Morissette, who rocketed to fame in the 90s with the release of her third studio album, Jagged Little Pill, will be performing later this month in Rishon Lezion. And her opening act is none other than Ninet Tayeb, the popular Israeli singer who now lives in Los Angeles. Tayeb, who won A Star is Born in 2003, has released five studio albums, and opened for Cyndi Lauper and Robbie Williams when they performed in Tel Aviv.
Morrissette’s hit singles “Ironic,” “Hand in My Pocket” and “You Oughta Know” made the singer a household name, won her five Grammy Awards and sent her on a worldwide tour.
The musician recorded her first album when she was just 16, and Jagged Little Pill came out when she was 21 years old. Now, at age 44 and the mother of two, Morissette hasn’t lost her edge. And she’s ready to prove that when she takes the stage at the Rishon Lezion Live Park on July 30.
A review of a performance in Dublin earlier this month in iNews said the show was a “powerful confirmation that her vocals, at once barbed and uplifting, remained as powerful as in her commercial heyday” and that Morissette “effortlessly swept the sell-out audience back to those days.”
Morissette will arrive in Israel at the tail end of a mini tour across Europe, heading from the UK to Germany, Finland, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium.
While she has released eight studio albums and is working on her ninth, there is no denying that Jagged Little Pill is her most enduring and recognizable body of work. “Ironic,” in particular, has entered the pop culture lexicon in an enduring way. In a recent interview with The Guardian, when the singer was asked what her most embarrassing moment is, she replied: “The entire planet shaming me for my use of Ironic.”
In an appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden in 2015, the singer and the TV host offered an updated version of the song, including lyrics like “it’s a traffic Jam/ when you tried to use Waze” and “it’s singing Ironic/ but there are no ironies.”
Jagged Little Pill, the angst-filled record that spoke to many a 90s teen, is now reaching a new platform: the theater. A musical based on the album opened earlier this year outside Boston, and The New York Times said it “tackles hot-button issues like opiate addiction, gender identity and sexual assault, as well as more quietly urgent ones like transracial adoption, marital bed death and image-consciousness.”
The Canadian singer has long been popular in Israel, with her songs still played on the radio and 10,000 people showing up to hear her perform at Menorah Mivtachim Arena in Tel Aviv in 2012. Morrissette faced a lot of pressure to cancel that show, which came just weeks after a cease-fire in Operation Pillar of Defense took hold. But the singer paid no heed to the calls to boycott Israel, and not only performed the concert, but also spent several days touring the country, including a stop at the Western Wall.
And 23 years after her most popular album was released, Morrissette is pleased to find they still resonate.
“I feel grateful that these songs stood the test of time for me to be able to perform them with any kind of conviction as a woman in 2018,” she told The Boston Globe in May. “It continues to boggle my mind that something that felt so urgent and visceral and immediate when I was 19 and 20 still remains, maybe even more so, appropriate for what’s going on – in a microcosmic way for me personally, and also for what’s going on in the world.”
Tickets for the show are available at tmisrael.co.il and *9964; tickets in the grass have sold out but VIP and Golden Ring options remain, ranging from NIS 495-565.