Potential boyfriends beware:
Anything that may happen between you and Alanis Morissette is on the record. And the CD and the cassette. "Anyone who's even thinking of a romantic relationship with me probably has enough information about me to know that I may sing about what's going on," she says. "So I think they know better."
Following up 1995's "You Oughta Know," from her 17-million-selling debut Jagged Little Pill, Morissette, 27, makes another ex squirm in the first single from her latest, Under Rug Swept, which opened at No. 1 on the Billboard chart. The new song, "Hands Clean," is largely written from the point of view of a showbiz exec (she won't identify him) who dumped her even though she kept her teen affair with him quiet. "I wrote it for myself," she says, "certainly not for revenge, but for the sake of being honest." Guys have nothing to fear, she claims, when she is not in the studio. "I'm far more courageous in my song-writing than I am in my day-to-day life," she says. Her confrontational lyrics don't "mean that I hate men, because I don't. When someone says, 'Yeah, right on, I hate men too!' it says more about them than about me."
The Ottawa native, who now lives in Los Angeles, has just started dating someone new ("It's not crazy official yet," she says) and calls herself "a romantic" despite feeling emotionally scarred. Does she want mea culpas? "No one's ever called up and taken responsibility," she says. "But that's a pretty fantasy."
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