Jagged Little Pill Acoustic is an acoustic studio version of Alanis Morissette’s international breakthrough album Jagged Little Pill (1995). When Jagged Little Pill Acoustic was released in 2005, it commemorated the tenth anniversary of the original album.
The album’s single in the U.S. was “Hand In My Pocket”. The video for the track received rotation on VH1. The accompanying tour ran for two months in mid-2005, with Morissette playing small theatre venues. During the same period, Morissette was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame. In the autumn of 2005, Alanis Morissette opened for The Rolling Stones for a few dates of their A Bigger Bang Tour.
The cover artwork is a tribute to the cover of the original Jagged Little Pill. To celebrate the first vinyl release ever of this release, the first 1500 copies are numbered and pressed on transparent vinyl.
Review:
There's an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm from 2002 where Alanis
Morissette is performing at a benefit concert that's eventually held at Larry
David's home, where she sings a stripped-down acoustic arrangement of “You
Oughta Know” with guitarist David Levita for an audience of wealthy Hollywood
liberals. This may not have been the genesis of her 2005 album Jagged Little
Pill Acoustic – initially for sale only in Starbucks stores, but released to
mass retail in late July – but that performance not only offers a clue to the
sound of this acoustic-based reinterpretation of her blockbuster breakthrough,
but also to its target audience. Unlike the 1995 original, this is not a dense,
glossy pop album that slyly co-opts and repackages ideas from the musical fringe
for a mass audience, nor is this akin to her 1999 acoustic album Alanis
Unplugged, where Morissette was still sorting out exactly which direction to
take in the aftermath of her phenomenal success. Jagged Little Pill Acoustic is
the sound of an artist who is comfortable and settled, fondly reminiscing about
her crazy past for an audience that is also comfortable and settled. This is
sepia-toned music (which is appropriate, since the cover itself is a sepia-toned
replication of the original's artwork), with all of the excesses and
eccentricities of youth either romanticized or dismissed with a soft chuckle.
Alanis marvels at how crazy she was back then, as she and her audience both
congratulate themselves on surviving ten years while reflecting on how much
they've personally grown in that decade. All of this is captured in the lone
lyrical change: “Ironic” now concludes with Alanis meeting the man of her
dreams and meeting not his beautiful wife, but his beautiful husband (she's no
longer pronouncing “figures” as “figgers,” either). This doesn't change
the song or its intent, but it does signal that Morissette has a slightly
different perspective, one that is self-congratulatory, more tolerant, and more
self-consciously urbane. And that pretty much summarizes the music here, too:
it's deliberately mature and certainly more tasteful than the original Jagged
Little Pill, the kind of music that would sound good playing in, well, the
background of a coffee shop. While there are acoustic guitars at the foundation
of each of the 12 tracks here (plus the unlisted 13th bonus track), this isn't
strictly acoustic, at least by most standards: with original JLP producer Glen
Ballard, who never met a production he couldn't overdub a few more times than
necessary, on board as well, it's not surprising that Acoustic winds up being a
subdued adult alternative pop album filled with strings, keyboards, and
production instead of a stark acoustic record. Since Ballard is a pro and since
Alanis has lived with these songs long enough to find different, yet
comfortable, ways to rephrase these familiar melodies, it's a pleasant enough
listen, but it's hard to see the point of the album. That is, unless it is
really for the kind of crowd she serenaded in that episode of Curb Your
Enthusiasm – a very satisfied, very comfortable audience that prefers to see
the past only through rose-colored glasses that present their history in terms
that are more acceptable to who they are now than who they were back then.
~ Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine