Alanis Morissette was left "horrified" by her fame.
Alanis Morissette
The 43-year-old singer had no idea her 1995 album 'Jagged Little Pill' would make her a global superstar but she grew increasingly uncomfortable with life in the spotlight and didn't find any of her success "fun" as she had no support network.
She recalled: "I didn't know what I was signing up for.
"I was already quite an isolated person, and it got worse. I became averse to people even looking at me. I was always a people-watcher, I'd sit for hours observing, and then all of a sudden, every eyeball was on me. I was horrified by it.
"I started landing at airports internationally and there were 30,000 people there. I wound up hiding in my hotel room, but if I walked past the window, even my shadow on the drapes would cause people to scream outside.
"People would break in and leave notes in my underwear when I was doing a show. It felt like an obliteration of my boundaries...
"I had no one, apart from a couple of therapists who I would phone from the road, desperately, at three in the morning."
Asked if any of it was fun, she added to Event magazine: "No. No, it wasn't fun. I just kept looking down. It was one foot in front of the other."
And the 'Ironic' singer - who has children Ever, five, and Onyx, 22 months, with husband Souleye - claimed she was left feeling objectified by male musicians at the time.
She said: "Especially with other artists, if certain men couldn't sleep with me or didn't want to sleep with me, they didn't know what to do with me.
"If there wasn't going to be romance or sex, they didn't know how to categorise me."
But despite being uncomfortable with life in the spotlight, Alanis admitted she felt "grief", as well as "bliss", when her huge stardom began to wane.
She explained: "Grief because I'm an attention junkie, and bliss because I'd wondered if this was how it was going to be for ever. When it started shifting, I thought, Oh thank God, there might be a normal life in my future. Or normal-ish."
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