Alanis Morissette’s blonde hair was on full display Saturday night, but it was her voice, humor and range of emotions that made her acoustic performance a pill that was neither jagged nor hard to swallow.
The singer-songwriter best known for her caustic breakup song “You Oughta Know,” sat dressed in black, center stage and delivered a concise set of stripped down career highlights with a healthy dose of storytelling and self-deprecation.
As expected, Morissette relied heavily on material from her magnum opus “Jagged Little Pill” album, eight of the set’s 14 songs to be exact. While Morissette’s acoustic treatment of “Pill” songs is nothing new, it is an amazing experience to hear the renditions in a live setting.
Not surprisingly, the “Jagged Little Pill” material turned out to be the crowd pleasers, but songs like “A Man” and “Mary Jane” stood out because many members of the crowd did not sing-along and it gave the songs an ethereal quality.
With the venue’s close proximity to the Canadian border, Morissette’s jokes about being Canadian and how it impacted her early interaction with record company executives seemed to resonate with the crowd. Considering the fact that “Jagged Little Pill” was one of the last albums to rely on physical sales, it’s interesting to hear Morissette’s take on the push and pull between artist and label.
As has been the case with an increasing number of artists, Morissette decided to forego leaving the stage and returning for an encore after “closing” the traditional set with a stirring version of “Uninvited,” she went into “Ironic” during which the crowd handled a fair share of the vocals.
The night ended appropriately enough with “Thank U,” a song that encompasses everything that makes Morissette such a captivating singer.
Blonde or brunette, Morissette is an engaging performer whose material has not lost any of the bite that propelled her to superstardom, and with next year being “Jagged Little Pill’s” twentieth anniversary, it will be exciting to see how she celebrates the albums milestone.
Setlist:
You Learn
So Pure
Hand in My Pocket
Hands Clean
Right Through You
Mary Jane
A Man
Not the Doctor
Everything
Head Over Feet
You Oughta Know
Uninvited
Ironic
Thank U
Photos by Gus Griesinger. We would like to thank Leslie Logan from the Seneca Niagara Casino for the credentials to review the show.
