Having just completed a self-described year of "acknowledgment and reflection," Alanis Morissette is ready to take on the future.
      "Ever since I was a young lass, my fantasy was to have enough songs accrued to be able to actually create a collection record," the seven-time Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter explains.
      It had been suggested over the last several years to do one, she adds, "But this felt like the right time because of the fact that 2005 wound up turning into a year of acknowledgment and reflection." That reflection included her Jagged Little Pill Acoustic CD.
      She says she typically kind of breezes through every passage and moves on to the next record, the next project. "And this year turned into my acknowledging everything that I’ve done for the first time, really, which was a challenge for me because I typically don’t stop and look back in that way."
      She has done that with the release of The Collection on Maverick Records. It is an ambitious project in which she handpicked the material with a goal to reflect the full spectrum of her artistry and vision.
      It includes material from four Maverick studio albums (Jagged Little Pill, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, Under Rug Swept and So-Called Chaos), the Feast on Scraps DVD/EP, the MTV Unplugged album, and her contributions to the soundtracks for Dogma, (in which she played the role of God), City of Angels and De-Lovely (in which she also acted), plus a song she recorded for The Prayer Cycle album.
      It is offered in two configurations: a specially enhanced single-disc version with behind-the-scenes footage of Morissette, and a special limited-edition, two-disc gatefold package consisting of the CD and an hour-long DVD documentary tracing the time period from her emergence with 1995’s landmark Jagged Little Pill through the present.
      "It felt like the perfect year to also have all these songs in one place and have them be filled with songs that are more recognizable, and then songs that were not released formerly as singles that were personal favorites," she says. On a self-indulgent level, it was a real gift to her, she adds, even just to get that objectivity. "I think the looking back has given me a lot of objectivity on not only songs from 10 years ago, but from the whole evolution of the last 10 years itself."
      She says the The Collection has enabled her to look at her songs from a new perspective. "I think I understood what other people have given me in terms of feedback over the years," she says. "A lot of times people would give feedback, whether it was encouraging or discouraging, and I wouldn’t really understand, always, where they were coming from. But upon listening to these songs with a tiny bit of distance, and in some cases a lot of distance, I have a sense now of who I am in a way that I was not able to, just being too inside of it."
      The package offers her new interpretation of Seal’s "Crazy," which emerged from her participation in a Gap commercial. "Right around Jagged Little Pill time, we had a mutual admiration society going, which was really sweet," Morissette says. She had been a fan since his record first came out when she was a teenager. "I was obsessed with that record that ‘Crazy’ was on," she says. She considers the primary lyric, "You’re never going to survive/Unless you get a little crazy," as "one of the simplest yet most profound statements."
      When she decided to cover "Crazy" for the Gap commercial, she checked in with him about it. "I sent him an e-mail letting him know that I was honored to do it, and that I just really respected him and love him," she explains. "He sent a very gracious e-mail back, a very kind one." She thought it would be a great song to put on as the first single on The Collection.
      She gives herself permission to be proud of her new album. "I feel really proud, to be honest, and it’s not something that I would typically say, based on the fact that I haven’t had objectivity on my own journey as an artist in any way," she says.
      "I feel really charmed by it, as much as I can step outside of it and look in. I feel like this record really represents the sorbet between entrees for me. I feel like it’s wetting my whistle to really start this new chapter on the note of having really honored the prior one."
      She says that new chapter includes plans to "hit the ground running" in January in writing a new record that she has been eager to take on—"to say the least"—for a couple of years.
      When she writes a record, she does it from two full journals she has kept. "And I have about five full now, so I’m definitely bursting at the seams to start writing again," she says.
      Actually, she already has begun, contributing a song ("Wunderkind") to the soundtrack of the Disney film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Chronicles of Narnia. She wrote it very quickly before she left for Europe. "That was so much fun to just dive into someone else’s perspective," she says, noting that her intention was to honor and add to the magic already created by Andrew Adamson and C.S. Lewis.
      Morissette says she is very much open to more acting roles. "I haven’t—at this point, anyway—put aside a lot of time to do anything more than a cameo, but I think over the next year or two, I’m definitely up for really committing to it."
      She is, in general, ready to take a few more risks in her career. "I love fusion. I love fusion music and fusion art and fusion architecture, so I would love to fuse sonic landscapes with the more organic ones and stretch that even further on this next record and work with new people, so I’m excited about that."
      Evolution is important to her. She says she has been enjoying chronicling her own on tape, and she plans to continue doing that. "If someone is up for evolving along with me, then I couldn’t be happier about that. I also respect the fact that some people may not want to."
      She has learned important lessons in these first 10 years in the spotlight, which include more than 40 million albums sold. "Just to be a writer and be an artist and be someone who chronicles my experiences and feel really aligned with my purpose [is one]," she says. "I do as much as I can do to share it, and do as much as I can do to enjoy the abundance and affluence and hugeness that can accompany what it is that I do.
      "I try to do the best I can to just continue focusing on being an expresser and being a human being and evolving away and just sharing that. It really helps me stay grounded in sometimes very surreal environments I find myself in."