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NEW YORK — There's a diamond ring on Alanis Morissette's hand and a story behind how it got there.

A few years ago, it seems, the singer's friends were teasing her about her claim that she could manifest things into physical form. “I said, I can do it with anything,” she recalled on a recent stop in town. So as her friends guffawed, Morissette proclaimed, “I'd like to welcome diamonds.” The very next day, during a last-minute check of a hotel room, what should she discover in the safe but a ring, sitting all alone. She left her number with the management, requesting that they call if anyone should claim to have lost the jewellery; no one did. Ever since then she's worn it, as she says, “to kind of remind myself of the whimsy of thinking I can manifest.” Besides, the ring – eight smaller diamonds encircling a large single stone, and appraised at $10,000 – looks awfully pretty, even if it is on her right hand.

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Of course, for a couple of years, she wore a different ring, an emerald-cut platinum number, but she traded it, you might say, for this new album.

If you want to fully understand the story, you must wade into the sometimes icky intersection between art and tabloid chatter. (You can do so guilt-free by recognizing Morissette has occupied the intersection before.) Back in the summer of 2006, rumours began surfacing that Morissette's two-year engagement to Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds (Definitely, Maybe), whom she had met at Drew Barrymore's birthday party in 2002, was melting down. They made a few appearances together, but by February, 2007 representatives of both celebrities announced the two had gone their separate ways.

One month later, showing impressive resiliency, Reynolds turned up in the company of dewy actress Scarlett Johansson, then 22. (The two are now engaged.) Meanwhile, Alanis did what Alanis does best: She dove deep and emerged with nuggets of raw emotional truth. Flying off to London to meet with the producer Guy Sigsworth (Seal's Crazy, Bjork), the two wrote 12 songs in as many days. Two months later, they spun off another dozen, then whittled them down into what became Flavors of Entanglement, Morissette's first studio album in four years, which dropped on Tuesday.

The album reasserts Morissette's status as the musical Martha Gellhorn, an unusually adept war correspondent who has forged a career reporting from the front lines of her own turmoil. Across 11 songs that take in swirling tabla and cello, a menacingly metal buzz, and soothing piano ballads, Morissette gives an intimate blow-by-blow of her state of mind in the aftermath of the breakup. She declares a ban on commitment in Moratorium, is “reborn and shivering / spat out on new terrain” in the mournful Not As We, tentatively regains her footing in Giggling Again for No Reason, and turns a wistfully self-satirizing new page in the final sing-songy tune Incomplete.

“At that time I just needed to stop the insanity, so to speak,” reflects Morissette, sitting in a tiny meeting room of the W Hotel on Lexington Avenue that is still littered with the used water glasses of Goldman Sachs employees who had been conducting recruitment interviews an hour before. (We were supposed to have met for lunch in the hotel's restaurant, but after the maitre d' accidentally seated someone right next to the quiet table that had been reserved in Morissette's name, her manager, recognizing she might not be comfortable opening up with potential eavesdroppers a few feet away, insisted on the relocation.)

“I needed to step away from the addictive aspect of it – love addiction, and frankly co-dependence, and all the muck and mire of the version of commitment that I was entertaining,” she says. “The kind of marriage that I aspire to is not what I was doing.”

Does she blame herself for the breakup? “I do believe it always takes two to tango, so I don't take 100 per cent responsibility,” she replies. “But someone else's, whether it's my ex-fiancé or anybody, their 50 per cent is not my problem. Whether they own it or not, I have no control over.” She has a debilitating tendency to accept responsibility for anything bad. “If someone punches someone a mile away, it's my fault. That was how I used to operate. So now it's about stopping at that 50 per cent point – in all areas, frankly. So that's made for more mature interactions, not only in my romantic life but in my professional life and everything.”

Speaking with Morissette can be a strangely giddy experience. While most actors and singers become brittle and guarded after a few years of prodding by the press and the public, in person Morissette maintains a remarkably open mien; she even speaks with an occasional uptick. It may be that she has been doing this for so long – a one-time child actor, she recorded her first album of dance tunes at age 17 – that she knows no other way. But it may also be that the New Age patois she deploys – her speech is littered with mentions of phoenixes rising, of the need to “esteem myself from within,” and of being ambivalent about career success offering an “egoic thumbs-up from the outside” – conceals as much as it reveals.

Still, she laughs frequently, is a rare Canadian celebrity who retains specks of her Ottawa-area accent, and exudes genuine warmth, even when handily deflecting questions about Johansson's recent album of Tom Waits covers. (But then, the album bombed.)

Her aggression stays in the music, safely out of her personal encounters, whether romantic ones or interviews with the press. “It's not considerate to myself if I don't express my anger,” she explains. But, “it's not very popular to walk around admitting you're depressed or admitting you're suicidal, or admitting you're really, really vitriolically angry,” she says. “But it's not inappropriate in art to be angry and flailing, and physicalize all that emotion. It's actually welcomed.

“Because ultimately I'm still Canadian, and I'm still very concerned about being respectful and that kind of stuff.”

In the new album's final tune, Morissette sings, “I have been missing the rapture this whole time,” and at 34 she says she's reached a point in her life where she's no longer willing to endure torment in the hope of some far-off goal. “For a long time, the managers that I was working with would say, ‘Tough it out' – the theme is always suck it up – at the cost of myself. Suck it up, because if you do this tour, I know you're burned out, but if you do this tour you'll be – fill in the blank. Laying out the groundwork for the future. What future? I might be dead in five years.” She laughs. “What if I want to enjoy my life now? So that song is to me the most philosophical, spiritual song on the record.”

She's starting to take her own advice. About a year ago, she got a pair of tattoos, one on the inside of her right forearm that reads, “breathe” (she often forgets to take deep breaths, especially when concentrating), and one on the outside of her left forearm that reads, “gentle.” “People have shown me that, you put it on that side of your arm, you're ultimately asking other people to be gentle with you,” she giggles.

There are those willing to take up the challenge. She has a new boyfriend, who, as it happens, is neither a celebrity nor a Canadian.

A few years ago, an episode of the squirmy sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm revolved around Morissette secretly revealing to Larry David the identity of the former lover about whom she had written her angry hit single, You Oughta Know. In real life, though, she says she has no intention of outing the ex. “When I write songs, I don't write it for the sake of seeking revenge,” she explains. “I write it just to get it out of my body, so I don't get sick. So I think if I were to write it and then speak about who it's about, that would be my version of being offensive.

“I know it's torturous for people who are curious,” she nods. “Some people are really excited to find who these songs are about, but that's not why I write them.” I suggest to her that people may feel if they learn the identities behind the songs, the world might make sense to them. “Right, and God bless them,” she laughs, “maybe the world isn't supposed to. What's that Pema Chodron title, Comfortable with Uncertainty? If only we could all be more comfortable with uncertainty,” and here she emits an urgent whisper, “I think we'd all be a little bit more relaxed”