on pointing out that “rain on your wedding” day and a “free ride when you’ve already paid” aren’t examples of irony but just bad luck, the song is an enduring fuzzy classic. ‘You Oughta Know’ went one better, achieving ARIA platinum certification.
In case you’ve forgotten, Alanis is also an awesome person. For starters, she’s an eloquent feminist. In a 2016 Time op-ed she described the patriarchy as “an ignorant and emotionally immature purgatory at best, and, at worst, a liminal despair-filled holding pattern carefully held together by resistance, hate, hostility and separatism.”
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She’s also hugely influential. This is exemplified by a 2015 article in The Guardian that underlines the feminist credentials of Jagged Little Pill. Musicians from Braids, The Staves, Alvvays and Shura contributed to the piece, speaking of their fondness for Morissette’s breakthrough LP.
Plus, in 2002 she showed up in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm and went on to play the character Dr. Audra Kitson on a couple of seasons of the show Weeds.
Bluesfest 2020 is being held from 9 – 13 April 2020.
Tickets are on sale now via Moshtix.
