“Habits (Stay Hydrated)”…
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[6.22]
Will Adams: Alanis Morissette doing her own version of “Habits (Stay High)”: better than you’d expect! There’s a bit of melodrama — the plonking piano; the “here we are!” that reminds me of “Alone”; too much reverb — that undercuts the seriousness of the lyrics. Like “Ironic,” the crux of the song is that it betrays its own title. The reasons in question are never given, and that’s the point; when drinking becomes just another thing you do every day, there’s no longer any justification needed. You do it because it’s what you’ve always done. The song scratches at that terrifying thought, but not quite enough.
[6]
Brad Shoup: That pounding piano! Thought Morissette and Alex Hope were giving us a Bareilles banger. But it settles into a circuit, content to support a typically wonderful, messy Morissette text. She draws the line between wanting and needing a drink, and all around this axis she plots these little asides about being Alanis: being rich and symbolic and an entertainer. When she hollers you can tell she’s listening to Top 40 with a real curiosity; when she slams into the chorus you can hear Heart.
[9]
Alex Clifton: I really love how the piano line sounds like it was stolen from a Sara Bareilles track, mostly because that’s not what I ever expected from Alanis. In fact, if Alanis didn’t have such a distinctive voice, I might’ve guessed that Sara Bareilles wrote this on a (very dark) bad day. Jagged Little Pill was such a landmark album in the 90s in part because Morissette is so good at channelling naked emotion through her voice, and while this doesn’t sneer like some of her older material, it’s still got some bite. “Even though I’ve been busted/I don’t know where to draw the line ’cause that groove has gotten so deep” strikes me particularly hard, if only because I have my own finely-worn ruts of maladaptive coping skills. Reckless behaviour comes easy after a while. Admitting you’re destroying yourself is harder. I can’t tell if the jauntiness of this song is meant as a distraction from the content of the lyrics, or if it’s ironically detached. Either way, it sounds good.
[7]
Vikram Joseph: Despite the familiarity of the chord progressions and rhythmic piano jabs, Alanis Morissette’s longstanding disdain for rhyme schemes and her bracing vocal high-wire act — belting this out like a showtune — keep “Reasons I Drink” sounding slightly off-kilter. She’s still such an unusual lyricist — a lot of her lines here are blunt to the point of being slightly uncomfortable (“nothing can give me a break from this torture like they do”) but then there’s a peculiar, dramatic declaration about buying a Lamborghini, and intonation that makes “sick industry” sound like “sick in the street”, and a chorus that crams in “long overdue respite” for, really, no good reason. In both its strangeness and familiarity it feels a bit like a ’90s anachronism, but for better or worse it’s definitely her anachronism.
[6]
Leah Isobel: I believe that pop music is inseparable from its context. A great pop song pinpoints its performer in that moment and then transcends it; through performance, phrasing and word choice, its images and ideas grow bigger until they become abstract symbols. It’s tempting to write a song in those big, abstract platitudes, but the specificity has to come first or else it’s meaningless. Here Alanis demonstrates that it’s also tempting to only write the specifics, and in doing so creates a piece of musical theatre without a play to hang itself on.
[5]
Ian Mathers: Another discovery on our mutual march to inevitable death; it is possible to be genuinely happy to see an artist from your earlier years still doing their thing and to discover their thing is no longer anything you yourself need to listen to, and these things don’t contradict each other at all!
[5]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: The lyrics are far from her most memorable works, but her voice flagellates enough to create large, theatrical swells. She justifies the staid piano chord plinks, transforming the song into a martial anthem for the adult contemporary set.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: The 2010s-now-2020s are bad — blistering take I know — but when did they get so bad that an alarming number of musicians are finding escapism, or at least career pivots, in the most saccharine, jaunty piano stomps that sound remarkably like Emeli Sande’s “Next to Me”? To be fair, “Reasons I Drink” also sounds a great deal like Heart’s “Alone” and fun. — and if we’re really being honest and damn the connotations, Amanda Palmer circa Who Killed Amanda Palmer — but what it doesn’t particularly sound like is an Alanis song. It’s written like an Alanis song, obviously. The subject — drinking being crushing and fun, the music industry being crushing and more crushing, millennial burnout as experienced first by Gen X — aren’t novel, for Alanis or anyone. But what other songwriter would crash the word “medicated” out of the scansion, or decide at the last possible minute to throw into her chorus something about getting lit, or generally grover together so many bad writing habits that the result is an unmistakable individual voice? (No, the answer to that last one isn’t me.) But it’s not an ideal Alanis song, not least because Alanis at her peak, when writing a song called “Reasons I Drink,” would produce an itemized list of 55.
[5]
Josh Langhoff: These are 21 things that I want in an Alanis song. 1) Indifference to rhyme. 2) Indifference to making syllabic stresses line up with musical accents. 3) The sense that this “indifference” is actually a formal choice. 4) The sense that these formal choices are actually, partly, trolling. 5) Along those lines, heretofore unsingable phrases like “give reprieve” and “long overdue respite.” 6) Likewise, weird slang (“lily pad”???) that I’m guessing nobody else uses but maybe I’m wrong because Canada. 7) Vocal hectoring. 8) Also braying. 9) Several different vocal timbres per song. 10) But at least one of them should be obnoxious, they can’t just be variations on breathiness. 11) Gigantic hooks… [Note: So far so good!] 12) … that don’t sound like anyone else’s. (I’m hearing Heart’s “Alone” in the chorus, and my wife spotted Emeli Sandé in the piano groove.) 13) If they do sound like someone else’s, at least the possibility that such copycatting poured forth as part of the same unfiltered spew as the words. 14) Vocal treatment that doesn’t obscure the word “respite” because we pay to hear that shit. 15) I mean come on — does she have to sound like she’s trying so hard for a Hot AC add? 16) Still, I love that her idea of retail therapy is buying a Lamborghini rather than a car anyone in the past 20 years has thought about. 17) Evidence that we’re around the same age and level of self-awareness. 18) The sense that she’s trying too hard to fuck with structural paradigms. 19) Motherfucking lists, baby! 20) A whiff of unrealized ambitions, because that’s just Life.
[8]