Alanis Morrissette, Joan Jett, Morgan Wade
Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia, Maryland, June 30, 2024

In August 1999, I joined a small group of people driving from the northern suburbs of Boston to the hinterlands of Southern Massachusetts to see what was, in retrospect, a monumentally odd dual-headlining show of Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos. The short-lived 5 1/2 Weeks collaboration, which seems like it could've been a clash of egos, ended up not being the artistic or cultural disaster that it might have been, although it was by no means the best Tori Amos show I ever saw. But it was my only experience seeing Alanis Morissette in concert. Until last month.

I didn't write anything that stayed online from that concert, although my concertgoing companion, glenn mcdonald, wrote a typically prolix description of the show a few months later, in the context of reviewing a boatload of Tori Amos and Alanis Morissette CD singles. I drove glenn and a few others to that show from Somerville, and one of my most distinct memories was that Alanis danced like a goat, and that the crowd a stone’s throw from Rhode Island cheered lustily during the chorus of the song “Thank U” in the encore, when she sang, “Thank you India, thank you Providence.” Of course that wasn’t the Providence that Alanis was thanking at the time. More memorable than the Alanis Morissette performance was the confrontation between Tori Amos and a few belligerent fans, which glenn concisely described in his 1999 blog.

I had owned Jagged Little Pill on CD since 1996, and its overly verbose followup Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, and even the MTV Unplugged record (pretty good, although the Police cover didn’t need the gender swap in the lyrics). I even bought Under Rug Swept as a dodgy bootleg in Kamchatka and picked up some of the others before my attention faded in the late 2000s.

This being said, it was almost 25 years from the first time I saw Alanis to the subsequent time that I brought my wife and a few friends to see her in the posh suburbs of DC. Since that time, Alanis went from global pop phenomenon to someone on the margins of commercial rock, to dabbling in acting (her work in Weeds was lovely, her Philip K. Dick adaptation Radio Free Albemuth was honest in its weirdness; she’s never denied being a dork), to becoming something of a wellness and holistic healing advocate whose affirmations moved ominously close to New Age hokum. And of course, she had a jukebox musical on Broadway based on her songs. She has never been out of the spotlight, exactly, but it was noteworthy when a live pandemic television performance of a song about her children went viral for her daughter cheerfully babbling over her singing. My wife loved that performance and the song, “Ablaze,” as I suspect any parent would during such a fraught moment in the world.

For any aging Gen Xer or geriatric millennial. Alanis Morrissette is like the water we swam in during our formative years. I don’t listen to her music regularly, but I’m not planning on removing it from my CD shelves or my laptop either, and hearing “You Oughta Know” still gives me a jolt when it comes on unexpectedly. Now, she’s an elder musical stateswoman to generations of younger women (at the tender age of 50, mind you, and looking glorious) and looking back on the 25th anniversary of SFIJ and nearing the 30th of Jagged Little Pill.

The Alanis show was preceded by a short video montage of her musical life, and to her credit, it was no hagiography. There were awkward clips of her childhood on Canadian comedy TV, her dance-pop routines as a teenage Debbie Gibson-like ingenue, her goof on the Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps,” her nerdy parodies of her own songs — she has never taken her own stardom very seriously, although the video did of course feature her global stardom and armfuls of Grammy awards and platinum records.

Looking over the setlist, you can see how Morrissette still mostly relies on Jagged Little Pill and Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie for her live material. I get it; those were the big globe-conquering albums that everyone owned. But I think her continued work has strong material, and she did only two songs from the surprisingly good pandemic-era Such Pretty Forks In the Road — regrettably, not “Ablaze” — and 2012’s Havoc and Bright Lights, which I missed entirely. Something interesting in the approach to the songs was the brief segues or excerpts from a song that would be used only in passing; it creates a weird sense of mystery when looking over the setlist; like, “I don’t remember her doing that one.” But those are the segues in the setlist, which might be only a half a minute or so introducing a new song. Honestly, it feels like granting partial credit for only doing part of a math assignment, but that’s where Morrissette managed to sneak in some of the material from her less popular records.

After a lengthy electric set with some of her biggest hits - “You Learn,” “Head Over Feet,” a tremendous “Hands Clean” from Under Rug Swept, which is a very solid record that is mostly slept on — Alanis’s band broke for a four-song acoustic set. I don’t love Alanis in acoustic mode, even though I own the Unplugged CD, but the version of “Mary Jane” from Jagged Little Pill was a solid one. Something I always admired about Morrissette is her steadfast willingness to write songs with too many words, with awkward diction and rhyme schemes. Her scansion and the strange emphasis she places on syllables, not to mention the subject matter, are distinct. Despite her global fame, I think it’s why people who loved wordy experimentalists like Scott Miller of the Loud Family or Mary Timony of Helium or Stew of the Negro Problem or whatever also liked Alanis. They were all putting out records at that time; Alanis became a stadium-level pop star while the other languished playing in tiny clubs and recording on independent labels. But Alanis’s lyrical perversity — which peaked in SFIJ — makes her songs less predictable, less populist, than other chart-topping stars; it’s honestly remarkable that some of her weirdest songwriting choices became global hits.

So, on that note, onto “Ironic.” She opened the second electric set with “Ironic," probably the song from Jagged Little Pill for which Alanis got the most shit as a songwriter, from every grammar pedant (raises hand). It’s not my favorite song on Jagged Little Pill but it probably has the longest cultural impact decades later. It’s an indication of the song’s depth and impact, it’s almost thirty years later, that at least three or four of the images from the song, which doesn’t describe instances of irony, we get it, have become part of the vernacular. It’s still a great song, and seeing thousands of people shout-singing along to “It’s like RAAAIINNN on your wedding day,” has a visceral thrill. Given the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie anniversary, it’s not entirely surprising, but worth noting, that the encore were both SFIJ songs, not Jagged Little Pill: “Thank U” and “Uninvited.” And they were grand, vast, and satisfying for the twenty thousand in the audience in a late evening in Maryland.

Alanis Morrissette setlist: https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/alanis-morissette/2024/merriweather-post-pavilion-columbia-md-1ba94d2c.html

The two openers for the show were Morgan Wade and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. I heard only a few of Morgan Wade's songs, and after ascertaining that she was not in fact Morgan Wallen, it was fine. She is a heavily tattooed, muscular rock singer, in what is now an unfashionable lane, doing barroom classic rock with unironic covers. For points of reference, she mixed a Rick Springfield cover and a cover by the Outfield, along with a few of her originals, and borrowed heavily from familiar touchstones, including shout-along pub rock and vague honky-tonk allusions.

Morgan Wade setlist: https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/morgan-wade/2024/merriweather-post-pavilion-columbia-md-1b5711c8.html

In the second opening set, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts were phenomenal. The band came on stage following Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl” over the speakers, which made me smile. I was making an effort to see her entire set, and I expected something of a familiar canned greatest hits catalog. We got that, but I was delighted by how spontaneous her stage patter was, and the sense that it’s not just the same-old best-of she could have been doing any point in the past three decades. 


She spoke about growing up in Montgomery County, not too far away, and made funny jokes about the geography and the suburbs. She also cheerfully shared her lifetime love of the Baltimore Orioles, although this part of Montgomery County is now surely Nationals territory. Jett told stories about the relevance of particular songs to her, before her tender cover of the Replacements’ “Androgynous.” And she did every song you would expect her to play, from the covers you’d expect (“Crimson and Clover,” “I Love Rock ’n Roll”) to ones you wouldn’t (“Everyday People” by Sly Stone, “I’m So Free” by Lou Reed), and of course, all her own hits, from the Runaways “Cherry Bomb” to “I Hate Myself for Loving You,” which whole generations know as the Sunday Night Football anthem. I commented to my wife that the original lyrics of that song made a lot more sense now that Joan Jett came out as gay. She ended up with “Bad Reputation,” and honestly, she and Blackhearts could have been a fully satisfying performance all by itself.

Joan Jett setlist: https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/joan-jett-and-the-blackhearts/2024/merriweather-post-pavilion-columbia-md-ba94d2e.html



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/21/2024 02:58PM by zwirnm.