Here’s what’s on Alanis Morissette’s mind as she preps to do ‘Jagged Little Pill’ in NC

Like every other performing artist these days, Alanis Morissette excited to get back on the road.

Just listen to her song “I Miss the Band” — which was written during the pandemic and dropped this past spring — to hear what exactly she missed while touring was on hold. In addition to inside jokes, hanging out in the baggage claim, and late-night drives, she reminisces about the “familial musical telepathy” she shares with her band on stage.

For someone who says she misses her bandmates even when she is with them, you can sense that the road is a comfortable place for her.

And this summer, Morissette is finally back on it: The 47-year-old Canadian singer and seven-time Grammy winner will perform at PNC Music Pavilion this Saturday night, when she’ll celebrate the 25th anniversary of her seminal “Jagged Little Pill” album — a year later than planned due to COVID.

It’s not just her band that she missed and couldn’t replace with virtual performances broadcast from the library in her home, surrounded by what looked like thousands of books. She also missed the audience that has grown up and matured with her.

Just like the rest of us, Morissette says she worked harder than ever during the pandemic, in her case having “unschooled” her children, which is a form of homeschooling. And she described the feeling most of us felt during the pandemic as “rats in cages,” continuously looking for ways to express ourselves.

Through all this, she hopes that we haven’t lost our sense of humor and looks for the crowd to respond to her little one-liners between songs or her off-hand comments that try to acknowledge she and the crowd are growing together, even in a world that seems to value teenagers over successful musicians.

She describes herself as having a “high sensitivity factor” and her audience as “deeply thoughtful.” She invites concertgoers to “look at their own journey,” and wants each fan to have their own moment experiencing the things she is trying to convey through her lyrics, her physical movements on stage, or her expression of deep emotions.

As for the current tour, the singer seems to really come alive when talking about opening act Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power.

Although Morissette admits that, in the ’90s, female performers couldn’t always get along on tour, this summer she is living out her own fantasy of women being highly compatible on the road. (Shirley Manson’s Garbage also will open the show.)

Morissette attributes the shift within her, in part, to her own maturity, and being a mother — though it’s a topic she addressed long ago, in her 2002’s “Sister Blister,” a song lamenting how women use the same language against each other that men use to put women down.

Meanwhile, when it comes to playing songs from “Jagged Little Pill,” she said that she loves doing modernized iterations of the songs from that iconic album. You can also expect to hear songs during her set from her most recent album, 2020’s “Such Pretty Forks in the Road,” like “Smiling,” “Reasons I Drink,” and “Rest,” which was written about her own struggles with mental health issues.

But Morissette could sing almost anything on Saturday night, as long as she’s on the stage in front of a live audience, and be content with it. Same goes for us.

If you go

When: 7 p.m. Saturday.

Where: PNC Music Pavilion, 707 Pavilion Blvd.

Tickets: www.livenation.com.

This story was originally published August 19, 2021 at 11:29 AM.