Alanis Morissette is no stranger to laying it all bare — and in a new interview, the Jagged Little Pill icon is still peeling back the layers
At 51, Morissette is opening up about a different kind of burnout. Not the grunge-era heartbreak she became famous for, but the insidious mental health toll of addiction, overwork, and the industry that quietly rewards it. “If I kept going, I’d be dead.”
In a raw conversation with The Guardian, Morissette didn’t mince words. “If I said, ‘Oh, I did heroin till four in the morning and totally blacked out,’ people would be like, ‘Oh s***, bitch needs some help,’” she said. “But if I said, ‘I’ve been working my f***ing ass off for this deadline and I finished at 4:15am,’ people would be patting my back.”
That double standard — glamorising workaholism while pathologising other addictions — is one Morissette knows too well. She’s battled substance abuse in the past, but says it was her work addiction that cut deepest. “It’s equally corrosive,” she explained. “Because any addiction, if we keep going with it, we’re dead.”
Even now, decades into a career that changed the sound of the 90s, Morissette admits she’s still fighting. “I have an anxious, depressive tendency,” she said, describing how being a “highly sensitive person” in a toxic environment nearly destroyed her. “If you put a highly sensitive person in an environment where they’re brow-beaten or reduced, they’ll basically want to kill themselves.”
Therapy, she says, is what keeps her alive.
It’s a sobering statement — especially coming from someone gearing up for her Glastonbury debut this Friday, headlining the Pyramid Stage like a survivor.
For all the familiar singalongs and 90s nostalgia, Morissette’s honesty is a reminder that the struggles don’t stop once you’re on stage. Vulnerability doesn’t disappear with success, and recovery rarely follows a straight line.
