Why does Alanis Morissette use coffee as percussion?

Alanis Morissette has opted to forgo traditional percussion instruments in her latest song The Morning. Instead she – along with the famed Costa Rican musician Carlos “Tapado” Vargas – decided to go down a more avant-garde route and substituted drums from coffee beans and coffee machines.

The song was written for the upcoming documentary A Small Section of the World and was premiered on The Hollywood Reporter.

But what is the link to coffee?

A Small Section of the World, in its own words, “is a documentary film that tells the inspirational story about a group of women from a remote farming region of Costa Rica whose ideas sparked a revolution in the coffee growing world.”

The film is based in the Bolley region of Costa Rica, which saw a mass outward migration in the 1990s due to a mixture of a global coffee crisis and a lingering, deep recession. With most of the males – the de-facto breadwinners at the time – gone, the women were left to fend for themselves.

In an isolated part of the country, the women banded together to form ASOMOBI (The Organized Women’s Association of Biolley) to shore up the local coffee industry and build their own coffee mill, becoming the first female-operated and run micro-mill in the country.

“Their [intention] was to certainly provide a beautiful cup of coffee,” Alanis Morissette noted in a recent interview. “But at the same time, the deeper intentionality behind it was to keep their families together.”

“For a long time, there was no conversation about women in coffee. But [I was told] some 75 percent of coffee-making is done by women,” the seven-time Grammy award winner said, highlighting the inequality that is prevalent in some aspects of the industry.