Showtime

What: Alanis Morissette

Where: Hamilton Place

When: Saturday, Oct. 11. Doors open at 7 p.m. Show at 8 p.m.

Tickets: $49.50 to $65.50 at Copps Coliseum box office, ticketmaster.ca, 905-527-7666

Alanis Morissette is a songwriter who has always worn her heart on her sleeve. That's what warmed fans to her back in the Jagged Little Pill days when she sang angry songs of love and betrayal.

Back then she wrote a nasty little song called You Oughta Know. It was probably one of the angriest singles ever to hit the charts, with lyrics that can't be repeated in a family newspaper. Although she never said who the song was written about, former boyfriend Dave Coulier of the TV sitcom Full House eventually admitted it was him.

Things haven't changed much in 13 years. Her latest CD, Flavors of Entanglement, was recorded shortly after her much-publicized break with Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds.

Although its songs don't contain the anger of You Oughta Know, there's still plenty of love ache on tracks such as Not As We. The opening two lines, for example: "Reborn and shivering/Spat out on new terrain."

Ouch! Poor Alanis took the loss hard. But the song would have been a lot more bitter if she knew what was coming next. We're assuming that it was written before the announcement of Reynolds' engagement to the younger Scarlett Johansson. And how Alanis must have felt when a couple of months later, this Scarlett woman released her debut album. It was awful. Reynolds actually dumped her for one of those bodacious actresses who think they can sing. Only Lindsay Lohan or maybe Paris Hilton, could have been worse.

Morissette isn't the type to tattle. So, in a recent conference call to plug her current tour, which sets down in Hamilton Oct. 11, she refused to confirm that former fiance Reynolds was the inspiration for the latest CD.

But once she gets talking, it's hard to stop her. She made it pretty clear where her head was at the time the album was made.

"It reflected some serious disassemblings in my personal life and it's sort of far-reaching ....

"It allowed me to hit rock bottom in a way that I had never done before. I'd always sort of bottom dwelled, but I never really bounced off the bottom. The best news of all for me was that there is a bottom because I used to think that emotions were bottomless, and if I didn't calibrate it, that I would be eaten whole.

"So now that I know that when I surrender there's a bottom, and I can bounce back up, I realize that the only thing that there is bottomlessness to is joy."

Wow, Alanis, that's deep. But maybe you should try describing joy as topless, not bottomless ... unless ... you're trying to put the bottom spin on it. Either way, we're glad you were just "spat out" and not "eaten whole."

That would have been really ugly.

grockingham@thespec.com

905-526-3331