My first encounter with Alanis Morissette's music was not a happy one. After a very long day at the office, I came home to my fed-up wife with a migraine headache. Something that sounded like a very loud rendition of someone murdering cats emanated from my fifteen-year-old daughter's room. My wife swiftly instructed me to tell our daughter to "turn that shit down" so Mom could nurse her splitting cranium. So, it's a wonderful irony that I found myself turning up the stereo while listening to that same shit ten years later.

The 1995 cat murderess was Alanis Morissette on her debut album "Jagged Little Pill". Now like most people my age, I've had a peripheral awareness of Alanis, but never became familiar enough with her songs to be a true fan. The Collection album has changed that situation dramatically.

The most well known of Morissette's songs are included: "You Oughta Know", "Head Over Feet", "Thank You", "Ironic", "Sister Blister", "Hand In My Pocket". It was a genuine pleasure to hear all of these songs, each becoming progressively louder on my headphones. There are also a number of songs described as personal favorites, including "Uninvited" from the City of Angels soundtrack, "Let's Do It" from the De-Lovely soundtrack and "Mercy" from The Prayer Cycle Album. It also features a bonus single, a cover of Seal's "Crazy". A special dual re-mix of the song will follow the release of The Collection.

For me, Morissette is at her best with the raw, power chord oriented material which made her famous. The overproduced "Mercy" and "Uninvited" don't serve her well, as the audio sweetening tends to distract from the pulled from the gut emotions that makes her the great artist she is. When Morissette enters the dark little rooms within herself that store her pain, she connects to the listener deeply, a rare gift among singer/songwriters these days.

But with songs like "Mercy", where Morissette attempts to pour the same emotions into the song as her previous works, it comes off somewhat disingenuous. "Uninvited" is an okay song, but in its effort to tap a more Middle Eastern spiritual flavor, the heavy orchestral strings just make the song clunky. It would be interesting to hear this song played with actual indigenous instruments a la Peter Gabriel or perhaps Sarah McLachlan, with Morissette's towering vocal signature laid on top.

The musical score for Cole Porter's "Let's Do It" is certainly an appropriate frame of reference for the period setting of the film, but Morissette's doubling of her voice tracks seems a little anachronistic. I think part of the problem is "Let's Do It" is just too cutesy a song for Morissette's semi-growl, which just leaks out throughout the song. It's almost a parody of itself.

The single "Crazy" is a better entry. Morissette returns to her roots here, and does a marvelous job of converting Seal's searing lyrics into a forum for her own point of view. But beware of the Glen Ballard remix on the single- Mr. Ballard toys around a bit with effects diminishing some of the edginess, trying to make the song more appealing for commercial markets.

For either the formerly uninitiated like me or die hard fans of Morissette, The Collection is a smart, accessible, well put together retrospective of her career. It makes me look forward to a day when some future woman in my life with that unnerving migraine yells at me to "turn that shit down!"