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Alanis Morissette

A former Canadian teen pop singer who turned up in Los Angeles with Glen Ballard, made Jagged Little Pill in 1995 and watched it become one of the biggest albums of its decade.

Origin
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Years active
1991-present
Genres
alternative rock, post-grunge, pop rock
Labels
MCA Records Canada, Maverick, Collective Sounds

Ottawa

Alanis Morissette was born in Ottawa on 1 June 1974 and appeared on five episodes of the children's sketch show You Can't Do That on Television in 1986. MCA Records Canada released her debut album, Alanis, in Canada only in 1991. She wrote every song with its producer, Leslie Howe, and the dance-pop record went platinum. She became known as the Debbie Gibson of Canada and won the 1992 Juno Award for Most Promising Female Vocalist.

Her second album, Now Is the Time (1992), was a ballad-driven record with plainer production and more thoughtful lyrics. It sold a little more than half as many copies as the first, and by her account MCA Canada dropped her soon after. In 1993 her publisher introduced her to the manager Scott Welch. She moved from Ottawa to Toronto to write with other people, and then to Los Angeles.

Jagged Little Pill

In Los Angeles she met the producer and songwriter Glen Ballard on 8 March 1994, and within half an hour they were trying out sounds in his home studio. They aimed to write and record a song a day, and she sang each vocal in one or two takes. By January 1995 many labels had passed on her. Her lawyer Ken Hertz arranged a meeting with Guy Oseary of Maverick's A&R department, and within two days she was signed.

Jagged Little Pill came out on 13 June 1995. The Los Angeles station KROQ-FM began playing the lead single, You Oughta Know, which had Dave Navarro on guitar and Flea on bass. Hand in My Pocket, Ironic, You Learn and Head over Feet followed as singles. The album reached number one in the United States in October, almost four months after release, and stayed there for twelve weeks. At the 1996 Grammy Awards it won five awards, among them Album of the Year, which made her the youngest winner of that award at the time. It has sold more than 33 million copies worldwide. An 18-month tour followed, with Radiohead opening from mid-1996.

After the Pill

After the last show of December 1996 she went to India for six weeks, and the trip became the cornerstone of her next album. Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie arrived in November 1998, written and co-produced with Ballard. It debuted at number one in the United States with 469,000 copies in its first week, then a record for a female artist. Her song Uninvited, from the City of Angels soundtrack, won two Grammys. In 1999 she toured with Tori Amos, recorded an MTV Unplugged session that became the album Alanis Unplugged, and played God in Kevin Smith's film Dogma.

Under Rug Swept followed in February 2002. It was the first album she wrote and produced alone, and it debuted at number one in twelve countries. She won the Juno Award for Producer of the Year for Hands Clean and So Unsexy. So-Called Chaos (2004) entered at number five on the Billboard 200. In 2005 she re-recorded the 1995 album as Jagged Little Pill Acoustic, sold for six weeks only through Starbucks.

Stage and legacy

Flavors of Entanglement (2008) was produced by Guy Sigsworth, and Havoc and Bright Lights (2012) came out on her new label, Collective Sounds. For the 20th anniversary of the debut in 2015 the album was reissued with ten demos and a London concert recorded in September 1995. A stage musical built on the songs, with a book by Diablo Cody, premiered at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May 2018. It opened on Broadway on 5 December 2019, received fifteen Tony nominations and won two. Such Pretty Forks in the Road, her first studio album in eight years, followed on 31 July 2020, and The Storm Before the Calm, an album of meditation music, in June 2022.

She headlined the last night of the 2024 Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago and brought out the trio Muna for Ironic. In June 2025 she played the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury, opening with Hand in My Pocket. She was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame in 2005 and the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2015, and was named to the Songwriters Hall of Fame class of 2026. Katy Perry called Jagged Little Pill "the most perfect female record ever made", and Kelly Clarkson said it made her a better writer.

Records

Songs

Glen Ballard, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tori Amos, Garbage, Joan Jett

Where to go next

Official

Reference

Writing and criticism

Interviews

Live performance archives

Sources

  1. Alanis Morissette, Wikipedia
  2. Alanis Morissette interview, July 2020, The Guardian (2020-07-24)
  3. Such Pretty Forks in the Road review, The Guardian (2020-08-02)
  4. Taylor Swift and Alanis Morissette Inducted Into Songwriters Hall of Fame, Pitchfork (2026-01-21)
  5. Jagged Little Pill (musical), Wikipedia