From Child Star to Superstar
Alanis Morissette got her start on the children’s variety show You Can’t Do That on Television at the age of 10. In a move now seemingly replicated by every actress to ever land a show on the Disney channel, she parlayed it into an attempted career as a dance-pop singer. She released two albums in Canada, one of which was a top ten hit, but remained an unknown internationally. Then she left the Great White North, partnered with producer and songwriter Glen Ballard (Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl, Wilson Phillips’ self-titled debut) in L.A., and tapped her bitter diary entries of teen angst to transform from “mall-pop songstress” to “angry rocker chick.” ZS Of course, she was savvy enough to give her songs enough pop gloss to move over 30 million copies of the album worldwide and inspire “a generation of soundalikes to bare their souls on record.” PR
The Recording
“According to Ballard, the connection was ‘instant’, and within 30 minutes of meeting each other they had begun experimenting with different sounds…Ballard and Morissette penned their first song together, called ‘The Bottom Line’. The turning point in their sessions was the song Perfect, which was written and recorded in 20 minutes.” WK Alanis “snarls, at the top of her formidable lungs, about egregious slights – from parents who suffocate with their expectations.” TM She “improvised the lyrics on the spot, and Ballard played guitar. The version of the song that appeared on Jagged Little Pill was the only take that the pair recorded” WK and the first song shared with “A&R and record company people.” WK
From there on, they aimed to write and record a song a day over 12-16 hour shifts. WK Ballard provided rough instrumentation and Morissette’s vocals were recorded in one or two takes each; those original demo vocals were still used when the tracks were redone in a professional studio later. WK
Not the Best Singer – But She Didn’t Need to Be
Alanis “isn’t a particularly good singer” AM as she “tends to wildly oversing every other line” EW’07 and stretch “the limits of pitch and credibility with her octave-skipping caterwauling.” AM However, her “wounded bleats and bellowing screams” TM “feel truly wild, too unruly to have been plotted beforehand.” TM She was able to “scream about the anger and confusion that comes with being alive.” CQ She “chews up and spits out the lyrics in a style reminiscent of Tori Amos at her most melodramatic.” PR
The Album Takes Off
Maverick Records had low expectations for the record, assuming it wouldn’t sell more than 250,000 copies. WK However, “things quickly changed when a Los Angeles DJ from the influential radio station KROQ began playing You Oughta Know, the album’s first single.” WK After it took off, five more radio releases “kept Jagged Little Pill in the top twenty on the Billboard 200 for over a year.” WK
Her “bitter diary entries are given a pop gloss that gives them entry to the pop charts.” AM Alanis knows “she’s selling pop songs. Not transcripts of therapy sessions.” TM “Jagged Little Pill is like a Nineties version of Carole King’s Tapestry: a woman using her plain soft-rock voice to sift through the emotional wreckage of her youth, with enough heart and songcraft to make countless listeners feel the earth move.” 500 It was “a defining disc for her generation.” ZS
Angry Young Woman
“Decades before Taylor Swift got lyrically mad at Jake Gyllenhaal over a scarf, Alanis was reminding her ex about the mess that he left when he went away.” CQ “The very first seconds of Alanis Morissette’s breakout record feature a blend of electric guitar and harmonica, signaling right from the beginning that a new voice in alt-rock had something to say. And an entire generation was listening.” CQ “If you were young, female, and alive in the 1990s, there’s a strong chance you didn’t just own this album, but had it memorized from beginning to end.” CQ “At its core, this is the work of an ambitious but sophomoric 19-year-old, once burned by love, but still willing to open her heart a second time.” AM She provided an “inside look into the minds and moods of young women who’ve been jilted and scorned” ZS refuting the “wisdom about how anger is not a terribly constructive emotion,” TM opting to “unflinchingly explore emotions so common, most people would be ashamed to articulate them.” AM “Every teenage girl who owned it says, ‘she’s not annoying, damn it! She’s me!’” ZS
Alanis displayed an uncanny “knack for bringing listeners into the center of her storm. She doesn’t merely recount assorted setbacks, she offers a minute-by-minute tour of them, sparing no detail to describe raw and often uncomfortable emotions.” TM “Perhaps it was the individuality that made it appealing, since its specificity lent it genuineness.” AM
A Perfect Fit with the Grunge Era
Alanis’ “anger is articulated by a ferocious, sub-grunge sound” PR aided by some contributions on bass and guitar from the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea and Dave Navarro. Sonically, this “clearly is an attempt to embrace the ‘women in rock’ movement in alterna-rock.” AM Alanis “aspires to the swaggering confidence of U2’s big-tent anthems” TM with “similarly broad sing-along refrains.” TM “This combination of unsophisticated, low-fi sound and sexually explicit lyrics caught the mood of the moment and inspired a generation of soundalikes to bare their souls on record.” PR
Grammy Success
The album garnered six Grammy nominations, of which Alanis snagged Album of the Year, Best Rock Album, Best Rock Song, and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. She missed out on Best New Artist and Song of the Year. Until 2010, “she was the youngest person to receive the Album of the Year award, at age 21.” WK
The Songs
Here’s more detail about each song individually.
“You Oughta Know”
With its “hello-it’s-me phone rage” 500 Alanis “turns jealous bile into something worth hearing EW’07 as she “unleashes her rage at a lover who dumped her for another, threatening to disrupt dinner and taunting him: ‘Everytime I scratch my nails down someone else’s back,’ she rasps, ‘I hope you feel it.’” EW’07 The victim of that venom “became the most guessed-about antagonist since that of Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’.” WK However, it has long been suspected to be Dave Coulier of television’s Full House, whose relationship with Morissette had soured shortly before the song was recorded.” WK
“Hand in My Pocket”
“Jagged Little Pill isn’t just about rage: Hand in My Pocket actually delivers a somewhat optimistic message of literally ‘everything’s gonna be fine fine fine.’” CQ It was the second song sent to radio and followed “You Oughta Know” to the top of the alternative charts, proving that she wasn’t a one-hit wonder.
“All I Really Want” and “Forgiven”
Third single All I Really Want failed to reach the top 10 on the alternative chart and missed the top 40 on the Billboard airplay chart. It seemed like the album might have run its course – but the biggest hit was still to come.
That song and Forgiven fester with a barely suppressed rage against institutionalized hypocrisy and what she sees as the emotional dishonesty of the male species.” PR The “lyrical hints” AM suggest “a record executive…took advantage of a young Alanis…This is such insider information that it’s hard to believe that millions of listeners not just bought it, but embraced it.” AM
“Ironic”
In the 1990s, it became a common practice for record companies to withhold singles to get the public to plunk down their dollars for full albums instead. It made for some blockbuster albums, especially for alternative and mainstream rock, but it also robbed artists of potential #1 hits. Alanis’ most memorable song, Ironic, peaked at #2 on the Billboard airplay chart, but it seems like it should have been a chart-topper. The video was also a huge success, ranking as one of the top 100 of all time, according to Dave’s Music Database.
Much has been made about how the song Ironic “ironically failed to use the word properly [but] it still managed to talk about bleak scenarios in a ‘well, everyone’s been there’ way.” CQ It was really “just Alanis speaking her piece about the perils of being a girl in a fickle-as-fuck world, singing like an acoustic guitar.” 500
“You Learn”
You Learn did reach #1 – on the Billboard airplay chart, technically becoming the highest-charting song from Jagged Little Pill. However, “Ironic” and “You Learn” did actually reach the Billboard Hot 100 as well – peaking at #4 and #6 respectively.
“Head Over Feet”
Head Over Feet was the sixth and final single from Jagged Little Pill. Like three of the other singles from the album, it failed to chart on the Billboard Hot 100, but was an airplay hit, peaking at #3.
Notes:
In 2005, a collection of the entire album performed acousticly was released in celebration of the album’s 10th anniversary.
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