Originally published at my site. Please leave any comments there.

There was a time when I really, really, really didn’t much like Alanis Morrisette. Couldn’t stand her, to be truthful. But that dislike, if I were being brutally honest with myself, wasn’t because of Morissette herself but rather because of her song “You Oughta Know” and the reaction from the media (and no small number of fans) to the song. Such a tremendous hullaballoo was made out of the fact that this woman (gasp! a woman!) was singing about these aggressively sexual acts in the song as if no female singer-songwriter had ever addressed issues of sex, jealousy, rage and revenge before. The frenzy surrounding that one song (and the near incessant radio and video play the song received for most of 1995) really turned me off of her music… even after I realized how catchy the rest of Jagged Little Pill was. [1] The more albums she sold and the more spins that record got and the more magazine covers she turned up on, the stronger my hatred for her grew.

(All of that distaste for her on my part was formed before I developed the Popular Does Not Automatically Equal Suck theory I operate under these days. Ah, the folly of youth.)

But over the last ten years or so, as she her name has become less synonymous with that one song (and, well, as I grew older), I’ve mellowed more than a bit and started to kind of dig on her. Some of her songs are actually pretty groovy, and her voice manages to be both fragile and biting at the same time, and very vulnerable — even when I have no idea what the hell her lyrics are talking about, I always feel like she feels whatever it is she’s singing.

Tonight, though… tonight my respect for Ms. Morissette increased a hundredfold:

(Click here if the video won’t show for you.)

Well done, Alanis. Well done.

(It occurred to me while listening to this song, though, that it seemed like a cover Tori Amos should have done.)

[1] Still, infernally catchy or not, please don’t get me started about the almost complete lack of irony in the song “Ironic.”