Access to exclusive website containing: "We're With The Band" Alanis' improv short film spoof, "Everything" music video. Retrieved June 1, 2007.- Enhanced CD contains: live performances of "Eight Easy Steps" and "Excuses" from an inside look at the making of So-Called Chaos, special acoustic version of "This Grudge" "Alanis 'Steps' Back Into The Past In New Video".
The song's music video was directed by Liz Friedlander. The New York Times called the song "triumphant", and The Guardian found the song's distortion effective, as well as its " Nine Inch Nail-like metallic rage". PopMatters disagreed, commenting that the chorus's "one shining moment of Alanis Anger" was one of the album's few energetic moments. Stylus Magazine gave the song a negative review, finding it a "flaccid and innocuous" attempt to recreate the hard rock sound of her 1995 single " You Oughta Know".
Morissette's vocal range spans nearly an octave and a half, from A♭ 3 to C 5. Its verses are set to a Middle Eastern beat. It is written in common time and moves at a moderately fast 132 beats per minute. "Eight Easy Steps" is a pop rock song composed in the key of A♭ major. Problems listening to this file? See media help. The verse transitions into the louder hard rock chorus. The song reached number nine on the Billboard Hot Dance Music/Club Play and number twenty-seven on the Adult Top 40.
The song may be seen as discussing self-help, with the message that it is the "course of a lifetime", but the help that is actually "offered" in the song is ironical throughout, with lines like " How to lie to yourself and thereby to everyone else" or " How to control someone to be a carbon copy of you". The album's opening track, it was released in 2004 as the So-Called Chaos's third single. " Eight Easy Steps" is a rock song written by Alanis Morissette for her sixth studio album So-Called Chaos. Alanis Morissette, John Shanks, Tim Thorney