Morissette offers a dose of comfort
Alanis Morissette/Jason Mraz
Wang Center, Boston, Massachusetts
June 17, 2005
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in The Boston Globe, June 20, 2005

Its creator might argue otherwise, but last week’s release of Jagged Little Pill Acoustic (a Starbucks exclusive until July 26) could easily be read as a sign of desperation. After all, while Alanis Morissette’s original Pill sold 16 million copies, its followup sold only three million and only one other Morissette album even went gold. If those numbers don’t sound problematic, consider that the sales record of her contemporaries Hootie and the Blowfish, the go-to band for smirking ’90s nostalgia, consists of identical numbers.

Considered in that light, Morissette’s fiddling with the album seems less like an artistic risk than a retreat to her one unqualified hit, and Friday’s performance at the Wang Center didn’t offer up much of a counterargument. Despite a handful of more recent songs like “Hands Clean” and the moody, minor-key “Sister Blister,” the show was billed as a celebration of the tenth anniversary of Pill, and Morissette played every one of its songs by the end.

If all of this focus on a decade-old album suggested that Morissette’s glory days are long gone, neither she nor the audience let on. Performing on a stage made up to look like a well-used living room, the singer was relaxed and comfortable atop her band’s acoustic backing, though she occasionally had trouble making herself heard over the crowd’s singing. She eventually stepped back and let them take entire verses and choruses of “Ironic,” though she made a point of taking back the song for the newly altered and Massachusetts-friendly line, “It’s meeting the man of my dreams/And then meeting his beautiful husband.”

Morissette took a few other liberties with her songs, slowing down and changing the chords of “Hand In My Pocket” and giving “You Oughtta Know” the same churning, unresolved feel of “Fire And Rain.” Mostly, though, the acoustic arrangements didn’t drastically alter the material but simply offered a warmer and subtler spin on songs like “Head Over Feet” and “Right Through You.”

Opener Jason Mraz maintained the evening’s acoustic bent, providing a busily rhythmic thrust to his clever songs and sounding like G. Love singing John Mayer. He and percussionist Toca Rivera joked around like best friends, but their clowning left room for only seven songs in their 40-minute set.

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