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Alanis says breakup inspired her new album

‘Yeah, it’s really about my grief,’ says singer who split with Ryan Reynolds

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  Morissette talks new album, heartbreak
Billy Bush talks with Canadian-born singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette about her new album, “Flavors of Entanglement,” as well as her breakup with Ryan Reynolds.

Access Hollywood

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Access Hollywood
updated 8:41 p.m. ET July 22, 2008

Alanis Morissette has gone on the record, admitting her new album, “Flavors of Entanglement,” is about the breakup of her relationship with actor Ryan Reynolds.

“It was cathartic,” Morissette told “Access Hollywood’s” Billy Bush. “Someone said very wisely to me the other day that catharsis doesn’t mean healing necessarily, and I thought, ‘Damn! It’s true.’ But catharsis is good to get it out of my system, for me to see with some clarity what’s going on.”

Many believe her new single, “Torch,” is one of the most personal on the album, including Bush, who asked her about the origin of the heart-wrenching lyrics of loss.

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“Yeah, it’s really about my grief,” Morissette said of the breakup. “I think the most painful, sort of suffering oriented moments in my life (are) when I’m resisting something… If I just say, ‘It’s true. I’m unbelievably insecure, really broken, devastated,’ then I can move through it, toward the next place. But if I keep resisting it, I’ll stay there forever.”

Morissette said she has wished Reynolds well since their split.

Reynolds is now engaged to fellow actress, Scarlett Johansson, and Morissette has moved on, too. She told Bush she is even thinking of a family.

“I think the idea of life partnership and kids — at some point — sounds appealing, but not today,” she laughed.

Morissette also addressed the success of her cover of the Black Eyed Peas’ song “My Humps,” explaining how the super-trafficked YouTube clip came about.

“I was in the studio one day… I think at one point I said it would be fun to do a song that is really simple and I said, ‘I’m gonna try to write it,’ and (the guys in the studio) looked at me and laughed and said, ‘It’s not possible for you to do,’” Morissette recounted. “So I said, I’m going to write a song like ‘My Humps.’ So we just decided to cover it.”

The singer explained that the video, which features a reinterpretation of the original, was done fairly quickly.

“Within a week I was recording the video for it in the garage at my house with my comedian friends,” she explained. “I just thought I would put it up on YouTube just for fun, a couple hundred people would get a kick out of it.”

Copyright 2008 by NBC. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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