Entertainment

Baby, it’s you

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Several songs on Alanis Morissette’s new album, “Havoc and Bright Lights,” out Aug. 28, deal with her experiences as a new mom. To hear her tell it, though, the road to motherhood for Morissette — who gave birth to her first child, a son named Ever, on Christmas Day 2010 — kicked off with far more havoc than anything else.

Ever’s birth left her mired in postpartum depression and great physical pain for over a year, an experience she has described as feeling like she was “covered in tar.”

“Hormonally, circumstantially — everything changes overnight,” says Morissette of what she now more mildly refers to as an “about-face lifestyle.” “My whole body was completely overtaken by this new experience.”

But if childbirth left Morissette reeling, the musical challenges she faced went beyond the physical and emotional.

Morissette, whose 1995 release, “Jagged Little Pill,” sold over 15 million copies in the US, has seen her last two albums of new material, 2004’s “So-Called Chaos” and 2008’s “Flavors of Entanglement,” fail to even hit the gold-album threshold of 500,000 copies sold.

Her new album’s first single, “Guardian,” was both a declaration of love and protection for her son, and an accounting of how in the process of becoming a mother, she unwittingly abandoned her own care.

“The chorus is about him, and the verses are about how I was treating my son really consistently, and I wasn’t offering that to myself,” she says. “So the verses are about growing my own inner parent, for my own inner kid.”

It’s questionable, though, whether Morissette’s inner child can inspire music lovers’ inner record buyers, since “Guardian” failed to hit either the Billboard Top 100 or the iTunes singles chart.

But Morissette’s sales numbers might be in for a sizable boost, as she’s in discussions for a possible role on “American Idol.” “I am having conversations about the idea of being in that mentor position,” Morissette tells The Post (later saying that the roles of both mentor and judge are possible). “I’m excited about it.”

If this comes to pass, Morissette will join the recently-hired Mariah Carey on the show, and if anyone can relate to Morissette’s recent difficulties it’s Carey, who gave birth to twins Moroccan and Monroe in April 2011.

Carey’s pregnancy was so difficult that she told “20/20” that while bedridden, she feared she “wasn’t going to be able to walk properly again.” Husband Nick Cannon told Billboard that the birth “inspired her on so many different levels” that Carey would have an album out by year’s end, but that album never materialized.

She finally released a single called “Triumphant,” with Rick Ross and Meek Mill, several weeks back. Critics felt it was anything but, with Spin noting their disappointment, and MTV feeling that Carey was “holding back,” adding, “in all fairness, I’m sure she is busy with Dem Babies” (Carey and Cannon’s nickname for the twins).

Given the average pop star’s well-oiled machine of a life, though, childbirth is often just successfully integrated into the process.

Since giving birth to daughter Willow Sage in June 2011, Pink has announced a starring role in the sex-addiction comedy “Thanks for Sharing,” and recorded a new album, “The Truth About Love,” which drops Sept. 18. The album’s first single, “Blow Me (One Last Kiss),” was released last month, and became a Top 10 hit.

Then there’s Jay-Z, whose “Glory” — a song for newborn daughter Blue Ivy Carter, whose cries are featured on the track. The sentimental, single made her the youngest person ever to chart on Billboard at two days old.

And Adele, who announced her pregnancy in June, has said she’ll take at least two years to allow herself mommy time, meaning we’ll probably get an album called “24” that details the pains and joys of childbirth, and will bring us to our knees.

It remains to be seen what effect motherhood will have on Morissette’s career, “American Idol” notwithstanding. “I’m not sure that’s gonna help or hurt her any at this point,” says Esquire music critic Andy Langer. Having “storylines for a Pink or an Alanis Morissette that didn’t exist last time around is probably good careerwise. It gives them one more thing to talk about, but ‘I’m a parent’ is not a unique story.”

Morissette has immersed herself in an online mommy community, doing blogs for sites including iVillage, where she wrote, about motherhood, “I remain baffled at how little I was prepared for what was to come,” and, “I remember crying out on a walk up the street, startling a dog.”

As for her new record, confronting this major event in her life head on is, she says, her natural way — sales be damned — of creatively connecting to the world around her. “For me, success is defined in different ways. My ego would love to sell 100 billion records,” she says. “Sometimes there’s confetti, and sometimes there’s tumbleweeds, but I can’t control that. What I can control is showing up.”