It’s music video week. Here’s another one and I think, of all the videos we’ve talked about today, including BTS, and I do LOVE BTS so much, and their video is epic and wonderful, but this one might be the one that affected me most. That’s what Alanis has been doing to us for a long, long time though.
Her video for “Reasons I Drink” is devastating and it was already a devastating song about addiction – and mental health, and loneliness, and pain. It’s Alanis over the years, telling us that addiction is constant and clever, that it can grow with us and that it is all of us. Because ultimately, what Alanis has always tried to do with her music, is empathise. And here is a powerful visual representation of who addiction affects: everyone. Which is how the video ends, on a reminder that it’s not so much about the “other” people who have the disease, but that all people are profoundly affected by it.
“Reasons I Drink” is the first single off Alanis’s upcoming album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, which she’ll be supporting on tour kicking off in May. The tour celebrates the 25th anniversary of the seminal Jagged Little Pill, indisputably one of the most important albums of our time. Jagged Little Pill is now a Broadway musical and the reviews have been great. I can’t wait to see it, to experience those familiar songs in such a radically different way, and go back to how it felt when I heard them for the first time with the perspective change after hearing them for a quarter of a century. And I really hope to be able to see Alanis on tour, taking me to uncomfortable places and asking uncomfortable questions because she’s been uncomfortable and maybe there’s some comfort in knowing it’s not just you. Which is what she’s been doing all this time.