Hear Alanis Morissette Talk Tori Amos, Kate Bush on Debut ‘Alanis Radio’ Episode

Alanis Morissette has launched her Alanis Radio show on Apple Music Hits and for the inaugural episode, she shared a playlist and thoughts on the artists and the music that inspire her, including Tori Amos and Kate Bush.

Morissette said that Amos was among her favorite artists and listening to her music was soothing when she first moved from Ottawa to Toronto and lived alone for the first time. She added that Amos’ taught her a lot about songwriting, before sharing Amos’ “Little Earthquakes.”

“I had the privilege of going on tour with Tori, a five-and-a-half weeks tour in 1999. It was a really sweet journey point for me to be touring with someone who had such a big influence on my feeling liberated to stream-of-consciousness-write basically, and just write what was going on,” she said. “I wrote a lot of songs as a young person and it was adhering to a craft or a structure of a kind and I started writing songs heaven forbid that wouldn’t rhyme or melodically were a little more challenging.

“And it was met with quite a bit of disdain at the time and a lot of people were asking me to just ‘stick with what I knew’ so I basically got dropped from MCA Records and moved to Los Angeles and no one knew me there so I had this clean slate and not be beholden to whomever I’d been collaborating with or someone else’s perception of me at the time,” she added. “So, it was quite liberating at the time. This was right after I heard Tori’s record and I thought hey now ‘if SHE’s doing it’… “

Another early influence on Morissette was Kate Bush and she cited the UK artist’s classic “Wuthering Heights.” “Kate Bush was so gorgeous to me. Her voice was so beautiful to the point where I really believed that if I could sing along with her and hit the same notes as her, that I had a tiny chance to be able to be a legit singer at some point,” she said.

Morissette also discussed Patti LaBelle, Rufus Wainwright’s “Poses,” Paul Simon’s Graceland and other artists’ work in the debut episode. The full first episode is available here. She released her ninth album and first in eight years, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, in July.