| |  | | Morissette comes clean about the origin of her weight obsession on "Hands Clean," the first single from Under Rug Swept, which brings to the forefront abusive comments made by her longtime ex that shaped her constant questioning of whether she could ever be thin enough, good enough. She sings his comments from his perspective in the verses and answers him from the present in the chorus and bridge, creating a virtual "he said, she said" confrontation between the two. "I might want to marry you one day if you'd watch that weight and keep your firm body," goes one such line of his — one that he apparently said to her when she was all of 14.
"There was a lot of focus on what the external was," Morissette said, "and God bless him and God bless society on some level for having that take, but it was definitely at odds with what my take was, which is that our bodies are instruments and fun in terms of them being ornaments ... I struggled with eating disorders all through my teen years, and some of it was because of that, and some of it was just because of magazines and society and messages and family and school and everything. It's not one singular person that can be pointed at." [RealVideo]
Still, his remark stung, and Morissette ended up going the reverse route — focusing on her internal life, while coming to terms with and eventually exposing her external self, even when it meant facing ridicule. After all, appearing naked as she did in the "Thank U" video takes chutzpah. Morissette said she's taking the same path — brazen nakedness — with her lyrics, because only by doing so can she understand her experience. Part of the chorus of "Hands Clean" is the breaking of a promise she once made to keep things under wraps.
"I wanted to focus on certain things that I hadn't been talking about, about this particular relationship and writing it for myself," she said. "Just to speak it, so I could actually remember what had happened because it did get to a point where I was forgetting almost, decidedly so ... I basically wanted to be as honest about this situation with this person from my past because I had sort of promised to be silent about so many things, at the cost of myself, really. So writing about it was more about wanting to finally speak the truth about it to myself more so than wanting to seek revenge of any sort on this person."
More so than taking her ex to task, Morissette triumphs merely by asserting her own musical self — by writing, producing and arranging the entire work on her own; there's no Glen Ballard/Svengali figure guiding her this time. Not that that was according to plan, but over the course of her past two albums, she picked up enough skills to do it her way.
"I went to Toronto to write," she said, "and I didn't know whether I'd be writing songs for the record alone or with someone. I had no idea, but I started writing alone, and within the first week I'd written seven songs. So it was all really fast and accelerated, and I think 'Hands Clean' was maybe the 10th song that I wrote and I just wrote it with a guitar in a room. I'd have my little space station worked out where it was like a keyboard, an acoustic, an electric, my journal and a microphone set up, and we'd record it all onto DAT.
Running a personal ad for her ideal mate, touring through the Mid East and hanging with the Navajos ... NEXT
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