It’s Like Rain: Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill at 30
Looking back on a Canadian pop milestone
The road to extended stardom is littered with the wreckage of teen pop hitmakers who couldn’t make the jump forward.
There was a point when one of Canada’s hitmakers, in some ways that country’s post-Debbie Gibson, post-Tiffany pop star, seemed like she might be among the ruins.
But Alanis Morissette, who’d always had a hand in her music, was determined to avoid that fate. Thirty years ago this month, she made the statement that ensured she would, with the release of Jagged Little Pill.
Morissette had tasted some success in Canada in 1991 through 1993, coming out with six Top 40 hits. Hardly a passive participant, she co-wrote everything on her first two albums.
Both she and the industry seemed ready to move on, not to the same things. Now is the Time, a more ballad-centric follow-up album to Alanis’ dance pop, sold half as well.
So Alanis was without a recording contract, with a publishing contract and a highly uncertain future. She’d moved from Ottawa to Toronto at the suggestion of her publisher, but nothing came of her attempts to come up with songs with players, co-writers and producers there.
“I really was dying to go to Hollywood,” Morissette told the CBC in 2015. “But I knew that if I went from Ottawa straight to Hollywood it just would’ve been too big of a cultural change for me. So I spent about a year or so in Toronto, and then I was dropped by MCA.”
Morissette hadn’t stopped writing, but she hadn’t found the co-writer and producer to work with yet.
“It’s why I moved to Hollywood and wrote with so many different people, I didn’t want to stop until a song really represented exactly what I was thinking and feeling,” she said. “[I’d already written] probably 50 songs? [Laughs] I was a people pleaser, and I had a hard time stopping the process if I was writing with someone out of respect for them, so I would finish the song, but I knew that I would never use the song. The exercise of it was really illuminating for me but I knew I hadn’t sort of found my rightful seat, so to speak.”
That collaborator would be a man who’d been active as a songwriter and producer since 1978, being involved in hits here and there (like soap actor Jack Wagner’s sappy ballad “All I Need”) until he produced a four-song demo that turned into a platinum debut album by Wilson Phillips, which had five hit singles.
Glen Ballard and Morissette clicked right away.
“He was intellectually sophisticated, so there was no ceiling for me there, and then musically he was really sophisticated, so there was no ceiling there, and then he was just really curious about who I was and left this huge open space for me to write,” she said.
It was fortuitous timing, as Ballard’s home studio in Encino was just becoming usable again after the Northridge earthquake.
Even with the quake in the past, it wasn’t as if things were uneventful.
“And then when we’re writing the record, literally this O.J. Simpson saga was happening and at one point, Robert Kardashian, he lived in Encino not far from my house,” Ballard told the CBC. “There were all these helicopters going over, chasing O.J. Simpson down the street and we were going, ‘What the hell is going on?’”
The two came in with different types of influences. Morissette’s tastes at the time were omnivorous without much concern for genre labels. Ballard really dug the varied sounds he was hearing from Poe, whose highly underrated debut album, Hello, would be released later in 1995.
A big reason the two clicked was that Ballard, an American, carried no preconceived notions about Morissette based on her early work.
“Glen had no agenda,” she said. “His begged question for me was, ‘Who are you? What do you wanna write about? What’s going on with you?’ That was a real freedom, it was beautiful.”
“I think the biggest thing is that she wasn’t on a record label, and we weren’t really trying to write something for the radio or for an A&R guy or whatever, we were just writing songs and I think that’s the best thing that could’ve happened, because I think she was much too original,” Ballard said. “She didn’t want to copy anything, I mean that wasn’t in her. And so it was the least derivative thing I’ve ever done, it was literally just whatever we wanted to do we started doing.”
The two basically wrote a song a day that spring and fall, then came up with a flurry of songs when she returned from Canada in October.
“I was making a track as we wrote the song. So, it was kind of building the house and designing it at the same time,” Ballard said in an audio commentary on Spotify in 2015.
The end result was a demo they both felt good about. The labels? Not so much.
That changed when Maverick, which had been set up by Warner Brothers as a label for one of its co-founders, Madonna, came into play. Its biggest outside success to that point had been Candlebox.
Morissette was working on the song “AII I Really Want” at the time, dressed for comfort in sweatpants. So she and Ballard, dressed in songwriting casual, made their way to Maverick’s offices on Sunset Boulevard.
The two didn’t need to make a sales pitch other than let A&R man Guy Oseary, who had almost no idea who they were, hear the demos. Only a couple years older than her, he connected with the material.
“The first song they played me was the demo of ‘Perfect,'” Oseary told the CBC. “Within, I don’t know, 20 or 30 seconds into the song, I was done. I was already blown away and never heard anything like it and wanted to sign her. That was really it, for me.”
Within two days, Morissette had signed. Work would continue on the album through part of 1995.
The Jagged Little Pill listeners heard was built off the demos Morissette and Ballard created in 1994, with some tweaks, overdubs and the likes. Some other suits at Maverick had notes that led the pair to re-record some of the material.
“Begrudgingly, we re-recorded some of them and then when Maverick heard it they just said, ‘Ew, no no no, we want the originals,'” Morissette said to the CBC with a laugh.
The lead single was one that Morissette pretty much had the lyrics for before they started writing the song. It would be the album’s instantly recognizable calling card, the intense breakup classic “You Oughta Know.”
Longtime Los Angeles fixture KROQ was the first to break the single, as staffers recognized its potential immediately. So did listeners, as the phone lines lit up.
Morissette and her band were playing L.A. clubs when it happened.
“We did a show at Luna Park and there were people there and it was a lovely show,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2015. “Then I think two nights later we did a show at the Dragonfly, and it was during those two days that KROQ started playing ‘You Oughta Know,’ and so that show at the Dragonfly, there was a line around the block and people were singing ‘You Oughta Know’ louder than I was. Two days ago, no one knew this song, and now everybody knows this song. I was just hiding in the back corner while the place was jammed with celebrities.”
The intensity broke through to American audiences and told Canadians that this was a much different Alanis than the sort of artist the writers of How I Met Your Mother might have had in mind when they created the Robin Sparkles storyline.
The single was the one time that Oseary did more than let Morissette and Ballard do their thing. He suggested that the song could benefit from different players, specifically the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Dave Navarro and Flea.
She started the first verse in relative calm, singing, “I want you to know that I’m happy for you/I wish nothing but the best for you both.” But then she makes it clear just how pissed off she is at the ex with the song’s most infamous line, “An older version of me, is she perverted like me?/Would she go down on you in a theater?”
VIDEO: Alanis Morissette “You Oughta Know”
Ballard kept her from losing the blunt lyrics. “You know, I’m Canadian to the core of my core, so I said to him, ‘We’ll probably have to change some of those lyrics, some of them are a little intense,’” Morissette told The Independent in 2010. “And he goes, ‘Wait a minute, did you mean everything you wrote?’ And I said, ‘Well, of course,’ and he said, ‘Well, we should keep it.’”
The song’s raw emotion struck a chord, especially paired with the perfectly calibrated dynamic shifts (dig the wordless multi-tracked vocal break in the place where someone else might have put a guitar solo) in the music. Morissette had a hit on her hands.
She also had the Gen X version of “You’re So Vain” as fans and the press speculated about who the ex was.
Speculation was that Full House co-star Dave Coulier was the guy and, years later, he expressed the view that he thought that was the case.
Morissette, for her part, has kept it a secret (even Ballard claims not to know the identity).
“Fifty-five people can take credit for that song, and I’m always curious about why they’re doing it. But Dave is the most public about it,” she told EW in 2015.
VIDEO: Alanis Morissette “You Learn”
The second single, “You Learn,” was a change in tone, even though Morissette was still working through some things. The lyrics still carried a sting, but the lyrics also reflected a more positive view, a determination to get through it. The whole thing went down easy with the sampled beat and a chorus that made it unsurprising to find out that plenty of people behind the scenes thought it was the album’s obvious hit.
Third single “One Hand in My Pocket” had a mid-tempo charm, stepping along to a groove with a looped guitar, complete with a Morissette harmonica solo (on her first time playing the instrument).
Lyrically, she played with contrasts, at moments unintentionally prescient about the way exploding fame would change her life (“I’m high, but I’m grounded/I’m sane, but I’m overwhelmed/I’m lost, but I’m hopeful, baby”).
VIDEO: Alanis Morissette “Ironic”
We arrive at the fourth, and most successful, single from Jagged Little Pill, the last song from the initial round of writing in the spring of ’94. It’s also the one with the lyrics that became part of standup comedy acts — “Ironic.”
Tying an anthemic chorus to verses about unfortunate events in life, it’s easy to see why it became a hit, especially with the charming video with Morissette, reflecting different personalities, in quadruplicate.
But, yes, a lot of those moments didn’t fit the song title. A black fly in the Chardonnay is a sign of unsanitary conditions at the restaurant, not irony.
At the time, she didn’t want the song on the album. Ballard saw its potential, calling it his favorite of the songs they came up with. He told EW, “Life is never what you think it is, and I thought it was a huge amount of wisdom from such a young person, to be able to look at fate and twists of fate. It’s a really astonishing take.”
And, yes, Morissette knew the “ironies” weren’t ironic.
“I think the malapropism in ‘Ironic’ was the only thing I regretted,” Morissette told the CBC with a laugh. “I was like, oh God, if I knew more than 10 people were gonna hear this, I would’ve been a stickler instead of being shamed publicly, planetarily, for 20 years.”
The initial success of “You Oughta Know” made it easy for some to pigeonhole Morissette into the “angry woman” trope (or worse, “shrill”). The more accurate adjective would be honest.
Besides, she sang warmly of love and kindness (even as she struggled to believe she deserved it) on the fifth single, “Head Over Feet.”
VIDEO: Alanis Morissette “Head Over Feet”
Another well-constructed song with a hook, it tells of a friendship that’s evolved into a relationship. Ironically enough, she described that evolution with a term that became more associated with unattached hookups – “You’re the best listener/That I’ve ever met/You’re my best friend/Best friend with benefits.”
The sixth and final single (released as such in the UK and Australia) was the first song Ballard and Morissette started writing and the last one finished for the album — “All I Really Want,” which began as “The Bottom Line.”
The song, which started the album, relied on the strength of that looping guitar, lyrically showing a desire for her partner to show the same commitment to the relationship as her. She wanted a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T, showing right away that she wasn’t going to be cookie cutter with her vocal choices (check out the way she sings “how” in “how appropriate”).
Morissette switched roles for the painful family drama of “Perfect,” singing as the emotionally abusive parent too busy trying to live vicariously through their child’s achievements to be a loving parent. Frankly, it cuts deeper than “You Oughta Know” because of how it builds to the vocal explosion, much like how the abusive parent keeps the happy face on until they’re behind closed doors.
Alanis had to deal with more than just standard issue industry bullshit by the time she and Ballard put the album together.
She was raped by someone in the industry when she was 14 in an ongoing “relationship” that lasted until she was 18 (not with Coulier, it should be noted), an experience she didn’t address publicly until releasing “Hands Clean,” the 2002 single off her album Under Rug Swept.
“The grudge I hold is against myself for having been quiet for so long,” Morissette told Q Magazine in 2004. “I’ve covered his ass for so many years. So now it’s almost like … I wanted to liberate myself from not beating myself up any longer. It’s almost irrespective of his involvement now; it’s more about me and my relationship with my own past.”
The precipitating event to write “Right Through You” was a rejection by Atlantic that so ticked off the A&R person there that he quit the company, but it’s hard to ignore the prior trauma in the room. The disgust in the lyrics is all the more understandable.
“Forgiven” is the sound of Morissette going through her not-so-distant Catholic past (having gone to parochial schools through junior high). The drama of the doubts and guilt that upbringing can install in kids. It’s all pitched to peak angst, with verses that are catchier than the choruses.
If “You Learn” was Alanis as self-help guru, tender ballad “Mary Jane” takes a more personal approach. Seemingly built for waving lighters to the chorus, the album’s most underrated song was inspired in part by a friend who gave so much of herself that it left her depleted.
Much is made about this album about Morrissette coming into her own as a songwriter stepping into adulthood and taking ownership of herself (denying Maverick’s idea that she still go under the Alanis mononym). As it should be.
Ballard also deserves credit, co-writing the music which repeatedly gave her the proper backing based on the mood.
His wisest call was knowing when to back away when Morissette, who’d been overly managed in the studio in the past, stuck with what she wanted.
“She never changed one vocal,” Ballard told EW. “‘You Oughta Know’ was one take, and I barely got it on tape, and it’s kind of distorted. Believe me, I wanted to change a lot, and she wouldn’t let me.
“There was something so refreshing about just doing it and having it sort of stand up on its own. It was working beautifully,” he added.
His touch made the non-singles work as well. Take the acoustic guitar and drum machine beat on “Not The Doctor” putting a candy shell over the pointed demand for relationship equity.
VIDEO: Alanis Morissette “Not The Doctor”
In the 2015 commentary, Morissette said, “I listen to it currently and think, ‘That’s a little harsh.’ That’s the only song I think is harsh, even though it’s really honest and I stand by every lyric in that song. It wasn’t very, um, tender.”
And as with other songs, the relationship in question could be family or friendship rather than romantic. In this case, it’s about boundaries being set when too much is being asked too often.
“Wake Up” also insists the partner take things seriously. It plays ’90s alt-rock “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” if the girl cut out the middleman Beatle and told the guy herself, with a yearning state of mind that she could convince him to be more open.
It being the ’90s, there was even a hidden track, the totally fictional acapella “Your House.” Morissette had stayed at the house of someone she had a crush on in Hollywood for a week. Rather than sing about what she actually did for the week, she turned it into a creepy snapshot of someone doing way too much exploring.
It didn’t take too long after the release for Jagged Little Pill to explode beyond people’s expectations. Years later, Morissette remembered one of the suits telling her that she’d sell 175,000 copies if things fell into place. Instead, it went platinum, then diamond. It’s now part of a select group of albums to sell at least 30 million copies worldwide (at around 33 mil these days).
The experience was a lot, to put it mildly, with the loss of anonymity, especially once her face, blurry through motion and quick cuts in the “You Oughta Know” video was on full display in the one for “Hand in Pocket.”
Then there was the neverending tour, 17 months straight with almost no time off and ridiculous occurrences of shows on separate continents without break days built in.
Her next two albums would also top the U.S. charts and she remains a successful touring act.
“The good news about the songs I wrote when I was in my late teens or early 20s is that there was a value system there that I still connect with,” Morissette told W Magazine last year. “There’s a continuity throughout all these decades of essential self, even though circumstances and chapters are all so different. Now there’s a little bit more empathy, a little bit more relational grace going on, a little more perspective, or a little more perimenopause, less fucks to give. That helps.”
But the album never went away. In 2011, Morissette was first approached to help put together a musical based on it.
It debuted on Broadway eight years later, with a book by Diablo Cody, screenwriter of Juno and the cult classic Jennifer’s Body. The music included other songs from Morissette’s career and two new songs she penned for the production. It received good reviews and drew well, but was ultimately cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic.
To this day, Morissette is appreciative of the fact that an album created under insular conditions would continue to resonate with people in the decades since its release.
“I felt way, way less alone when people resonated with the record,” she told People in 2019. “I thought, ‘Wow — here I am egoically thinking that I’m the only one suffering in this particular way,’ and then I came to realize that not only was I not alone, but everybody had some version of validation just by their feeling along with me.”
In retrospect, Jagged Little Pill feels somewhat like a ’90s version of Tapestry. The circumstances weren’t the same. Carole King was a 27-year-old mother with a track record of hits as an outside songwriter. Her massive breakthrough hit had a more stripped down sound.
But on the other hand, both strong albums were built on the strength of their demos. Both resonated massively with women and girls as part of their wider appeal. Both became generational touchstones that one could keep coming back to.
Morissette didn’t happen in isolation. 1995 was also the year of PJ Harvey’s To Bring You My Love and Garbage’s debut. Hell, Bjork’s Post came out the same day as Jagged Little Pill.
Freed of the burden of expectation, Morissette, with Ballard, was able to create freely. There were no demands, no label people handing down notes. This was a young woman playing with house money, creating freely for the first time.
And if the occasional moment is awkward lyrically, I offer the reminder that Morissette was 19 and 20 when she made the album. How many of us had everything down when we were that age?
Jagged Little Pill was, without a doubt, nothing less than honest, a work more relatable than Morissette ever imagined. But who hadn’t felt the burden of unfair expectations? Who hadn’t wanted to tell off the Mr. Duplicity in their lives? Who hadn’t felt brave, but chickenshit at the same time?
“I think the word that keeps coming up for me is ‘invitation.’ I do this as an invitation for people to resonate wherever they do or don’t, and permission,” Morissette told People. “This musical and this record has always been ‘Forget all that for a minute; you’re allowed to actually be a human being right now.'”
Thirty years later, Jagged Little Pill remains worth RSVPing to.
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